Washington's IT Guy

Timothy found a profile of Carl Malamud up at The American Prospect, characterizing it thus: "Carl Malamud — underrated work shedding sunshine on the sort of things that 'sunshine laws' may make legally accessible, but that often are not practically accessible. The man should be up there on the list with Wikipedia, Wikileaks, the big Free Software projects, and the Creative Commons."

I have a story

[Saint Stephen]

Back in 1993 (pre WWW), I had an internet account. My college girlfriend was doing a paper on Nafta, and I was trying to help research. Some congressional staffer gave me the FTP address to his private hard drive where I picked up a copy in .ps format or something. All 9000 pages of it. I could see all his files.

Good times. In those days, there was a rule: never meet anyone from the internet IRL. That used to be condsidered a good way to end up in a bodybag. Nowadays everyone meets everyone that way (me + my wife for example.)

Re:I have a story

[davidgay]

Good times. In those days, there was a rule: never meet anyone from the internet IRL. That used to be condsidered a good way to end up in a bodybag.

One of the sillier comments I've seen on slashdot... (weird yes, but bodybags is ridiculous)

David Gay, who did use the internet in 1993, and met people IRL in 1994...

Viral Advertising

[Anonymous Coward]

I only glanced through the article. Isn't this just a shout-out that this guy is available for a government job? Don't we have job boards that take resumes that do the same thing without wasting my front page "NEWS for Nerds. Stuff that matters" websites?

Carl has been on Slashdot before

[Anonymous Coward]

You might not remember it, but Carl has been on Slashdot quite a few times. Basically, he's trying to gather up all that government data that's supposed to be publicly accessible (but isn't) and make it conveniently accessible on the web. Problem? There are a lot of people who profit from this and they're not so happy. Also, you have to deal with tons of red tape.

Here are some past appearances on Slashdot:
Getting us free access to copyrighted CA laws [slashdot.org]
Putting 1.8M court records online [slashdot.org]

I think he also has a Slashdot account [slashdot.org], though it seems little-used.

Also the top comment on this old story is interesting:
http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/08/14/1158247/Firefox-Plugin-Liberates-Paywalled-Court-Records [slashdot.org]