I am quite aware of what DHCP is. Like everyone with more than one computer, I have my own adorable little DHCP server on my desk.
The problem is that you've gone and started exaggerating to make your point. You know and I know that running a DHCP server with that short a lease turnover is a ridiculous way to run a railroad. Unfortunately, you've fallen in love with showing your technical superiority to the knowlessmen by telling them how groundless and silly their worries are. If I had to hazard, I would guess that this is a habit so long-running as to be nearly reflex after a career of dealing with flighty managers and panicky secretaries.
Alas, this is exactly the sort of condescension that invariably drives casual users screaming from the FOSS community: you are calling people stupid for feeling that an issue is, in fact, an issue. In your haste, you are missing the key point: LJ is divulging information about a user that was not previously available without that user's consent. Yes, it's nothing that you couldn't look up before, but LJ users aren't IT professionals. Most of them did not previously know how to do anything with IPs except match them to find sockpuppets, if even that.
Further, you're ignoring the lazy-ass programming that went into this. The information is available to community mods and /the poster/ of the post in question to a community. You know, the poster that someone is calling out as a scammer, con, or liar? It's lazy inheritance of permissions from the parent object without the least bit of thought.
Finally, you're ignoring how normal people think! An IP address attached to a comment is glossed over. An IP address instinctively means something to very, very few people. When a username is attached to 'Bedford, TX', though, the information is automatically and instinctively relevant to anyone reading it. It feels and reads completely different to normal people, and it should come as no surprise to the LJ team that people react differently to it. They are professional developers of a social networking service, and thinking this would fly with normal users (particularly since the users left on LJ are the ones who rejected Facebook's anti-privacy crap) is remarkably nerd-tunnel-vision of them.
no subject
The problem is that you've gone and started exaggerating to make your point. You know and I know that running a DHCP server with that short a lease turnover is a ridiculous way to run a railroad. Unfortunately, you've fallen in love with showing your technical superiority to the knowlessmen by telling them how groundless and silly their worries are. If I had to hazard, I would guess that this is a habit so long-running as to be nearly reflex after a career of dealing with flighty managers and panicky secretaries.
Alas, this is exactly the sort of condescension that invariably drives casual users screaming from the FOSS community: you are calling people stupid for feeling that an issue is, in fact, an issue. In your haste, you are missing the key point: LJ is divulging information about a user that was not previously available without that user's consent. Yes, it's nothing that you couldn't look up before, but LJ users aren't IT professionals. Most of them did not previously know how to do anything with IPs except match them to find sockpuppets, if even that.
Further, you're ignoring the lazy-ass programming that went into this. The information is available to community mods and /the poster/ of the post in question to a community. You know, the poster that someone is calling out as a scammer, con, or liar? It's lazy inheritance of permissions from the parent object without the least bit of thought.
Finally, you're ignoring how normal people think! An IP address attached to a comment is glossed over. An IP address instinctively means something to very, very few people. When a username is attached to 'Bedford, TX', though, the information is automatically and instinctively relevant to anyone reading it. It feels and reads completely different to normal people, and it should come as no surprise to the LJ team that people react differently to it. They are professional developers of a social networking service, and thinking this would fly with normal users (particularly since the users left on LJ are the ones who rejected Facebook's anti-privacy crap) is remarkably nerd-tunnel-vision of them.