Fishbowl by Matthew Glass Read Free Book Online

you are too. Register on Fishbowll and talk to [HIM] [HER] today . Next to this would be a Register Now button that would direct the user to the Fishbowll registration page, following which a screen would appear with the sender’s home page and a message box.
    In short, each of the people communicating would be under the impression that it was the other who had wanted to communicate with them first.
    Obviously, out of the ensuing conversations between the two people, it might emerge that this piece of engineering had taken place, but Andrei imagined that in many cases it wouldn’t and, if it did, would usually be put down to a glitch in the system. He knew there was a deceit involved, and Andrei thought hard about whether it was justifiable. He was utterly convinced that if the site was going to work, people had to feel that the other people they encountered wanted to talk to them, and until he got the necessary number of users on the site, there was no other way to create that impression. Andrei believed that people would want the functionality he was developing, and if it took a slight deceit to introduce it to them in a form they would use, he decided that that was an acceptable compromise. He rationalized it as a small, necessary and excusable evil with the potential to create more than enough good to outweighit. Besides, it was a temporary measure. Once the site took off, he would be able to identify people who really did want to send a Bait.
    Andrei had all kinds of ideas for ways to refine and improve the site as it grew and as user data began to come in, and he knew that a whole series of other ideas would occur to him as those ideas were put into practice. But there was one other element that was built into the design of the site from the start. Retained from the first version of Fishbowll, it was perhaps the feature that would turn out to be the most important thing about the site after the ‘Take my Bait?’ concept itself. Any kind of interaction was captured and stored. When two people connected on Fishbowll, even if they were accessing it through their social networking home pages, everything they subsequently did with each other – their chat, the pictures they posted, the videos they sent – was held on Fishbowll servers.
    Andrei’s motivation in doing this was to ensure that Fishbowll could always produce the most relevant and current view of a person’s interests. But it also meant that, in theory, everything a user ever said or did could be retained, archived, and searched.
    There was no specific rule against the experiment that Kevin and Ben had carried out on Dan Cooley – but it was a clear breach of the Fundamental Standard, the two-line statement of general personal responsibility that governed student life at Stanford. In extreme cases, a breach of the Standard constituted grounds for expulsion from the university. The Office for Judicial Affairs, which had oversight of student discipline, regarded any alleged infraction with the utmost seriousness.
    As Andrei immersed himself in the reconstruction of Fishbowll, events moved quickly against Kevin and Ben. Only a week after Dan Cooley was found wearing Adidas sneakers in Ricker dining hall, a disciplinary board was convened to consider the case.
    It was clear that Kevin would have to take the lion’s share of the blame. It was his computer that had been used: he had set up the account, he had typed every keystroke, had posted everypicture and had carried out a number of frankly illegal acts of hacking, which, if discovered, would leave the board no choice but to involve the police. There was only one way for Kevin to partially exonerate himself, and that would be to claim that Ben had told him what to do.
    Kevin and Ben discussed this possibility and received the views of a number of other students – only some of which they sought. No one thought it would be a particularly smart move, not even for Kevin.