Gadgetopia

Apple, Think Secret settle lawsuit: Apple has successfully killed ThinkSecret.

Apple and Think Secret have settled their lawsuit, reaching an agreement that results in a positive solution for both sides. As part of the confidential settlement, no sources were revealed and Think Secret will no longer be published.

I don’t know how this is a “positive solution for both sides,” unless the only other option for ThinkSecret was to pay millions of dollars in damages.

Microsoft removes ActiveX activation warning from IE: The Eolas debacle has apparently ended. Microsoft paid them off and hopes to update all IE versions by April 2008.

For an undisclosed sum, the software maker has licensed the patented technology in question from Eolas, allowing it to modify IE6 and 7 for both Windows XP and Vista to remove the “click to activate” step for ActiveX plug-ins.

Problem is, you can’t stop using SWFObject just yet. While it’s great they fixed this, this had the effect of essentially introducing a bug that we’ll have to account for into perpetuity. At best, it’ll be years before you can safely go back to a standard HTML embed.

Defense Lawyers Cringe at MediaDefender’s Child-Porn Patrol Plans: This is interesting.

[…] MediaDefender planned to unleash a peer-to-peer crawler to search unspecified file-sharing networks for child-porn videos and images based on keywords — such as “young,” “kids” and “taboo” — provided by the AG’s office.

Once suspected image files were found, the software would collect the IP address of the machines trading those files and filter for any addresses based in New York. The data MediaDefender collected would then be sent automatically to the AG’s office, where investigators would analyze and investigate it, using a MediaDefender application to visit the IP addresses and download the suspect files.

The thing that concerns me here is if MediaDefender is doing this specifically for the New York AG’s office. If they were just reporting things that they found incidental to their existing work, then this would be justified and even required in some cases.

But if they’re doing legwork above and beyond for the AG’s office, you have to ask why. Are they just altruistic, or are they looking for some special favor? And it gets difficult to draw the line, I think — would they overstep their bounds because they felt like they had been pseudo-deputized?

A couple of months ago, we had a problem with a company that reprinted our posts in full, surrounded by their ads. It was a drag, but it seemed to stop right after that post (but not before they mocked our outrage a bit).

I noticed this today on a post in my aggregator:

This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement.

This guy must add that to every entry in his RSS feed to ensure that it shows up on any site that lifts his content directly from RSS. Interesting. Effective? I don’t know.

Judge Says Unix Copyrights Rightfully Belong to Novell: Has the last chapter in SCO’s IP land grab been written? Is this finally the end of one of the most pathetic attempts at IP abuse in recent memory?

In a decision that may finally settle one of the most bitter legal battles surrounding software widely used in corporate data centers, a federal district court judge in Utah ruled Friday afternoon that Novell, not the SCO Group, is the rightful owner of the copyrights covering the Unix operating system.

In the 102-page ruling, the judge, Dale A. Kimball, also said Novell could force SCO to abandon its claims against I.B.M., which SCO had sued. Judge Kimball’s decision in favor of Novell could almost entirely undermine SCO’s 2003 lawsuit against I.B.M.

Prosecutors: Nurse sent ‘sick day’ e-mail from husband’s account after she killed him: Be careful that you address those emails correctly, especially after you’ve killed someone.

The e-mail at issue, described to jurors by a state investigator, was sent from a Blackberry belonging to McGuire’s husband, William, the morning after authorities allege she shot him to death.

“I will be out sick today,” the April 29, 2004 message read.

He said the sender typed the only the first name of the supervisor, Thomas Terry, into the address when, in fact, Terry used his last name.

Prosecutors have portrayed the wrong address as strong proof that it was Melanie McGuire, not her husband, who wrote the e-mail. According to his co-workers, William McGuire was very familiar with the e-mail accounts because he oversaw the e-mail server and determined his colleagues’ addresses.

Supreme Court to examine ‘obviousness’ of patents: This Supreme Court case could have huge effects on intellectual property in general. The defendant is arguing that the patent in dispute is too obvious to be defendable. This could be huge for Internet-based patents (the “one click” debacle, anyone?)

The case has its roots in an obscure patent spat about vehicle gas pedal designs involving two companies without mainstream name recognition: the Canadian company KSR International and Limerick, Penn.-based Teleflex. (Teleflex had sued KSR for infringement of its patent on a gas pedal design that KSR contends is no more than an obvious melding of two existing inventions.)

But the facts of the case are far less important than the potential ripple effects of the high court’s eventual ruling.

Court says blogs can’t be sued for postings: This is some good news…or bad, I guess, depending on if you’ve been defamed or not.

Bloggers and website owners cannot be sued for posting libelous or defamatory comments written by third parties, the California Supreme Court has ruled. The court said only the original authors of comments published online can be sued.

Later in the story, they talk about another case:

The attorneys defending the owner of a dating website who is being sued by a Pittsburgh man who claims the site defamed him said they thought the California decision would help their defense.

Tasha Joseph, who owns dontdatehimgirl.com, a website where women post warnings about men they consider to be bad dates, is being sued by Todd Hollis, a Pittsburgh defense lawyer. Several postings on the site have accused him of having a venereal disease. Hollis says the postings are false.

I saw these two face off on Dr. Phil one night — the owner of the Web site, and the guy who claims he was defamed. While I’m all for free speech, the attitude of the lady who owns the Web site really ticked me off.

I don’t know what it was exactly, but the woman was essentially proud of the fact that people had (purportedly) lied about this guy. It was almost that she knew he’s been defamed and didn’t give a rip. Furthermore she denied this guy’s right to even be upset about the fact that her Web site was incubating this discussion, even if it was false.

Maybe I just took the guy’s side, but I just bristled a little at the whole thing. Having a free, public forum is nice and all, but you have to at least care in the slightest about what’s going on there, even if the law is on your side.

I’ve taken down a comment thread on this site because someone wrote me and claimed they’d been libeled in it. There are other threads on the site that make me nervous, and that I would very much open to discussion if someone wrote me about them.

JPEG Patent Claim Surrendered!: A victory for intellectual property.

Forgent Networks has stopped asserting its patent against JPEG, has dropped all its pending cases that were asserting the patent, and says that it won’t file any other infringement claims based on the patent.

Via CMS Report.

Judge: Libel limit applies to Web: Interesting.

Godbey ruled Monday that the one-year clock begins ticking when an article first appears on the Internet and ends a year later, even if the article in question remains available for reading on the Internet.

Copyright protected physical space: Cory Doctorow has written a very short (four paragraphs) explanation of why copyrights start to get fuzzy in the world of new technology.

Cory points out the absurdity of a photography kiosk at a county fair putting out a sign claiming that there are no cameras allowed because “this is a copyright-protected area.” His point is that people scream “copyright” way too much, but I found an even bigger point.

In short, this paragraph sums it all up for me.

Any businessperson has to contend with the realities of the world. Blacksmiths don’t get to demand that we abandon the railroad and go back to riding horses they can shoe. Maybe it was once possible to take a studio photography business (where you could control who came in and hence set the rules about taking your own pictures) on the road with a county fair. But if your business depends on ensuring that your photons only enter the lens of your camera, then putting those photons in a public place is a bad idea.

And that’s the truth of it. The ability to digitize content has really changed the nature of it. Unlike before, there is no physical barrier to reproduction. You can re-produce digital content all you want with no expense. That’s an example of technology fundamentally changing the rules, and you either adapt or eventually die.

Big Media has had some success suing people like crazy, but how long do you think that’s going to last? File sharing has been around for — what? — six years? Big Media has an advantage now, but do you really think they can keep that for the next 10 years? The next 100? You can’t put toothpaste back in the tube.

They’d do well to try and figure out how business is going to look in the future. It could be that the idea of intellectual property in general is simply doomed, and we need to figure out how we’re all going to do business without it. That seems crazy, but revolutionary changes make what seems crazy become reality, and then where do you go?

Hezbollah cracked the code: While pretty commonplace in superpower arsenals, you don’t expect this from someone like Hezbollah.

Using technology most likely supplied by Iran, special Hezbollah teams monitored the constantly changing radio frequencies of Israeli troops on the ground. That gave guerrillas a picture of Israeli movements, casualty reports and supply routes. It also allowed Hezbollah anti-tank units to more effectively target advancing Israeli armor, according to the officials.

Here’s a case where the RIAA might not have a problem with iTunes file sharing feature: Some dirtball in a UM dorm had kiddie porn movies on his computer and was caught when another Cramer Hall resident saw what was shared on his playlist.

The up-side is that there are good aspects of file sharing, but in the long run I suppose it’ll serve only as a warning to these scumbags to be more careful with where & how they store their porn.

Ask the Law Geek: Is publishing screenshots Fair Use?: Here’s an interesting discussion about something we do pretty frequently around here.

Is taking a screenshot of a public web site (like Google or Flickr) and posting it to your weblog or in a presentation considered copyright violation, or does it fall under Fair Use?

Whatever happened to crooks hiding their wherebouts and activities? I found this site today, posted as a link to a public forum. Their Web site says this:

Welcome to our website. We provide different types of services such as:

• proffessional cracking of any kind of software (CAD, CAM, CAE, EDA, GIS, PCB, FEA, FEM, CNC, CFD, PDS, 3D, Optics etc.) designed for any kind of operating systems(Windows 95/98/ME/2000/XP, Linux, FreeBSD, OS/2, MAC OS etc.)
• producing keygens, licenses for different proctection systems (FlexLM, SentinelLM, ElanLM, CrypKey, etc.)
• producing emulators for any kind of dongles (SentinelPro, SentinelSuperPro, Hasp4, Hardlock, WIBU, Guardant, etc.)
• quality reverse engineering (decompilation of programs, algorithms reconstruction, etc.)
• any other reverse engineering services…

The domain record had a Russian email address and no street address in Hamburg, Germany.

The Perfect Mark: Here’s a gut-wrenching story in brutal detail about how a seemingly intelligent man got caught up in a Nigerian 419 email scam. The Nigerians were mercilessly brazen — sucking more and more money out of this guy right up until the end, and beyond. And he fell for everything.

What’s interesting is that it’s not just the mark’s money they take. They con the mark into passing counterfeit checks. This is what gets their conifdence up — they get a $400,000 check from Nigeria, are allowed to deposit it, then wire the money somewhere else. That must really get them believing that the Nigerians are legit.

When Worley got off the phone with [the bank investigator], he was enraged.

“I hate being taken advantage of by you evil bastards,” he wrote to Nduka. “This is all lies?” He went on, “Your day will come that you will be judged by God, and so will I. And I am ashamed, and shamed, and an embarrassment to my family, who are so precious and Godly people. What a terrible model of a Christian that I am. Thoughts of suicide are filling my mind, and I am full of rage at you despicable people. I hate living right now, and I want to die. My whole life is falling apart, my family, my ministry, my reputation and all that I have worked for all my life. Dear God, help me. I am so frightened.”

In May, 2005, Worley went on trial in U.S. District Court in Boston on charges of bank fraud, money laundering, and possession of counterfeit checks.

Worley’s overseas correspondents, whose real identities he never knew, disappeared, and were never located or charged. With them went more than forty thousand dollars of Worley’s money and nearly six hundred thousand dollars from the checks. […]

Very, very sad. Via MetaFilter.

U.S. Grants Patent For Broad Range Of Internet Rich Applications: Okay, this is crappy enough:

A patent has been granted to a relatively unknown California Web-design firm for an invention its creator says covers the design and creation of most rich-media applications used over the Internet. The patent holder, Balthaser Online Inc., says it could license nearly any rich-media Internet application across a broad range of devices and networks.

But here’s the crappier part — the company that got the patent is Balthaser Studios. I don’t know how many of you remember them, but back in 1999 they made perhaps the greatest Flash intro ever. I remember being blown out of my chair by this thing (does anyone know where it is now — I would love to see it again).

Because of this cool thing they made, I always had a soft spot for Balthaser. They were…cool. They delivered something that blew me away, and that made me look up to them. Unless this is a huge case of mistaken identity, that good feeling has suddenly vanished.

Mind you, they have no chance of defending this patent — the prior art here is huge — but it’s still lame as hell that they pursued this. Lamer still that the USPTO granted it.

Stopping Flagrant Piracy of Mint: Mint is a stat-tracking app that I actualy purchased and used for a while. I paid $30 for it.

Well, shocker, Mint is being pirated and the developer is none too happy about it. I can’t say I’m shocked that it’s being pirated — when I got it and installed it, I kept thinking, “what’s to stop someone from ripping this off?” Nothing, it turns out.

The developer does, however, have a pretty inventive idea for finding pirates. He wants to enlist other Mint users to randomly check sites through their copy of Firefox:

[…] a Firefox extension that silently checks for a Mint installation on each site visited and if found, sends a ping to a central server. The server could then validate the domain against a list of licensed domains and flag any offenders. The extension would not reveal the outcome or require any input from the browser user. The ping would be anonymous and only fire when a Mint installation was found (and not every page visited). Even if only 3% of Mint’s current user-base chose to participate in this “Neighborhood Watch” it would create a pretty significant canvas.

It’s an inventive idea, and I really think it would work. Too bad it came to this. (Personally, the font size on his site makes we want to go pirate a magnifying glass.)

Entwistle reportedly searched Web for ways to kill people: Interesing how they’re combing through this guy’s surfing habits and essentially building a case out of it.

A man charged with murdering his wife and baby daughter searched the Internet for ways to kill people and methods of committing suicide in the days before the slayings, authorities said.

[…] The same week, he obtained the names and addresses of various escort services. He also visited a website called “Adult Friend Finder,” which investigators said helps subscribers find sexual partners.

Of course, leaving the country a day after his family was murdered probably cast a little suspicion on him too.

From the “It Was Only A Matter Of Time” department, some guy — John Kiel Patterson of Louisiana — is suing Apple because he says the iPod he bought is a hazard to his hearing.

Patterson does not know if the device has damaged his hearing, said his attorney, Steve W. Berman, of Seattle. But that’s beside the point of the lawsuit, which takes issue with the potential the iPod has to cause irreparable hearing loss, Berman said.

Potential. Well duh.

For a remedy, Patterson wants Apple to force the iPod to cap its output at 100dB, and slap warning stickers all over the thing. As if there is anybody alive today that doesn’t already know it’s a bad idea to run around all day with tiny speakers stuck in your ears and the volume turned up to 11. Heck, I remember my mom yelling at me back in junior high for listening to too much Bachman Turner Overdrive with headphones; and she didn’t even have any high-falutin research to back her up back then.

God forbid we all use common sense.

From Yahoo News