Dear school administrators,

What’s the best way to ensure that your computer network remains riddled with security vulnerabilities that leave you, your personnel and [someone think of the] schoolchildren in danger? Why, to demonize the student who discovered the vulnerability and alerted you to it, of course. Have him charged with a felony while you’re at it.

A student in a Saratoga County (New York) school alerted his principal to a computer security vulnerability that could expose the names, social security numbers and addresses of school employees. While the student tried to do it anonymously, he was eventually tracked down. Then the school threw the book at him.

The student is now being charged with three felonies for his unauthorized use of the computer network. The best is this quote from a state trooper:

The kid committed an intentional criminal act. He deceitfully used someone else’s name and password so he would not get caught and was looking to profit from his criminal act.

The only thing we can take away from this is, even if you discover a security vulnerability, it’s completely in your best interest to keep it to yourself, otherwise you’ll be branded a criminal terrorist when you were merely trying to do a good deed. Or, if you insist on doing the right then, use Wikileaks.

How much does it cost to monitor college students’ anti-American P2P activities? A whole lot, and that’s money colleges could be spending on, I don’t know, education.

This chart breaks down the cost of complying with, specifically, the new provisions of the Higher Education Act of 2008. That law, which the RIAA and MPAA were able to lobby their way into, requires colleges try to stem the spread of illegal P2P downloads on campus. The tools to police what students are up to exist—ipaudit is one that comes to mind—but is it really the business of colleges, realm of higher learning, to snoop on what their students are up to? Why not live and let live, punishing violations as they occur rather than spending all day playing cyber nanny?

One comment at Inside Higher Ed goes into the issue of government-sponsored censorship and prior restraint (in a sense), since the law applies to state schools as while as private schools. That’s an issue for another day, I think.

Like Achilles, it looks like RealDVD has lived a short but glorious life. Its name will echo for eternity. And so on, and so forth.

Right, so that judge that RealNetworks was so confident would rule in its favor did the exact opposite, ruling in favor of the movie studios. The temporary injunction on the sales of RealDVD will go on indefinitely; the odds of RealDVD coming back, especially before Christmastime, now look pretty gosh darn slim.

With this sentence, the judge seems to have sealed RealDVD’s fate:

I’m not satisfied that in fact this technology is not in violation of the DMCA.

That’s quite the innovative statement coming from the judge. Now all we have to do is wait for the record labels to work this line of thinking to their favor. You know, “If the judge says you can’t copy a video discs, why should you be able to copy an audio disc?”

Hooray for America.

Being that lie detectors are complete wastes of space, law enforcement needs, you know, something that actually works. That something could well be brain fingerprinting, which measures brainwave activity to determine if someone is telling the truth or not.

VentureBeat puts it in easy-t-understand terms. Imagine you viciously murder someone with an axe. Then, when the police are questioning you, they show you a photo of an axe. Naturally, your reaction to that photo of an ace would be totally different to someone who didn’t just murder someone using an axe. Then, using all sorts of fancy policing, including Vic Mackey-style tooling up, the police are to determine to a greater degree if you’re lying.

The method is still in development, and the company behind the technology, Brain Fingerprinting Technologies, says about $25 million in funding is still needed to perfect it.

Yesterday, the Virginia Supreme Court ruled the state’s anti-spam law unconstitutional. Good news to the ears of Jeremy Jaynes who gets a free pass. The spammer was previously convicted as the first felony spammer in the country in a 2004 trial. He had been sentenced to nine years.

Ugh. It’s still morning here on the West Coast.

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A Bronx woman will have to pay the RIAA $6,050 for making songs available to download on Kazaa. That works out to something like $756 per song (there were eight songs in question).

The case, Electra v. Barker, matters a little more than serving as anti-RIAA fodder. The RIAA was trying to argue that merely making songs available in a shared folder was tantamount to copyright infringement. If that were the case, the RIAA wouldn’t have to prove that anyone actually downloaded songs from your computer (that is, that you actually uploaded songs). That seems, I don’t know, unfair, but my days of freaking out at the RIAA are over.

What’s the worst that can happen to someone who refuses to pay such a settlement? Are you looking at jailtime for downloading some songs?

The Senate has passed the Higher Education Act (the House passed it earlier this year), which, among other things, provides for federal monies for student loans. What’s most interesting to us here is a provision in the bill, which it’s expected that President Bush will sign into law, that tells college campuses to rein in wanton P2P downloading. To that end, the MPAA will provide colleges with some sort of “briefing book” on how to curtail downloading.

Expect mandatory filtering as well, college students.

As we all know, college students are proficient at at least two things: drinking and illegal downloading. Fun fact: I was invited to join an Xbox release group in 2004 because of my fast Internet connection. That’s what you get for idling in IRC all day long. Who knows how different my life would be had I accepted the position.

It’s hard to get mad at the MPAA and RIAA for wanting to protect their livelihood, but that they could so easily influence the legislative process is somewhat annoying. Not entirely unexpected, just annoying.

Long story short: some kid got tired of playing Final Fantasy XI, and tried to cancel his account. His parents couldn’t cancel from the game’s Web site, and had to—gasp!—call the number found on the credit card statement. The kid’s dad is a bigwig in his state (Illinois), who got his legislator friend to help pass a law stating that online service providers must provide a way to cancel an account online.

The moral of the story is, have important parents, or get the shaft like the rest of us. Neat, right?

via The Earth Times

A more perfect union~!

How much do you trust the Department of Homeland Security? Like, a lot, or a lot lot? Doesn’t matter, really—it now has the right to riffle through your laptop, iPod and other electronic (and non-electronic) devices and documents when you cross a border coming into the U.S.

To Liberty!

Yes, the DHS now has the right to riffle through your junk at the border, all in the name of security, of course. What’s even more troubling—and it’s pretty damn troubling to begin with—is that the DHS can keep your stuff for as long as it wants (a “reasonable period of time,” reads the policy).

Oh, and you don’t even have to be suspected of any wrongdoing in order to have your stuff confiscated.

Several lawmakers are against the new policy, including Sen. Russell Feingold, who called the policy “truly alarming.” Indeed it is, Russ.

What exactly this means for your large collection of V0 MP3s and x264-encoded movies, who knows. Maybe you’ll luck out and they’ll only slap a gigantic fine on you. Wouldn’t surprise me.

Yeah… those are some l33t photoshop skillz.

I guess Don’t Drop the Soap Saga XII and the latest Battle Raper (I wish I was kidding) have been deemed poisonous to the minds ostensibly being rehabilitated by Britain’s overcrowded prison system. Games have been a privilege among institutions for some time now but budget cuts have caused the console-buying programs to be pruned despite prison staff praising the games as good time-wasters for bored, incarcerated youth.

Games with adult content (described as “human sexual contact” or “gross violence”) would be banned under the new regulations, and inmates in England and Wales would have to pay for any approved games out of their own pockets — assuming those jumpsuits even have pockets.

A German court has ruled that having an open, unsecured Wi-Fi access point isn’t tantamount to copyright infringement. Follow the logic for a minute: you’ve got a wide open WAP, and someone comes along and downloads a Metallica album off The Pirate Bay. Metallica’s record company finds the IP address, your IP address, and sends a letter to your ISP demanding retribution. You then argue that it wasn’t you who downloaded the album, but rather some passerby, so you shouldn’t be liable. No court in the U.S. has bought such an argument thus far, often saying it’s your responsibility to secure your property lest it be abused. Well, the Germans disagree.

The court said that an “abstract risk of abuse” wasn’t enough to hold someone liable for copyright infringement.

While our courts in the U.S. may cite World of Warcraft when handing out judgments, the odds of one going by European law are pretty low, since citing Euro law would be unpatriotic.

“Give me a good reason why you’re filming around.”

BakelBlog discusses some of the filming restrictions proposed in the UK and the resulting reactions of “community support officers” when folks try to film in public streets.
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The MPAA may have some explaining to do following remarks of one of its lawyers in the Jammie Thomas trial. The remark in question, as written by Marie. L. van Uitert:

It is often very difficult, and in some cases, impossible, to provide such direct proof when confronting modern forms of copyright infringement, whether over P2P networks or otherwise; understandably, copyright infringers typically do not keep records of infringement

In other words, the MPAA shouldn’t have to provide “direct proof”—it’s pesky!—when suing old ladies, dopey college kids and John and Jane Does for as much as $150,000 per copyright violation.

How does that make sense, in human terms? Never mind the $150,000 per copyright violation—movie tickets are, what, $10 these days?—but the MPAA believes it should be able to extract such funds merely because, you know, it’s “difficult” to prove any wrongdoing? Stunning.

How old and unreasonably rigid is our legal system that this type of thing can be taken seriously?

Oh now I’m all worked up again.

via TorrentFreak

Penny-Arcade

Everyone’s favorite real life Lionel Hutz could find himself disbarred in the near future. Jack Thompson walked out of a Florida court room today, claiming that it was a sham hearing and that the presiding judge was “incompetent” and “arrogant.” (Sounds like him, too.) Since he walked out in a huff, the Florida bar asked for an “enhanced disbarment,” which would prevent Thompson from practicing law in the state for 10 years.

The best is his 4,500-word rant against the court: “Try to get me disbarred. Go ahead, do your worst, Referee Tunis. I will continue to do my best.” He claims to be “ahead of the curve,” fighting the good fight against the likes of GTA IV.

Thompson is a harmless blowhard. Sit back and enjoy his antics.

It was bound to happen, and today it’s official: Craigslist is countersuing eBay, claiming unfair competitive practices, fraudulent business claims, copyright infringement and more.

The auction site has a roughly 25% stake in Craigslist, and Craigslist wants it back, and the filing says that Craigslist wants eBay to divest its shares.

We’ll have to see how this pans out when it goes to court, but it’s looking like eBay, the company that trades on people being good to each other, wasn’t taking its own medicine.

Just a quick note for those of you who purchased replacement power adapters for your iBook or Powerbook, the ones that cause sparks and start fires that burn you and your family alive: you’re getting a refund.

Depending on which adapter you have and for which portable, you could receive up to $79 from Apple in a class action settlement.

This is addition to the power adapter recall Apple had a few years back, but not related to the battery recall of two years ago.

Does your adapter qualify? You’ll have to wait to find out. The final ruling is expected in September, but Apple will likely have a place on its website where you can input your serial number and see if you get cash.

More news in Atlantic vs. Boyer, a case of the RIAA coming down hard on an innocent user and the user fighting back.

Yesterday we brought news that the defendant’s attorneys filed a countersuit yesterday and that the judge has dismissed it. Turns out the RIAA filed for a dismissal, but today the judge put aside the RIAA’s dismissal request and will allow the countersuit to stand.

This means the RIAA’s got a fight on its hands. Normally the defendants back down and try to get out with as little loss as they can, but it’s great to see someone standing up to these big jerks.

So you know how all those people have been up in arms about the adult content in games like GTA IV? And how they think that the ratings need to be tougher? A few politicians don’t think they go far enough. They want to actually start using retail cashiers to police who buys what, IDing people when they purchase to make sure they’re of age.

I’m OK with this for cigarettes and alcohol, but for a game? Games aren’t dangerous, but I guess someone has to think about the children. Or, how about if they go about the real work of congressmen, trying to end the war, feed the homeless, and fixing our gas prices?

Yes, Lee Terry (R-Neb.) and Jim Matheson (D-Utah), I’m talking to you. STFU & GBTW.

I love it when people fight back against the RIAA. Their bullying tactics are getting old, and it seems the courts are realizing this. Last week a judge made it clear that making files available for download — seeding a file to a P2P network, for example — is not copyright infringement. There are other stories of people fighting back, and Atlantic vs. Boyer.

Boyer’s attorneys are being awesome and countersuing the RIAA for a number of offenses, and it’s a juicy, lovely list. The counter-suit states that the RIAA’s wrongdoings include civil conspiracy (to commit extortion, illegal investigations, and computer fraud), computer fraud and abuse, trespass, deceptive and unfair trade practices, declaratory judgment, and
abuse of process. Wow.

Sadly, the judge dismissed the countersuit, though that’s surprising. Hopefully Boyer’s attorneys will think of something else to screw the RIAA right where it hurts.

GTA IV is still in the news. This week, Take Two, the publisher of the game, is suing the Chicago Transit Authority for pulling the game’s ads out of bus terminals and shelters without explanation.

Take Two paid Titan Outdoor, the group that handles advertising for the Authority, $300k for a six-week ad campaign. Titan Outdoor pulled the ads in response to a deadly crime wave that hit the city just as the ads were going up. Take Two, it seems, would like its money back.

We’ll keep you posted on how this develops.