Can someone tell me why it's newsworthy that MIT clowns exonerate themselves & blame their victim?

Other than to demonstrate how low some people can go.

Great that you found good people to handle those important things.

Thanks, bro :)

All riggghhhhtttt. Thanks Amicus :) I always wanted to have a big brother :)

Oh. OK. How many words do they want?

The legal fees alone are the killer. Veoh won every round, but had to go out of business due to the legal fees.

In my experience, their primary goal in every instance is to put people out of business, if at all possible. YouTube has been 'playing nice' with them for many years, but they haven't dropped the pending case.

The decision, IMHO, gives you what you need to know about the facts of the case in order to understand the significance of the decision. 56 pages is enough reading in my view, for our purposes. If you want more you can go on PACER and get hundreds of additional pages from the case file.

Yeah, definitely

1. I don't have a paralegal to work on my blog. I do all this stuff myself.

2. The guiding principle of Recording Industry vs The People since its inception in 2005 has always been that it is designed for readers who are smart enough, and serious enough, to read the actual litigation document rather than let someone else tell them what it means.

3. The blog post doesn't link to Slashdot for "more details" it links to it for "Commentary & discussion".

4. Most Slashdotters, I have found, do read the story and litigation document... not every word, but enough to form their own opinions.

5. And no, thanks, I am not looking for you to explain to me what the decision says; I read it, and I know exactly what it says.

Well he shouldn't call something "obscure" just because he's too lazy to read it, and wants someone else to tell him what it said.

Obscure? You calling my blog obscure?

There is no "backstory". Just read the front story.

The example you gave, if true, is a classic demonstration that IT management does not understand their business, not the other way around.

First, while you may want to approach a person directly to give them a friendly heads-up as a first step, the basic thing IT management is supposed to understand is that a user having weak passwords is not so much a risk to that user but a risk to the business. If a user ignores your friendly heads-up, or the problem is more widespread than 1 person, the next step is to go to the person responsible for that part of the business. Now, you don't have to be a douche and call out the specific individual(s) in question, but you then tell that person that there is a systemic risk to their operation because X% of users (or alternatively, a few users with extensive access rights to critical systems) have weak passwords that all appear near the top of /-/@xX0r brute force password dictionaries.

The key thing that even moderately competent managers (IT or otherwise) understand in these kinds of situations is that you have to put the decision (and relevant information) in squarely in the hands of the person accountable and responsible for the issue. In this case the issue is not that someone has a weak password that might result in someone messing up their My Documents folder, it is that weak passwords are a risk to the business. If a bank comptroller's password is 'password', that is not a problem-waiting-to-happen for the comptroller, it's a ticking timebomb for the bank.

In your example, you do not put the decision to act (or not act) in the hands of the account owner, but in the hands of the account owner's business unit head.

Security and IT issues in general tend to get short shrift in many business (at least in my personal experience) not so much because non-IT/non-technical managers are stupid, but because the IT managers lack even basic competence relative to the second half of their title.

Your parent's statement is not an oxymoron.

If every single print driver has components running in both ring 0 and userspace, but the preponderance of components (by number or 'size') of every single print driver is in userspace, then it is more precise to say that "all print drivers are mostly in userspace" as opposed to "printer drivers are mostly in userspace". The latter is semantically a superset of the former, as it could either mean the same thing, or also describe a situation where some printer drivers are completely implemented in ring 0, but the majority are completely or mostly implemented in userspace such that the preponderance of the set of all printer driver implementations resides in userspace.

In other words, your parent's statement is more precise about not only the aggregate population of printer drivers, but the distribution within the population. Whether that statement is actually correct or even the real intent of your parent poster's statement is another question :).