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The Courts

Submission + - New Attorneys Fee Decision Against RIAA 1

Submitted by
NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "The RIAA has gotten slammed again, this time in Oregon, as the Magistrate Judge in Atlantic v. Andersen has ruled that Tanya Andersen's motion for attorneys fees should be granted. The Magistrate, in his 15-page decision, noted that, despite extensive pretrial discovery proceedings, "when plaintiffs dismissed their claims in June 2007, they apparently had no more material evidence to support their claims than they did when they first contacted defendant in February 2005....." and concluded that "Copyright holders generally, and these plaintiffs specifically, should be deterred from prosecuting infringement claims as plaintiffs did in this case." This is the same case in which (a) the RIAA insisted on interrogating Ms. Andersen's 10-year-old girl at a face-to-face deposition, (b) the defendant filed RICO counterclaims against the record companies, and (c) the defendant has recently converted her RICO case into a class action"
Privacy

Submission + - MediaDefender gets source code cracked!

Submitted by
DragonTHC
DragonTHC writes: "Slyck news is reporting that MediaDefender has been cracked again and this time, their source code for anti-freedom efforts against p2p and bit torrent. The fifty megabyte download is by the same group that brought you the MediaDefender emails, MediaDefender-Defender."
Censorship

Submission + - MediaDefender and the Streisand Effect (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Foldarn
Foldarn writes: It looks like MediaDefender, in an effort to quell the explosion of negative publicity, has instead done the opposite (also known as the Streisand Effect) and made it even more widespread. The folks over at Ars Technica have an article about a few popular BitTorrent sites MegaNova and IsoHunt that are being demanded to remove the ever incriminating emails. What's more, Ars is reporting that it appears that MediaDefender, in response to IsoHunt's decline to remove, may be behind a massive denial of service attack against IsoHunt.
The Courts

Submission + - RIAA Tries to Stop RICO Class Action 1

Submitted by
NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "Last month an Oregon woman, victimized by the RIAA for two years, retaliated by bringing a class action for fraud, RICO, malicious prosecution, violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, misuse of copyright law, civil conspiracy, and other assorted wrongs, against the record companies, the RIAA, their investigators, and their 'enforcers', in Andersen v. Atlantic. The opening gambit of the record companies, the RIAA, and the enforcers (Settlement Support Center LLC), all of whom are being represented by the same law firm, has been to file a motion to dismiss Ms. Andersen's complaint. The RIAA's unlicensed "investigators", MediaSentry/Safenet, presumably represented by separate counsel, have yet to respond to the amended complaint. Ms. Andersen is the disabled single mother, who together with her 10 year old daughter, had been pursued by the RIAA for two (2) years, despite the fact that neither of them had ever engaged in file sharing."
Encryption

Submission + - To find DMCA violations you must violate the DMCA (ucsd.edu)

Submitted by meese
meese writes: staple is a tool that cryptographically binds data using an All-or-nothing transform. Why might that be interesting? Because it might allow for this scenario: to check for DMCA violations, a content owner would have to violate the DMCA themselves.

The basic transformation is keyless, but all the data is required to reverse it. The tool can also throw away part of its internal key, making the data decipherable only with the key or via brute force attack. If a content publisher, Alice, wants to check for copyright violations by another party, Bob, she could be thwarted: Bob could staple Alice's file with one of his own and discard part of the key. To check for copyright violation, Alice must brute force the stapled file (possibly violating the DMCA), which protects Bob's file. The FAQ has some more detail.
Censorship

Submission + - Wordpress.org blocked in Turkey (webgeekworld.com) 2

Submitted by
unity100
unity100 writes: "Wordpress.org domain has been blocked by monopoly infrastructure backbone provider Turkish Telekom in Turkey. Turkish internet users are not able to reach anything with wordpress.org domain extension due to DNS filtering. The move is due to a recent court order, in which a controversial religious sect leader, Adnan Oktar have sued wordpress.org for many blogs, containing criticizm about him. Since wordpress.org did not respond, Turkish courts have taken the 'Turkish' way and totally blocked wordpress.org domain instead of blocking the blogs in question one by one. Read more in below links :

http://wordpress.com/blog/2007/08/19/why-were-bloc ked-in-turkey/
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/home/home?wid=10&func =viewSubmission&sid=2883"
Censorship

Submission + - Anonymous Coward or Corporate Troll? (alternet.org) 1

Submitted by
grcumb
grcumb writes: "In a recent article on Alternet, Annalee Newitz writes to report that our perception of the typical anonymous poster as a fat, half-naked basement dweller with a grudge is nearly 100% wrong. Virgil Griffith's WikiScanner site exposes the surprising truth: The majority of dishonest edits and omissions on wikipedia derive from corporate and government IP addresses. In Annalee's words: 'It turns out that the people who are hiding behind anonymity online for nefarious or selfish reasons are not little guys in pajamas but the very bastions of accountability that haters of the Web have deified.'"
Privacy

Submission + - Man Arrested for Post on craigslist.com (grupthink.com)

Submitted by
davidthedrake
davidthedrake writes: "Kevin Zimmerman posted his eye-witness account of an arrest by Kalispell police (which occurred on July 28th, 2006) on a Montana craiglist.com site. The official police report stated the prank-pulling kids, whom Zimmerman witnessed, were arrested without incident. Zimmerman's post on craigslist.com painted a different picture saying police:

"...yanked the boy down, twisted him sideways, then grabbed his arm and cuffed him. He then kicked the boy in his leg twice, patted him down then shook the boy really hard." Zimmerman went on further in his post to insult the officers associated with the arrest.

Nearly a year later, police showed up at his door and arrested him for 'criminal defamation.' The police obtained Zimmerman's information by first sending a subpoena to craigslist.com and then sending a subpoena to Zimmerman's ISP."
United States

Submission + - Running trail mistaken for bioterrorism threat (msn.com)

Submitted by feuerfalke
feuerfalke writes: A flour-and-chalk trail marked out by Daniel Salchow and his sister Dorothee for their running club, the Hash House Harriers, sparked fears and evacuations Thursday night, and now the siblings are finding themselves in deep trouble with New Haven police. Police were called after they were spotted sprinkling "powder" in the parking lot of an IKEA furniture store, which was later evacuated. The "powder" was, in fact, flour, which the siblings have used plenty of times before, all across the country, to mark trails for their club. The Salchow siblings are now facing felony charges, and New Haven police seek "restitution" for the resources wasted in their mistake. This sounds familiar...
Privacy

Skype Linux Reads Password and Firefox Profile 335

Posted by samzenpus from the to-send-better-ads dept.
mrcgran writes "Users of Skype for Linux have just found out that it reads the files /etc/passwd, firefox profile, plugins, addons, etc, and many other unnecessary files in /etc. This fact was originally discovered by using AppArmor, but others have confirmed this fact using strace on versions 1.4.0.94 and 1.4.0.99. What is going on? This probably shows how important it is to use AppArmor in any closed-source application in Linux to restrict any undue access to your files."
Education

Submission + - Student suspended for website sues

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: A University of Delaware student suspended for a humor website that a fellow student found 'disturbing' has filed a lawsuit alleging that the University violated his First Amendment rights. A separate site (created for this purpose) has more details. From the complaint, "UD makes available its Internet server for students to create web sites with no restrictions on content... As such, UD may not, consistent with the First Amendment, punish any student based on the content of his or her website, even though the content may have an adverse emotional impact on some readers."
The Courts

Submission + - Foster Demands RIAA Post $210k Security for Fees

Submitted by
NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "A few days ago it was reported that, in view of the RIAA's one-month delay in paying the $68,685.00 attorneys fee award in Capitol v. Foster, and its lawyers' failure to respond to Ms. Foster's lawyer's email, Ms. Foster filed a motion for entry of judgment so that she could go ahead with judgment enforcement proceedings. In response to that motion the RIAA submitted a statement that it had no objection to entry of judgment, and intimated that it thought there would be an automatic stay on enforcement of the judgment, and that it would ultimately file an appeal. After seeing that, Ms. Foster's lawyer has filed a motion for the Court to require the RIAA to post $210,000 in security to cover the past and future attorneys fees and costs which are expected to be incurred."
Music

Submission + - Court acquits allofmp3.com site owner

Submitted by CapedOpossum
CapedOpossum writes: From the article: "A Russian court found the former boss of music download Web site www.allofmp3.com not guilty of breaching copyright on Wednesday in a case considered a crucial test of Russia's commitment to fighting piracy." ... "Denis Kvasov, head of MediaServices which owned the site, " ... "always said he was within the law because the site paid part of its income to ROMS, a Russian organisation which collects and distributes fees for copyright holders. The judge agreed with his defence."
The Courts

Submission + - Court Stays RIAA Subpoena to U. of South Florida

Submitted by
NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "More stormy seas for the RIAA in its campaign against college students? A federal judge in Tampa, Florida, has stayed enforcement of the RIAA's subpoena directed to the University, at the request of the two students who are named as "John Does" in the case, Interscope v. Does 1-40. The judge ruled that the subpoena cannot be enforced "pending resolution" of the motion by two students to quash the subpoena. This comes on the heels of adverse rulings in New Mexico and Virginia, and similar motions to quash in Oklahoma and Massachusetts."

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