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Feed Techdirt: Dell Sues Cybersquatters For Elaborate Shell Game (techdirt.com)

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Hearing stories about cybersquatters taking domains that are confusingly similar to corporate names is nothing new, but a new lawsuit from Dell shows just how far some firms are taking the practice. Dell has sued a group of registrars claiming that they're really a series of shell companies designed to sit on various squatted domains for free. It's no secret that a common practice among domain squatters is to register a domain and put ads on it for a few days to see if it drives any revenue -- and if it doesn't to return the domain within the grace period. We had always heard of this practice as being called "domain kiting," but Dell refers to it (more aptly) as "domain tasting" in its lawsuit. However, what's interesting here is that they're accusing one company of setting up a long series of shell corporations to keep registering the same domain name over and over again -- getting the benefit of the traffic without ever having to pay for the domain name. For example, Dell notes that one company registered "dellfinacncialservices.com" and used it for 5 days (the limit you can go without paying) before abandoning it. However, as soon as it was abandoned, another firm picked up, used it for 5 days and then abandoned it again, only to see another firm immediately pick it up. Basically, they trace a pretty compelling pattern to suggest that this was a coordinated effort, potentially by a single company.

The other interesting part about the lawsuit is that rather than focusing on standard laws having to do with cybersquatting, Dell has gone a step further and is claiming that registering domain names with the Dell name in them is akin to "counterfeiting." That seems like quite a stretch -- and even the legal expert quoted in the article seems to think it's a long shot for Dell to make that argument. It they win on this argument, then it could spell a lot of trouble for people who happen to own domain names that are similar to the names of large corporations. For many years, we've covered the fight between Nissan (the automaker) and Uzi Nissan, the guy who owns Nissan.com (this story is getting some more attention this week, thanks to a Freakonomics post, but the story itself has dragged on for years). Presumably, if Dell wins their case, then Nissan could turn around and accuse Nissan.com of "counterfeiting" and have a pretty strong precedent to back it up.

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Security

Submission + - New Zealand Nabs Cyber Crime Kingpin (techluver.com)

Submitted by
Tech.Luver
Tech.Luver writes: "Police nabbed the suspected teenage kingpin of an international cyber crime network accused of infiltrating 1.3 million computers and skimming millions of dollars from victims' bank accounts, officials said. "Working with the FBI and police in the Netherlands, New Zealand police arrested the 18-year-old in the North Island city of Hamilton, said Martin Kleintjes, head of the police electronic crime center. The arrest was part of international probe into the criminal use of "botnets," in which hackers gain control of third-party computers through malicious software and then use them as remote-controlled robots to crash online systems, accept spam and steal users' personal information. ( http://techluver.com/2007/11/29/new-zealand-nabs-cyber-crime-kingpin/ )"
Power

Submission + - Ethanol Under Siege

Submitted by
Reservoir Hill
Reservoir Hill writes: "Little over a year ago, ethanol was winning the hearts and wallets of both Main Street and Wall Street, with promises of greater US energy independence, fewer greenhouse gases and help for the farm economy. But the Wall Street Journal reports that critics now blame ethanol for pushing up food prices and dispute how much it really helps reduce the need for oil while environmentalists say additional ethanol production could strain water supplies and impair water quality and the EPA says that "ozone levels generally increase with increased ethanol use." President Bush gave ethanol a boost in his State of the Union speech in 2005 by calling for "strong funding" of renewable energy. Energy legislation that summer required oil companies to blend a total of 7.5 billion gallons of "renewable" fuels into the nation's fuel supply by 2012. Now the ethanol lobby is pushing for the Senate version of pending energy legislation, which includes a requirement that gasoline blenders use 36 billion gallons of renewable fuels by 2022 but formidable opponents such as the livestock, packaged-food and oil industries also have lawmakers' ears and what once looked like a slam-dunk could now languish in pending energy legislation that might not pass for weeks, if ever."
Censorship

Submission + - Egyptian Blogger Silenced by YouTube

Submitted by
Frosty Piss
Frosty Piss writes: "A Egyptian human rights activist has been muzzled after YouTube and Yahoo! shut down accounts belonging to the award-winning blogger. Cairo-based Wael Abbas regularly writes and posts video about police brutality, torture and sexual harassment in Egypt. One of the videos — of an Egyptian bus driver being sodomized with a stick by a police officer — was used as evidence to convict two officers of brutality, a rare occurrence in a country where human-rights groups say torture is rampant. YouTube said the decision to remove Abbas' videos had nothing to do with the Egyptian government, but was rather an internal decision."
Government

Submission + - Swiss DMCA quietly adopted (boingboing.net)

Submitted by roady
roady writes: We have seen a lot of talk about the Canadian DMCA. But few know about the Swiss version recently adopted by law makers, not even the Swiss people. The government and media have been very quiet, probably to avoid a referendum. Indeed, Switzerland is a direct democracy and if 50'000 citizens sign a referendum, the whole country will have a chance to vote against the new copyright law. In this version of the DMCA, sharing a file on P2P networks will land you one year in jail, even though the law mandates a levy on blank media. The history of the law can be read here.
The Courts

Submission + - Oregon AG Seeks to investigate RIAA tactics

Submitted by
NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "Turning the tables on the RIAA's attempt to subpoena information from the University of Oregon about the identities of the university students, the Attorney General has now filed additional papers requesting permission from the Court to conduct immediate discovery into the RIAA's 'data mining' techniques, such as the use of unlicensed investigators, the turning over of subpoenaed information to collection agencies, the obtaining of personal information from computers. The AG pointed out (pdf) that "Because Plaintiffs routinely obtain ex parte discovery in their John Doe infringement suits.....their factual assertions supporting their good cause argument are never challenged by an adverse party and their investigative methods remain free of scrutiny. They often settle their cases quickly before defendants obtain legal representation and begin to conduct discovery...... and have dropped cases, such as their case against Tanya Andersen, in which their methods and practices have been challenged through counterclaims...... While the University is not a party to the case, Plaintiffs' subpoena affects the university's rights and obligations. Plaintiffs may be spying on students who use the University's computer system and may be accessing much more than IP addresses." As one commentator succinctly put it, "They'll be going bananas in RIAA land" after reading this filing."
Security

Submission + - Surveillance cameras find atomic chemist's killer (chicagotribune.com)

Submitted by GlobalEcho
GlobalEcho writes: When a chemist was murdered in Chicago last week, police had few leads, until they reviewed the tape on nearby surveillance cameras. Cameras have been reviled for intruding on the privacy of the public, but it would seem there is a case to be made for having at least a few of them around, perhaps just enough of them (as here) to catch the stupid criminals (which is most of them).
Security

Submission + - Russian Hackers Hijack Search Results (techluver.com)

Submitted by
TechLuver
TechLuver writes: "A huge campaign to poison web searches and trick people into visiting malicious websites has been thwarted. "The booby-trapped websites came up in search results for search terms such as "Christmas gifts" and "hospice". Windows users falling for the trick risked having their machine hijacked and personal information plundered. The criminals poisoned search results using thousands of domains set up to convince search index software they were serious sources of information. While computer security researchers have seen small-scale attempts to subvert search results before now, the sheer scale of this attack dwarfed all others. "This was fairly epic," said Alex Eckelberry, head of Sunbelt Software — one of the firms that uncovered the attack. ( http://techluver.com/2007/11/29/russian-hackers-hijack-search-results-in-coordinated-web-attack/ )"
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - TPB files charges against media companies (thepiratebay.org)

Submitted by
PurpleZebra
PurpleZebra writes: "Thanks to the email-leakage from MediaDefender-Defenders we now have proof of the things we've been suspecting for a long time; the big record and movie labels are paying professional hackers, saboteurs and ddosers to destroy our trackers. While browsing through the email we identified the companies that are also active in Sweden and we have tonight reported these incidents to the police. The charges are infrastructural sabotage, denial of service attacks, hacking and spamming, all of these on a commercial level. The companies that are being reported are the following: * Twentieth Century Fox, Sweden AB * Emi Music Sweden AB * Universal Music Group Sweden AB * Universal Pictures Nordic AB * Paramount Home Entertainment (Sweden) AB * Atari Nordic AB * Activision Nordic Filial Till Activision (Uk) Ltd * Ubisoft Sweden AB * Sony Bmg Music Entertainment (Sweden) AB * Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Nordic AB"
Censorship

Submission + - Canada bans complaining about speech restrictions

Submitted by Anon E. Mouse
Anon E. Mouse writes: Calling Speech Restrictors "Enemies of Free Speech" Can Now Lead to Legal Liability in Canada:

Richard Warman, a lawyer who worked as an investigator for the Canadian Human Rights Commission, often filed complaints against "hate speech" sites — complaints that were generally upheld under Canadian speech restrictions.
Paul Fromm, a defender of various Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites, has been publicly condemning Warman for, among other things, being "an enemy of free speech."
Warman sued, claiming that these condemnations are defamatory.

Friday, the Ontario Superior Court held for Warman — chiefly on the grounds that because Warman's claims were accepted by the legal system, they couldn't accurately be called an attack on free speech.

Snippets of the opinion may be found at the legal blog, The Volokh Conspiracy.

Eugene Volokh writes:

It seems to me that Fromm was simply expressing opinions that the court disapproved of — that people who try to restrict "hate speech" are "enem[ies] of free speech," that people who are punished for hate speech are "dissidents," that people who for ideological reasons use the law to restrict speech they disagree with are ideologues who want only to deny freedom of speech to those with whom they disagree. Who is an "enemy of free speech" obviously turns on the speaker's view of free speech, and the view that he expects his audience to share, or that he wants to persuade his audience to share. Who deserves to be labeled with the generally positive term "dissident" depends on what dissent the speaker believes to be legitimate and morally proper.

Yet the Canadian justice system not only allows the suppression of certain viewpoints, and excludes them from free speech restrictions. With this case, it also tries to deny critics the right to label the speech they support "free speech," and the dissenters they like "dissidents."

The court is insisting that Canadians' speech not only follows the government-approved ideology on the topic of race, ethnicity, and religion (an ideology that I agree with, but that I don't think should be legally coerced). It is also insisting that Canadians' speech follows the government-approved ideology and terminology on the topic of free speech itself.

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