"A student law clinic is about to cause a revolution" says p2pnet. For the first time in the history of the RIAA's ex parte litigation campaign against college students, a university law school's legal aid clinic has taken up the fight against the RIAA in defense of the university's college students. Student attorneys at the University of Maine School of Law's Cumberland Legal Aid Clinic, under the supervision of law school prof Deirdre M. Smith, have moved to dismiss the RIAA's complaint in a Portland, Maine, case, Arista v. Does 1-27, on behalf of 2 University of Maine undergrads. Their recently filed reply brief (pdf) points to the US Supreme Court decision in Bell Atlantic v. Twombly, and the subsequent California decision following Twombly, Interscope v. Rodriguez, which dismissed the RIAA's "making available" complaint as mere "conclusory", "boilerplate" "speculation". The 2 students represented by Cumberland join the 8 students represented by a prominent Portland law firm, bringing to 10 the number of University of Maine students fighting back in this case.

The RIAA is apparently having an allergic reaction to the request by the State Attorney General of Oregon for information about the RIAA's investigative tactics, in Arista v. Does 1-17, the Portland, Oregon, case targeting students at the University of Oregon. See The Oregonian, December 1, 2007 ("UO suspects music industry of spying") and p2pnet, November 29, 2007 ("RIAA may be spying on students: Oregon AG"). Not only are the record companies opposing the request (pdf), they're asking the Judge not to even read it. (pdf) Commentary: "RIAA scorns Oregon University request".

It's that time of year again, where I realise I'm paying more than I need to for my phone and think about switching providers. Currently I'm paying abut £14 a month, for 100 minutes of calls and 40MB of data. I rarely make more than 60 minutes of calls in a month (I hate telephones), but I'd like more data so I can use my 770 as intended.

For the last four years, I have been looking for a service like this, where it provides calls but is mainly focussed on data. I am looking (somewhat half-heatedly, I admit) for jobs and the moment and so I don't know how long I will be staying in the UK for, making any contract with a minimum period unacceptable. This shouldn't be a problem, since I already own a phone so no network needs to make and recoup any investment (and yet most of them still require a minimum period of a year for a contract, and Three don't even offer SIM-only contracts).

Does anyone know of a UK operator which doesn't suck, and does provide intermittent data use for a reasonable rate? I am starting to think I should invest in WiMAX companies; at this rate they're going to make a killing when they start deploying over here...

There is no way I could feel more disdain for Apple's QA department than I do right now. It seems that, in spite of the fact Leopard was in development for over two years, no one bothered to test what happened when you updated an account using FileVault from Tiger. My experience was:

1. The installer worked fine.
2. I logged in, and used the OS for a day.
3. The kernel paniced.
4. On rebooting, my home directory was inaccessible, and Disk Utility was unable to repair the disk image.

Oh well, I thought. It's an occupational hazard when using an encrypted disk image for your home directory; if you don't get a clean shutdown then you can lose data. So, mindful of this, I restored from a recent backup and rebooted. Sure enough, there I was logged in again. Then, a few weeks later, I upgraded to 10.5.1, shut down cleanly, rebooted, and... couldn't log in. Apparently the disk image was corrupted. Worse, it turns out this is a known fault: Leopard always leaves FileVault home directories created with Tiger in an unmountable state when you log out.

I'm going to say that again:

Leopard always leaves FileVault home directories created with Tiger in an unmountable state when you log out.

What kind of monumentally incompetent design is this? I have no idea. Anyway, enough of the ranting. I'm sure what people really want to know is 'what do I do when my shiny new OS has just eaten 30GB of personal data.' Step one is to swear at Apple. A lot. Step two is to realise that this 'corrupt' disk image, with a 'bad superblock' actually mounts fine in Tiger still. Fortunately, I haven't 'up'graded my Powerbook to Leopard. I booted the MBP in target mode, mounted it on the PowerBook, mounted the disk image and copied all of the files out.

I now had /Users/theraven/theraven.sparseimage containing the disk image that Leopard was too inept to use and /Users/tr containing my files. After swapping these over, I rebooted. Could I log in? No. Now it didn't think that the disk image was corrupt, it just couldn't find it. A problem.

This lead to the question of how to tell OS X that I was no longer using FileVault. Apparently this isn't documented anywhere I could find via Google and so I had to spend a long time hunting through the filesystem. Thanks again Apple.

It turns out that the relevant file is /var/db/dslocal/nodes/Default/users/theraven.plist (where theraven is my username). To edit this, you have to log in as root. I did this by booting to single user mode (hold command-s on boot). Inside this file, you will find a key-value pair where the key is home_loc and the value is an array. If you delete this key, then it will fall back to using the home directory as a directory, rather than a mount point. You can then reboot (or just exit from single user mode) and log in. You can probably then reenable file vault and have it re-encrypt your data, but I think I want some confirmation from Apple that they are only mostly incompetent, rather than completely inept before doing this.

Once upon a time, Apple was known for attention to detail and thorough testing. I suppose their current activities are good news for Étoilé, but I'd rather we competed by raising our standards than by Apple lowering theirs.

The RIAA's latest anti-college round of "early settlement" letters targets 7 out of 8 Ivy League schools, but continues to give Harvard University a wide berth. This is perhaps the most astonishing display of cowardice exhibited to date by the multinational cartel of SONY BMG, Warner Bros. Records, EMI, and Vivendi/Universal (the "Big Four" record companies, which are rapidly become less "big"). The lesson which other colleges and universities should draw from this latest of many acts of cowardice: "All bullies are cowards. Appeasement of bullies doesn't work. Standing up to bullies and fighting back has a much higher success rate."

Someone just sent me the best link I've seen in a long time: http://freerice.com/index.php.

It's a simple vocabulary game which asks you to pick the closest synonym for a word from four options. It shows you adverts, and for every word you get right they donate 10 grains of rice to the UN World Food Program. It adjusts the difficulty based on how many you've got right so far, up to a maximum of 50. I seem to be hovering around he 40±2 mark at the moment.

EDIT: I got to 47 for a bit, but then dropped down again. Still haven't made it to 48, which they claim few people beat.

Ohio University, in Athens, Ohio, has found the key to getting the RIAA to stop inundating it and its students with "settlement" letters. According to the university's student online publication, the university paid $60,000, plus $16,000 per year "maintenance", to Audible Magic, the business partner of the RIAA's all-purpose expert witness Dr. Doug Jacobson, for its "CopySense" filtering software. Once it made the payments, the letters stopped. This of course raises a lot of questions as to the 'disinterestedness' of Dr. Jacobson, whose deposition in the UMG v. Lindor case was the subject of interesting Slashdot commentary.

Judge David G. Larimer, presiding in Rochester, New York, has denied an RIAA application for default judgment on the ground that the RIAA's evidence was insufficient, in that it contained no details of actual downloads or distributions, and no sufficient evidence that defendant was in fact Kazaa user "heavyjeffmc@KaZaA". The decision (pdf) concluded that "there are significant issues of fact regarding the identification of the defendant from his alleged "online media distribution system" username". (In case you're unfamiliar with the term "online media distribution system", that's because it is a term the RIAA coined 4 years ago to describe p2p file sharing accounts in its lawsuits; the term is not known to have been used by anyone else anywhere else.) In August a similar RIAA default judgment motion was denied on the ground that the pleadings failed to allege sufficient factual details supporting a claim of copyright infringement, in a San Diego, California, case, Interscope v. Rodriguez.

The Slashdot and Groklaw communities were so helpful in preparing for the deposition of the RIAA's "expert" witness, Dr. Doug Jacobson, we thought we'd come back and ask for your thoughts on what documents and/or data to request from the RIAA's 'investigator', MediaSentry, Inc. The documents we have so far are just printouts, which were used at Dr. Jacobson's deposition, specifically exhibits 6, 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14. Of course we have some ideas of our own about what to demand, but we want to leave no stone unturned. For the technical minded among you, this is your chance to be a part of bringing the RIAA's litigation campaign down.

The Interscope v. Rodriguez decision dismissing the RIAA's boilerplate complaint, and the $9250-per-song-file verdict in Capitol v. Thomas, have inspired some new dismissal motions in RIAA cases. In Charleston, South Carolina, Catherine Njuguna has moved to dismiss on the basis of the legal insufficiency of the RIAA's complaint and on constitutional grounds due to the excessive damages sought by the RIAA, while in Brooklyn, New York, MS victim Rae J Schwartz has moved to dismiss based solely on the complaint's failure to state a claim under Rodriguez and the Supreme Court decision, Bell Atlantic v. Twombly.

Jammie Thomas has filed a motion to set aside the $222,000 verdict obtained against her by the RIAA, based on allegations she infringed $23.76 worth of song files. Her motion papers (pdf) argue that the verdict is excessive and in violation of the due process clause of the U.S. Constitution, and should be reduced to $150 or less, or a new trial ordered. (See, e.g. UMG v. Lindor). It has been reported that the RIAA issued a statement that "Thomas [is] not taking responsibility for her actions, and .... they want to resolve the case in a "fair and reasonable" fashion. It is unfortunate that the defendant continues to avoid responsibility for her actions....". In my experience that is RIAA-speak for "after the verdict we have tried to make a settlement with her, but she wouldn't meet our terms".

OpenBSD has just released the theme song for the 4.2 release. The song title is 100001 1010101. What does that mean?

Converting them to decimal, we get:

100001 = 32 + 1 = 33
1010101 = 64 + 16 + 4 + 1 = 85

As ASCII codes, these are ! and U. Not particularly meaningful, but it gives us a hint. Considering the song's subject some connection to money could be a good guess. Considering OpenBSD's focus on cryptography, it seems like it might be encrypted in some way, but presumably some way that's known to be insecure enough that someone with only two characters and a knowledge of the context can decrypt it. A Caesar Cypher is an obvious bet. Since it's in binary, a power of two seems like a nice bet for an easy-to-guess key. We want one that leaves both characters in the letters region of the character set (65-90, 97-122). Picking 32, we get:

1000001 = 64 + 1 = 65
1110101 = 64 + 32 + 16 + 4 + 1 = 117

This corresponds to the letters A and u. Since Au is the chemical element for gold, this is probably the answer.

Of course, with only a two-letter cyphertext and no knowledge of the algorithm or key, we can't be sure, and the 'real' decryption could be anything, but it seems likely that the correct answer is gold considering the subject of the song. Assuming it is a Caesar Cypher, we know that the distance between the two characters must be 52, so we can write a simple program that will output them all:

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void)
{
for(int i=0 ; i<128 ; i++)
{
printf("%d: %c%c\n", i - 33, (char)i, (char)(i + 52) & 127);
}
return 0;
}

The only results where both are in the letter range are:

32: Au
33: Bv
34: Cw
35: Dx
36: Ey
37: Fz

Of these, only Au is an atomic symbol. The others might have some other meaning, but Au still seems like the best bet. No other powers of two give us a value in the letter range, although 16 gives 1e, which might mean something to someone (decimal 30? ASCII code for record separator?).

In summary, the title for the new OpenBSD theme song could be anything, but is probably Gold. Also, I am definitely a geek.

A federal judge in Tampa, Florida, has ruled that an RIAA defendant's counterclaim against the record companies for conspiracy to use unlicensed investigators, access private computer records without permission, and commit extortion, may move forward. The Court also sustained claims for violations of the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act as well as a claim under Florida law for deceptive and unfair trade practices. The decision (pdf) by Judge Richard A. Lazzara in UMG v. DelCid rejected, in its entirety, the RIAA's assertion of "Noerr Pennington" immunity, since that defense does not apply to "sham litigations", and Ms. Del Cid alleges that the RIAA's cases are "sham".

Several weeks ago it was discovered that a California federal judge, in rejecting an RIAA application for default judgment, had dismissed the RIAA's standard complaint for failure to state a claim, calling it "conclusory" "boilerplate" "speculation" in Interscope v. Rodriguez. In the wake of that decision, a Queens, New York, woman being sued in Brooklyn federal court, Rae J Schwartz, has told the Court that she is making a motion to dismiss the complaint in her case, Elektra v. Schwartz. This is the first post-Interscope challenge to the RIAA's boilerplate, of which we are aware. This is the same case in which the RIAA had sent a letter to the Judge falsely indicating that AOL had "confirmed that defendant owned an internet access account through which copyrighted sound recordings were downloaded and distributed". Ms. Schwartz suffers from Multiple Sclerosis and has never engaged in file sharing, but the RIAA has pressed the case against her.

I recently started playing squash. It's quite fun, you put two people in a small room and they try to hit a small ball past each other. It turns out, this ball is almost exactly the same size as an eyeball. It also turns out to be somewhat more resilient than an eyeball. When I played last Thursday, the ball left my opponent's racket and went straight into my right eye.

This, perhaps unsurprisingly, way quite astonishingly painful. After about five minutes, my vision started to go cloudy, so I went to the hospital. One of the nice things about Swansea is that there is a hospital right next to the sports centre, which specialises in eyes. After waiting for a little while, someone shined a bright light in my eyes, poked them a bit, and gave me some drops to take. Apparently my iris was bleeding (hence the cloudy vision). I had to use two kinds of eye drops and go back the next day. By this time, it was hoped, the cloudiness would have cleared enough for the doctor to see into my eye and see if my retina had detached.

The next day, the cloudiness hadn't cleared much, but the doctor couldn't see any damage (but I have to go back after another three weeks to make absolutely sure).

Today, for the first time since the accident, I can see clearly. Unfortunately, the pupil on my right eye is still very dilated (I think this is the eye drops, but I'm not completely sure), and so I am having to wear sunglasses and sit in a dark room to avoid being dazzled. The good news is that the week-long moratorium on exercise is lifted tomorrow, so I can go to salsa in the evening.