But they didn't "contact them from an offshore number". They contacted them from a number in Ohio. It says so right there on their Caller ID.

That's the trick, right? If the call-center is off-shore, the Caller ID can say whatever they want it to say, because they're not bound by the CNID spoofing rules.

That's not what I said. But you've constructed a wonderful strawman for yourself to knock down.

I said, let's recap:

- The domain servers they're using are not their normal domain servers and look nothing like them
- The domain registrar used for the MDM is not their normal registrar (and corporations don't generally have a bunch of parallel accounts for such things, they centralize)
- The service isn't hosted in their copious capacity but in a pair of anonymous AWS instances

As has been noted elsewhere in this thread, the tech support people in question are low-paid script-monkeys and probably don't even fully understand what the person is talking about.

even worse. It's just a bunch of AWS servers....

$ host leon.wabaw.net
leon.wabaw.net is an alias for awseb-e-a-awsebloa-saeaoerx3v7z-1299207820.us-west-2.elb.amazonaws.com.
awseb-e-a-awsebloa-saeaoerx3v7z-1299207820.us-west-2.elb.amazonaws.com has address 54.213.59.154
awseb-e-a-awsebloa-saeaoerx3v7z-1299207820.us-west-2.elb.amazonaws.com has address 54.191.121.98

Bets on if the account info for that AWS account is fake?

I'm going to go ahead and throw up a red flag. I don't think this is a Sprint owned domain. I think it's meant to LOOK like one, but I don't think it IS one.

$ dig +short sprint.net ns
ns1-auth.sprintlink.net.
ns2-auth.sprintlink.net.
ns3-auth.sprintlink.net.
$ dig +short sprint.com ns
reston-ns1.telemail.net.
ns2-auth.sprintlink.net.
reston-ns3.telemail.net.
reston-ns2.telemail.net.
ns1-auth.sprintlink.net.
ns3-auth.sprintlink.net.

The places Sprint hosts their "well-known" domains looks remarkably like it's a legitimate place. "wabaw.net", however?

$ dig +short wabaw.net ns
ns6.domainmonger.com.
ns5.domainmonger.com.
ns7.domainmonger.com.
ns8.domainmonger.com.

I'm going to propose a theory that the WHOIS data shows Sprint so that - if someone gets caught and folks go looking for someone to vilify, Sprint is the unwitting victim. But - in reality - it's sitting in some domain-registration that nobody official at Sprint has ever heard of, and someone's been building a network of phones that they control via MDM.

FreeBSD on AMD is "a niche market of a niche market".... you can't fault someone for ignoring it.

Also, nVidia has drivers "up-to-date" as of about three weeks ago.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/f...

So, not sure what your issues are. Can you perhaps restate them?

So, uh, what specific version of FreeBSD do you need. Checking the compatibility matrix for the last three FreeBSD major releases...

http://www.megacity.org/scrap/...

Yeah, but Jordan's already implied that FreeBSD will be going down a very similar path....

"logging messages just aren't important"?!

I guess you've never worked anywhere that had regulatory compliance requirements. Or ever wanted to debug something.

In the Michelin Man though, the trademarked character is "original".

For Mickey Mouse, the trademarked character is a derivative work (of the copyrighted work, yes a work they own, but still, it was created first and foremost as a character, not as a branding mark).

I think that'll make a difference.

Ultimately, I think Disney is 'right' in their defense because I don't think trademarked characters, without the original copyright to back them up, will actually survive.

It's not something that's been really tested (although actually this case might, because if Buck Rogers is ruled to be in the public domain, there are Buck Rogers related character trademarks in play, theoretically), but my gut tells me that courts will throw those out.

The character *is* part of the copyrighted work, so anything you can do with that character (which hasn't itself been copyrighted and given some later-expiring protection) is fair game.

So you could create your own "Mickey Mouse" comics/cartoons/etc. so long as such creations were not dependent on other, still existing copyrights. (In other words, you could create your own wholly-original Mickey Mouse cartoon, but it couldn't be based on, say, Fantasia... it couldn't also contain Minnie Mouse, etc.)

The issues are a little muddier to me when it comes to using a character.

Not really. This becomes the textbook definition of "a derivative work". If they want to make a derivative work of a public domain story (which includes the characters within that story) then they should be free to do so.

This is why the Disney thing becomes key, because any new work featuring Mickey Mouse is -- technically -- a derivative work of Steamboat Willlie, whether that work is created by Disney Corporation or (at some future point, after Steamboat Willie falls into the public domain) some new animation house.

Ha!

Yeah, I'd like to see an ISP try to stop routing Apple's traffic without an F-5 class Shit-Storm from their customers.

They can't. For lots of legacy/legal reasons those organizations outright *own* those /8s, as opposed to just having been "assigned" or "allocated" to them.