Again... .cooperate with WHAT exactly?

These guys aren't doing anything wrong... they're just editing some pages. The Wiki admins SAY they're libelling people, etc., but since when is it Wikipedia's responsibility to handle that for those that have been wronged?

If they're claiming illegal activity, then follow legal means to take care of it. They can't just say "they're doing illegal shit so we should take some vigilante action to shut them down".

Again, I'm not agreeing with what these vandals are doing, but I'd never condone Wikipedia using their popularity to influence an ISP. That's just a bully trying to get their way. At that point they stop getting any and all support from me.

Wikipedia apparently has a system or process with a few holes in it, in that they are relying on people being good and doing the right thing. That is flawed. It's not up to Verizon to deal with it, it's up to them to adapt their process to handle it. Either that or wait until the vandals get bored and go away.

Mind you, a story on /. will probably not help it go away any time soon. If anything, you can expect to see a bunch of new "vandals" start fucking with them any time now.

As opposed to going to the local Starbucks and using their Internet. Or scarfing any other source of non-Verizon internet access.

I highly doubt that someone going to this much trouble to cause them problems is going to stop the first time he runs into a simple block like this.

I guess I should have reworded my response to "adapt their process to something that will effectively take care of the problem".

This seems silly to me... why would Verizon care?

If the vandals are doing something illegal, then go ahead and follow the legal procedures to get it stopped, which would probably include subpoenaing Verizon for the identity of the vandals and going after them directly.

If it's not something that can be handled in the courts, (being a dick hasn't been made illegal, last time I checked) then Verizon may well open themselves up to a lawsuit for helping Wikipedia with this "wrongdoing".

If it's not illegal, then they'll probably have to adapt their process to take care of the problem.

And I'd be very interested to see how many good edits or entries were being made from that block of IP addresses. They may well be cutting off their leg to cure an ingrown toenail.

As a Canadian Citizen, I'd just like to say to the EU...

"Go fuck yourself."

That is all.

Oh please...

You have NO way of knowing that it was his decision. And it's a government... odds are that he was NOT allowed to make that decision.

I know that in my shop, the network admins do not have that kind of autonomy. They can make all the recommendations they want, but it's not their decision.

For all we know, he may have asked his superiors for permission and they failed to give it, and he went ahead and did it anyways.

Not at all.

I've been doing app development for years, and work in a few OS projects myself.

I'm quite familiar with the various licenses, etc., required.

I've helped vet those licenses for Government implementations, as well as pay lawyers to draft contracts for custom licenses I need for my own software product.

The last thing I wanted to do was go about and mass download and extract any/all Java/Apache/JBoss libraries and licenses.

It was nothing but a colossal waste of time for everyone involved. It's just the client ended up paying for it.

No. We were about to start he business analysis phase of the project... literally step one.

We were totally in the dark about what they needed, technical/business requirements, etc.

All we knew is that it was going to be an Oracle-backed Java distributed app running on Sun.

And I'm not even kidding. That was ALL we knew.

A good lawyer has common sense and a sense of situational awareness.

This one had neither.

He refused to believe he was wrong, and we did exactly what he asked of us.

In the end, we gave him just enough rope to hang himself with.

He just had to take responsibility for his actions.

Actually, I had assigned resources to the project at the client's request, so instead of having them pay for those resources as they sat idly by doing nothing, or ME having to pay for them to do nothing, I put them to work doing the only work we were allowed to do on the project.

AS REQUESTED BY THE CLIENT.

So yeah, it might have been a dickish thing to do, but I did my best to NOT do it.

Just to clarify some things, as it appears you're not that up to speed on how custom development contracts work.

This was a custom development job. We are talking about using core libraries, not finished products.

We were about to start with the discovery and business analysis phase of the project, as agreed to by the President and the VP that was championing the development.

We still didn't really know what it was that they needed us to build, but they had me spin up resources to work on the job so that we'd all be in the up-front meetings and be able to hit the ground running.

We didn't understand their business requirements, their budget, their limitations, timeframes, NOTHING. So we were in absolutely NO position to even start discussing what specific libraries were going to be used.

We were on a tight timeline (when aren't we?) and literally the day before we were to fly to the client, the lawyer inserts himself into the process, and raises a huge red flag to the president, and stops everything, demanding to not only proof-read the licenses, but to approve them before we use them. This was before our first BA meeting.

I tried to explain to him that we were in no position to understand what libraries or OSS we were going to use, because we had to move ahead with understanding the business first, but he refused to believe that.

I tried to talk to the President, but he had faith in the lawyer (his son-in-law), and refused to listen to us. The VP understood our situation, but his hands were tied.

I told the lawyer that we'd work with them on ensuring that all of the licenses that were attached to any software we were even thinking about using would be vetted and approved by him, but it'd be on an "as we figure out we need it" basis.

We didn't even know how they were planning on using the software at this point (internal use only, public web site, shrink-wrap, etc), so we didn't know what licenses were going to fit anyway.

He REFUSED to listen to reason, and claimed to understand application development better than we understood the law, and made a flat-out demand for the information.

I very clearly warned him of the unlimited scope of his request, and he said he didn't care.

I'd also spun up resources to start work on the project at the request of the President and VP, and there was no way in hell I was going to let them sit idle as a result of this, so I put them onto the task that was clearly demanded of me.

So yeah, I WAS trying to be a team player. I tried to educate the client about how to reasonably address their concerns, and how it was too early in the process to do so.

I also offered to just provide them with the major licenses out there that were the standards (GPL, Apache, etc), and he said "no, I need specifics".

So yeah, this lawyer was an idiot and an asshole, plain and simple. Condescending to boot. The fact he was working on getting his MBA might also explain a few things.

But I did everything in my power to deal with it in an effective manner in order to get the job done as effectively and efficiently for the client as I could, but he refused to allow it.

And I refused to take a 2 week hit on paying for my subs that would have sat idly by while that crap was worked out.

So yeah. Blow me.

Or their ability to find BS stuff to do in order to validate their existence.

I won't even tell you about the lawyers I've had to battle (in 2 different corporations) because they wanted a complete list of all of the Open Source libraries and associated copyrights, BEFORE we even started the project.

They'd heard all about this "Open Source" thing and how evil it could be, after all, and wanted to protect the company.

They wouldn't green light the project until we provided that list, and yet we didn't even really know what we were building for them, never mind what we were using.

The nice thing, though, was that we picked every POSSIBLE library that we could find and submitted them and their copyrights for their analysis/aproval.

We had 4 developers spend an entire week doing that. At the client's expense.

The end result was that the lawyer eventually backed down on their request, but not until after we outlined all of the expenses incurred as a result of their initial request.

The owner of that company canned the lawyer shortly after that.

But that was still a solid week of wasted time that I'll never get back.