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Comment Off site backup! (Score 4, Informative) 393

Professionals keep (at least) one off-site backup. You could rent a private locker in a bank or some other organization or make an online backup deal. I do use (two) USB disks for backups. They are pretty portable, fairly robust, plug in nearly every computer, have decent speed and good capacity.

Comment Re:Licensing and Accredidation (Score 1) 517

You can license the developers, but when management pressures them to cut corners you still have shoddy software. It is a much better idea to make your suppliers responsible for delivering a quality product and put liability on them when they provide a shoddy one. The companies themselves will start thinking about testing, quality assurance and such; I am sure that looking at the education of the developers will be part of the list of measures considered.

Comment The word: Purchase (Score 4, Insightful) 517

Most EUropean countries have clauses in their laws that instruct the judge to take the price of the good into account when considering what would be a reasonable quality for a product. A corollary of that is when you give something away for free, the expected quality level is something like "not known harmful".
When you buy software, for example a Linux distribution, you may expect that the distributor has tested the packages and that the software mostly works. Because you pay more for MacOS, you may just expect MacOS to work better.

Off course there has to come jurisprudence on all this, but I don't think that finding just one bug will entitle you to your money back. However, when the software won't work at all for you, the supplier can not hide behind EULAs and could be forced to compensate your damages... It will be a case-by-case balancing of responsibilities.

Comment Re:Only matter of time? (Score 1) 347

You are right that they can start a new investigation, into the new servers (abroad) and they'll have to prove that these same guys are still involved... In that sense dropping the charges was a good strategic move as it prevents a negative judgement on the issues.

OTOH, prosecution will have to think about how to obtain evidence that the Pirate Bay tracker really is involved, in an environment where DHTs are used. It will take several man-years of investigation (again!) to make a new case.

Comment Re:Only matter of time? (Score 4, Informative) 347

So, it is only matter of time they are back later with stronger evidences?

At this stage of the process the prosecutor has to present the evidence he has gathered to the judge; the defence gets time to present rebuttal evidence. When all evidence is presented, it is time for legal interpretation (pleading). It is planned that the judges have all the information they need in three weeks, so that only gives prosecution a few days to bring up new evidence.

And because it is a criminal trial, prosecution can not come back with another case based on the same facts... so dropping the charges now has permanent impact.

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