Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Two week downtime (Score 1) 349

Penalties are provided for knowing material misrepresentations in either a notice or a counter notice.

if you file a counter claim to get things put back up claiming misidentification or mistake and you are found to be infringing anyway, you could be on the hook for the copyright holder's attorney's fees. If the counter-claim requires a reason, I would recommend something other than one of these two.

As I understand the actual text of the statute, the reason in the counter-claim must be "mistake or misidentification". The notice of claimed infringement includes an assertion that the use "is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law." If you have a license from the copyright owner (such as the GPL), then the use is "authorized by the copyright owner", and if your use is covered under some statutory defense such as fair use, then it is "authorized by [...] the law". In either case, the copyright owner made a "mistake" by sending a notice where there is no infringement. I'm not a lawyer, but it would appear to me that an alleged infringer can demonstrate enough of a "good faith belief" to avoid a "knowing material misrepresentation" by summarizing the legal theory of a noninfringement defense in the counter-notice.

Comment Re: Probe requests should be manual (Score 1) 112

The article is about eavesdropping on probe requests that a device sends. In my proposal, a device would first listen for signals from GPS satellites to narrow the list of hidden SSIDs before determining which probe requests to send. Could you explain how using a GPS receiver to narrow down these probe requests would be "potentially even more intrusive"?

Comment Re:Free Wifi (Score 2) 112

If by "wifi list" you mean the list of known SSIDs on a device, that can be solved by using your device's user switching and making some SSIDs private to one user. Unfortunately, Android doesn't seem to implement multi-user for devices with screens smaller than 7 inches, and I don't know whether known SSIDs are user-specific or system-wide.

If by "wifi list" you mean the topic of the article (a list collected by someone listening for probe requests for hidden SSIDs), an SSID will appear only if 1. it has a hidden SSID, and 2. your device sends probe requests automatically instead of manually, and 3. your device doesn't use cellular or GPS location to determine which SSIDs' probe requests to send.

Comment Probe requests should be manual (Score 1) 112

For the sake of the user's privacy, operating systems need to default to manually sending probe requests. If that isn't convenient enough, and the device has cellular or GPS sensors, then when the user turns on Wi-Fi, the device could briefly turn on cellular and GPS radios and trilaterate nearby towers and satellites in order to determine which SSID's probe request to send.

Comment Droid does what iDon't: SSID spotting (Score 3, Interesting) 112

For fun, grab an Android app called WifiCollector.

Or MozStumbler, from the makers of Firefox.

But if you're looking for something similar on iOS, you won't find anything on the App Store because there's no public API to log seen SSIDs on iOS. Instead of making a public API, Apple instead just decided to blacklist the entire category of applications in March 2010.

Comment Cost of localization and localisation (Score 1) 148

It's getting to the point that in some circumstances, avoiding selling anything to USA customers saves tonnes of money and time with expensive lawyers... at the cost of 330 Million potential customers... but hey... there's over a 1 billion other internet users out there and growing.

Among sufficiently affluent English-speaking countries, the United States has a supermajority of potential customers. Into how many languages will you need to translate your product or service to reach the next 330 million potential customers?

Comment Fair use and other noninfringing uses (Score 1) 148

It's one thing to fight for what is legitimately your copyrighted content. But quite another when you're hosting other people's copyrighted material, to whom your customer may not have a distribution agreement with.

It's harder in cases where your customer's work contains a portion of someone else's work, and your customer and the copyright owner disagree on whether this use is a fair use.

Slashdot Top Deals

Work without a vision is slavery, Vision without work is a pipe dream, But vision with work is the hope of the world.

Working...