Easily digestible tech news... http://www.techdirt.com/ en-us http://www.techdirt.com/images/td-88x31.gifhttp://www.techdirt.com/ Fri, 21 Sep 2007 19:59:00 PDT Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070921/180540.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070921/180540.shtml leak of MediaDefender's emails, the folks behind The Pirate Bay now believe they have enough evidence to sue many major entertainment firms for "infrastructural sabotage, denial of service attacks, hacking and spamming." Basically, there's evidence in the emails that a bunch of firms, including Universal, EMI, Sony, Paramount and others were using MediaDefender to try to mess with The Pirate Bay's system. Whether or not the lawsuit actually goes anywhere may depend on a lot of factors (including Swedish laws, which I am totally unfamiliar with). There may be some questions about how the emails in question were obtained. And, of course, the entertainment companies will likely counter that they were just trying to protect their own materials -- which could find a sympathetic ear in a courtroom. Either way it would be quite a lawsuit.

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]]> could-get-interesting http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20070921/180540 Fri, 27 Jul 2007 11:43:25 PDT Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070727/112038.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070727/112038.shtml astronauts have been drinking alcohol before flying and possibly even being drunk during launch. There's not really much of a technology angle to that, but that news was quickly followed up by a story of sabotage on a space station computer. The details aren't entirely clear, but someone at a subcontractor deliberately cut internal wires in a computer that was supposed to be sent up to the space station on the space shuttles' next mission. Apparently it wouldn't have been life-threatening -- but it would have been a nuisance. It must not be very fun to be in PR at NASA these days, but it really does make you wonder what's going on there. It didn't take the agency very long to go from a position of respect to a series of punchlines on late night talk shows.

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]]> I-mean,-seriously... http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20070727/112038