vilain 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (132) comment rss

  • On the post: Plastic Surgeon Sues Online Reviewers Who Gave Her Bad Reviews

    vilain ( profile ), 15 Jul, 2010 @ 12:25pm

    Re: Re: libel v malpractice

    Actually, "it's all true" isn't a defense against a claim of libel. So be very careful what you post that's critical. Someone doesn't like it, they can sue regardless. Stupid, I know.

    Then again, the attorney that's fighting this case for the MD sure saw her coming. I wonder if she's a real blonde 'cause she sure is acting like one. I wonder if the attorney told her that discovery for the case would probably be worse than an unsedated colonoscopy and last for much longer. And IMO, the upside of litigating this is very small. If you win, you're the MD that sued their critics on how bad your skills are. There's is no upside to the Streisand Effect.

  • On the post: Quackwatch Sued For Suggesting Medical Lab Quackery

    vilain ( profile ), 01 Jul, 2010 @ 02:38pm

    crappy lawyer == cartoony lawsuit

    Sounds like the attorneys hired by the site practice law by boilerplate. Rather than specifically stating the issues, they threw everything into the suit, thereby making the presiding judge decide what's relevant. If it's a small shop, I can see how this might work well. Here's hoping the judge dismisses the entire suit with prejudice making the Dr. Data clowns pay for this. And their law firm walk away with nothing.

  • On the post: Court Says Border Patrol Can Take Your Laptop For Off-Site Search If They Have Reasonable Suspicion

    vilain ( profile ), 03 Jun, 2010 @ 08:58pm

    Corporate vs. personal laptops

    All this just means leave the personal laptop _and_ phone at home (that's searchable and savable too). Period.

    Use an in-country rental for whatever you need and sanitize it before you return it. I haven't used an iPad, but if it can't store stuff, then use it with remote storage for whatever you'd need a laptop for on a vacation.

    Corporate execs must have sanitized corporate laptops for overseas work. IT would transfer what was "safe" to it prior to the trip. Anything company proprietary could be saved onto corporate servers to be accessed via VPN. If the Gustapo find porn on that laptop, that exec is toast anyway.

  • On the post: New Webinar: What IT People Need To Know About The Law

    vilain ( profile ), 18 May, 2010 @ 05:02pm

    Legalities won't help if the boss is a crook

    I see posts on Slashdot from time to time from IT people asking, rather foolishly, what to do when they're told to do something unethical or out-and-out illegal by their boss. Writing a letter outlining the reasons why "this wouldn't be a good idea" to the boss and the boss' boss, cc'ing the CEO, will most likely get you fired for refusing to play along. Quitting while dragging your feet is another option. Reporting the as-yet-performed illegal activity to Wikileaks, Interpol, the FBI, Software Business Alliance, etc. will get you branded as unemployable.

    How does this relate to topics to be discussed at this forum?

  • On the post: Are Domain Disputes Suffering From Arbitrators Arbitrarily Cutting & Pasting Decisions?

    vilain ( profile ), 06 May, 2010 @ 10:48pm

    Careful, the US will just take over ICANN and the whole Internet

    I can see this happening very easily. All the root servers become US property and taken to the nearest US Embassy. Then Cyberwarfare is easy. Just redirect all China's traffic to LOLcats.

  • On the post: Laptop Spy Scandal Administrator Just "Loved" Violating Students' Fourth Amendment Rights

    vilain ( profile ), 19 Apr, 2010 @ 06:33pm

    Re:

    The problem a former student mentioned is that those students that put tape over the camera or tried reloading the OS with a clean copy of MacOS were threatened with expulsion. And accepting the laptop was manditory, not optional. All students were expected to have them like their school issued textbooks.

    This sort thing is taken to an extreme in Cory Doctorow's LITTLE BROTHER where such laptops are standard everywhere. The hero's solution, a hacked PS3 running an ubersecure Linux. I'll bet Cory's laughing his ass off right now. He should sue the district for copyright infringement. They stole his idea.

  • On the post: Hollywood Seeks To Kill Off 3D Golden Goose With Much Higher Prices

    vilain ( profile ), 26 Mar, 2010 @ 10:56pm

    Raising 2D also?

    At $10.50 a pop here in Silicon Valley, I've very picky about what I'll go see in the theater. Anything less than a good/great review I put on my Netflix list. That averages out to less than 1 movie/month. If the prices go any higher, I'll only see a couple a year and go 95% Netflix.

  • On the post: Troubling Ruling Against Web Hosting Firm: Your Liability Just Went Up

    vilain ( profile ), 22 Mar, 2010 @ 09:13pm

    I've complained to sites selling spammer's crap

    I used to complain to ISPs that hosted spammer's web sites that they were hosting this crap. Most ignored me. Some replied "So what? We (the isp) didn't spam you. And these are legitimate paying customers."

    Maybe now when I email ISPs and apprize them of the risk of hosting spammer's content, they'll listen and take it down. Suing the ISP for hosting the crap is going to far. But, if you shoot 1 politician a month for being a crook, maybe the others will find another line of work or, wonder of wonders, actually be honest politician.

  • On the post: Ubisoft's 'You Must Be Connected To This Server' Annoying DRM Servers Go Down

    vilain ( profile ), 08 Mar, 2010 @ 07:35am

    Re: Damnit

    I didn't buy this game, but if I had and it stopped working because the company "remotely turned it off", I'd be back at the point of purchase (aka my local game store) to complain. If they won't give me another game of equal value or a full credit-card refund, I'd contact the credit card company and request a charge back. I'd tell that to the owner of the store and all my friends. This might possibly result in the owner's credit card processor putting their account on hold, thereby limiting their ability to take credit cards. If I bought it from an on-line store, same thing. If enough people return the game as defective (it's got DRM that doesn't work), maybe Ubisoft might take notice. The game store owners surely will.

  • On the post: School Spying Scandal Gets Even More Bizarre: Student In Question Was Disciplined For Eating Candy

    vilain ( profile ), 22 Feb, 2010 @ 06:54pm

    Re: Re: Re: Constitutionality?????

    And yet, when a reporter did just this to the trash of a local judge, DA, and police chief and published a long article documenting the items found, there was such a hew and cry. Both the DA and police chief wanted the reporter thrown in jail. The judge knew better and just asked for her personal property back.

    Unless you can cite significant case law to support your opinion, it remains just that--your unfounded and uninformed opinion.

    For which I say "Thank you for sharing"

  • On the post: School Spying Scandal Gets Even More Bizarre: Student In Question Was Disciplined For Eating Candy

    vilain ( profile ), 22 Feb, 2010 @ 06:46pm

    Re: Constitutionality?????

    A quote from The Dude seems apt here. It goes something like, 'yeah, well, like, that's just your opinion, man'.

  • On the post: Pharma Patent Nuclear War In Action

    vilain ( profile ), 03 Feb, 2010 @ 09:03pm

    What about all those awsome new products from J&J

    Like Pledge wipes. Or the Nav'i Bandaids coming soon. Highly imaginative and innovative company.

  • On the post: Chicago Prosecutor's Office Leaks Old, Unsubstantiated, Discredited Internal Memo To Smear Innocence Project Founder

    vilain ( profile ), 08 Jan, 2010 @ 04:32pm

    Re: IStates Attorney's Offices

    I'd love to have everyone on the IL AG's entire staff past and present submit to a rigorous financial audit crawling so far up their GI tracts that you can see daylight. It's only fair. If they're going to "get the whole picture out there", it should go both ways. A little corruption, graft, and duplicity is good for the soul.

  • On the post: Can You Copyright An SQL Query?

    vilain ( profile ), 07 Dec, 2009 @ 06:56pm

    Re: work for hire?

    Yep. I'd start by getting a lawyer to review the contract the guy signed who created the code. Most contracts I've signed (employment or contractor) have verbage saying that any code or "product" I produce while working for the contractee is their property. It's most likely that header is an utter fiction. If the guy litigates, take his house, car, salt his fields and rape his cattle.

  • On the post: Bill Introduced To Limit Early Termination Fees

    vilain ( profile ), 03 Dec, 2009 @ 08:55pm

    Same crap on Verizon

    I switched to Verizon when Cingular took over AT&T Wireless. I didn't get a top-line phone and got minimal service. I've also resisted getting the latest phone ever 2 years. They keep nagging me to sign up for another contract but I'm now on month to month and have no termination fee (written before they started charging you for leaving regardless). I won't get an iPhone or a Droid or any other smart phone because of the termination fee. Is it unreasonable to want to stay out of servitude to these guys?

    In their eyes, no. Tough nuts.

  • On the post: Tiburon Approves Recording Every Car That Enters/Leaves… Despite More Evidence Of Traffic Camera Abuse In UK

    vilain ( profile ), 23 Nov, 2009 @ 05:56pm

    This could be used in litegation

    Just as the city can use this info, so can defendants. All it will take is a large settlement of a "driving while black" racial profiling class action and those cameras will be history.

  • On the post: Sanford Wallace Loses Again; Owes Facebook $711 Million

    vilain ( profile ), 30 Oct, 2009 @ 11:20am

    A solution has already been published

    In a recent novel (DAEMON by Daniel Suarez) a set of automata running on "the Internet" start after the death of their creator, owner of a gaming company (and master gamer, natch). One of the "batch jobs" that's run is "ALL SPAMMERS MUST DIE", where people in the "game" are sent parts to assemble untraceable weapons that are used to assassinate some 4000 people world-wide. After that, the 'Net is a much nicer, quieter place.

    Rather contrived and a sysadmin's wet dream, but what the what. It was fiction. And it's probably not going to win any awards. But it might become a TV mini-series. If an example is made of Mr. Wallace by extraditing him to Russia or incarcerating him for 40 years and we go after the advertisers who use spam maybe people will get the idea.

  • On the post: Zombie Spam Blacklists Return From The Dead To Make A Point

    vilain ( profile ), 20 Oct, 2009 @ 01:24am

    I've seen both sides of this

    I contribute daily to SPAMCOP, a user-contributed blocklist. Anyone can add emails they consider spam to the block list which is parsed with Baysian and IP filters. The resulting list is used to filter email processed by SPAMCOP and some ISPs use it as a block list as well. Oftentimes, some spammer gets all cartoony in the support forums threatening to sue for being put on the blocklist. 48 hours later, if no more spam comes from that ISP, it drops off. But if there's a spammer on the ISP, more spam will be reported and the wait is longer.

    The other side of this is I administer a members-only listserv which sometimes gets flagged as spam by various ISPs. Everyone on this list has to personally send me an email and I verify them to be a dues-paying member of a professional organization. Roadrunner is the latest SPAM Nazi to blacklist the ISP serving the list and their support people have no clue why. It left the members using that ISP no access to the list until they moved to Gmail or just left. For many of the older members, Gmail is to much for them to fathom (really, I'm not kidding).

    I'm all for spam block lists, but I warn members to avoid ISPs that act unilaterally by denying stuff rather than just categorizing emails and putting them in a SPAM folder. Comcast and Hotmail also do weird things but they seem to be transient mistakes rather than anything permanent. And I still report spam to SPAMCOP.

  • On the post: UK Royal Mail Uses Copyright Claim To Shut Down Postal Code Info Online

    vilain ( profile ), 06 Oct, 2009 @ 10:44pm

    What if someone hosts the data in Nepal or Ukraine?

    What's to stop someone from sucking the data to a server out of the Royal Mail's jurisdiction? Could they still file suit? Would the data still be copyrighted in another country where the copyright laws are different?

  • On the post: Lily Allen Distributing Tons Of Copyrighted Music; Blows Way Past Three Strikes

    vilain ( profile ), 23 Sep, 2009 @ 04:43pm

    Now all we need is law enforcement

    Some publicity seeking DA and police chief execute an arrest warrant to "take down a notorious file sharing pirate". Lilly spends a week or so in jail while she's trying to make bail after the judge levy's a $10M bond to ensure this pirate doesn't skip to Europe where file sharing is OK. And a great time is had by all.

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