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The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

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War on the Wires - Is Spamhaus Spamming? Cloudflare Fibbing? | 661 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Entire library journal editorial board resigns,
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, March 28 2013 @ 12:46 PM EDT
It is doubleplusgood to see there still are people with enough integrity to put
their soft cushions on the line for the sake of their souls.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

U.S. Defense Agency Feeds Python
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, March 28 2013 @ 02:49 PM EDT

U.S. Defense Agency Feeds Python

Essentially what they are doing is extending the SciPy and NumPy libraries. These libraries are very widely used in scientific computing. They are essentially wrappers around existing open source Fortran and C libraries that have been used in scientific computing for a long time. The heavy work is done by these libraries, while Python code is used for I/O and presentation (for which there are also some very good graphing libraries).

There are competing proprietary languages such as Matlab, but the problem with them are two fold. First, they are very expensive. Second, while they are oriented directly towards the application, they do a poor job of the more general programming operations. There can be a lot of work involved in getting the data in and the answer out of a program, and often the actual numerical analysis is a relatively small part of the program (particularly if you are using these libraries). This means you are usually better off adding numerical libraries to a more general purpose programming language than you are trying to add general features to a specialised language.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

"Taking a stand on open source and patents"
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, March 28 2013 @ 03:40 PM EDT
I think Google has just thrown the gauntlet down at M$, and
any other similar patent troll. And, yes I do think M$ falls
into the troll category. M$ has yet to actually produce
anything original of any significance as far as I am
concerned.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

The Internet is not a surveillance state
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, March 28 2013 @ 10:01 PM EDT
In reply to this Newspick March 17 is a rebuttal from

telekommunisten.net.
The author could have avoided embarrassement by reading Plato or Hobbes.
Perhaps the logo at right "miscommunication" says it all ...

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Microsoft publishes list of its entire patent portfolio
Authored by: Gringo_ on Thursday, March 28 2013 @ 10:28 PM EDT

Totally self-serving propaganda...

Microsoft is also asking companies to pledge not to seek injunctions on standard-essential patents, an issue at the crux of its ongoing legal dispute with Google’s Motorola division.

When M$FT attacks another Android OEM, they don't want it to be able to fight back with SEPs

There is more to their disclosure than that though. They are trying to intimidate their competitors by showing how many patents they have. They are really saying "Don't even think about fighting back when we come calling on you. We have 40,000 patents to sue you with."

Link

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

War on the Wires - Is Spamhaus Spamming? Cloudflare Fibbing?
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, March 29 2013 @ 03:13 AM EDT
Why are the only people willing to make any claims about the validity or scope of the attack directly involved: Spamhaus reps, the group's leader, and most dubiously, CloudFlare, the anti-DDoS firm Spamhaus enlisted to ward off the attack.

And it's that last party that's responsible for the sky-falling internet weather report, the party that stands to profit directly from you being worried that the internet as we know it is under siege.

Sam Biddle, Gizmodo (Giz gots graphs)
h/t Rob Beschizza, Boing Boing

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Sprint, Softbank to shun Chinese
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, March 29 2013 @ 05:44 PM EDT
NY Times translates: Sprint sells soul to NSA, or
Joe McCarthy's ghost stalks FCC

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Forbes article on CFAA gets conversion wrong
Authored by: Tolerance on Saturday, March 30 2013 @ 01:18 AM EDT
In the news pick "The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act Is a Failed Experiment", Eric Goldman writing in Forbes says:
If someone permanently takes someone else’s chattel, we call this “theft” or “conversion,” and we punish it both civilly and criminally.

Not so. As I recall, theft and conversion both involve removal of a chattel, and both can be crimes. But theft always requires the intention to permanently deprive the owner of his chattel; conversion does not. It's an important distinction for computer crime since a copied file does not deprive the owner of the original.
That's why teenagers who 'steal' a car to go joy-riding aren't charged with theft if they simply park it afterwards.
If they set fire to it or otherwise destroy it though, that can bring theft into the picture.

---
Grumpy old man

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Tweet, tweet, tweet ...
Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, March 30 2013 @ 04:11 PM EDT
Am I the only person here who finds the posting of Tweets as Newspicks somewhat vacuous and annoying? 'Specially when the tweet is substantially just a link to the real story? For people who do not use Twitter, and there must be more of us about, expanding a Tweet to a full thread is nonintuitive and takes two clicks. Then to find in the case of "I'm aware of security hole but..." that there is no substantive story other than the tweeter is so fearful of CFAA that the tweet refers to some hypothetical non-specific security hole who knows where. The twitter stream reveals some possible context in

2 Arrested For Refusing To Answer Immigration Questions Before Domestic Flight huffpo

Alfred Anaya Put Secret Compartments in Cars. So the DEA Put Him in Prison wired.com

Write Gambling Software, Go to Prison wired.com

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

uh oh... the natives are getting restless
Authored by: dacii on Saturday, March 30 2013 @ 04:17 PM EDT
Link to slashdot here: Here Warning NSFW. Strong language. Swartz case request for detailed information.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Report: US Patent And Trademark Office Denies Apple’s iPad Mini Trademark Application, Deemed “M
Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, March 30 2013 @ 07:06 PM EDT
<a
href="http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/30/us-patent-and-trademark-office-denie
s-apples-ipad-mini-trademark-application-deemed-merely-descriptive/">Rep
ort: US Patent And Trademark Office Denies Apple’s iPad Mini Trademark
Application, Deemed “M</a>

In general this denial struck me as sensible... but this line from the denial
stuck out in particular as plain wrong

[blockquote]The term “IPAD” is descriptive when applied to applicant’s goods
because the prefix “I” denotes
“internet.” According to the attached evidence, the letter “i” or “I” used as a
prefix and would be
understood by the purchasing public to refer to the Internet when used in
relation to Internet-related
products or services. Applicant’s goods are identified as “capable of providing
access to the Internet”.[/blockquote]

I'm curious, did anyone know that the "I" in apple products ever
referred to being able to access the internet? Does it even? I thought it was
just a naming gimmick personally, and was left unimpressed at the evidence as
well.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Matthew Garrett presentation video
Authored by: Nick_UK on Sunday, March 31 2013 @ 07:57 AM EDT
I have just watched this, and unfortunately I thought he was a good guy, but he
doesn't really get it.

He talks about the 4 freedoms etc. but ultimately concedes that MS have the
control of secure boot/restricted boot and are needed (in a financial/technical
type of way as no one else can afford or be bothered to sign keys).

The only way to go (if this IS the future of computing) is to campaign for an
independent signing authority that even MS have to go through - and even to
force OEM's to make it easy to disable secure boot for 'joe bloggs'.

Nick

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Developer Freedom At Stake As Oracle Clings To Java API Copyrights In Google Fight
Authored by: JamesK on Sunday, March 31 2013 @ 03:55 PM EDT
One thing comes to mind in this. Many years ago, when IBM PC clones were being
created, there was the issue of the BIOS. The BIOS was copyrighted and couldn't
legally be copied. The legal way around this was a "clean room"
approach, where one group would analyze the behavior of the BIOS and write a
spec about it. Then, another group, working only from the spec, would write a
new, functionally equivalent BIOS. Wouldn't similar apply here, in that the
published Java interfaces are used to design something equivalent software?

---
The following program contains immature subject matter.
Viewer discretion is advised.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Being Google
Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, March 31 2013 @ 04:20 PM EDT
Those of you who don’t use Google+ because you know for sure that it’s an echoing wasteland can skip this section. Personally, I spend quite a bit of time there; here’s why:
1. There are 29,000 people following me.
...
The short version: It’s not as efficient for spreading news as Twitter; but it’s way better for having a conversation.
...
Possibly you don’t agree with all the design decisions; I don’t. Googleversary
Ah, so it's about counting disciples. On the echoing wasteland score, are there any objective measures of g+ against, say Facebook? As for spreading news and having conversations, both rattled along quite merrily over twenty years ago, plain ascii text, on usenet news, and without the design decision that requires an insane amount of javascript to keep g+ afloat.
nobody wants to own the Identity subsystem.
You picked up the hot potato there Tim.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

US to release Aaron Swartz papers
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, April 01 2013 @ 05:15 PM EDT

Kinda, maybe, possibly, partially...

The problem is they expect you to trust them. They aren't going to hide anything important, they promise.

But who can trust them?

Boston Globe

There's the rub.

And we can be certain they are hiding something. As PJ commented, this so looks like when The SCOG ddosed themselves.

Wayne
http://madhatter.ca

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

US to release Aaron Swartz papers
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, April 01 2013 @ 05:18 PM EDT
Original news pick link was here

Out of curiosity, for those who know about these things (Webster?), is it possible for the defense to appeal a dismissal in a criminal case, in order to continue discovery etc.?

The goal of pursuing further a posthumous defense (of Aaron) would be to identify whether any of the actions of the prosecutors or of MIT staff, might rise to the level of criminal violations themselves.

At the very least, it might establish precedent, or even send a warning, that regardless of a defendant's suicide, any improper behavior in bringing a prosecution will see the light of day. It is necessary to deter abusive prosecution, which can result in Machiavellian harm if left unchecked.

NB - the order says the materials under discussion may be kept by the either side, until appeals are complete, which would be why appealing the dismissal, even as a formality, might make sense.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

US to release Aaron Swartz papers
Authored by: 351-4V on Monday, April 01 2013 @ 06:04 PM EDT
Why pray tell would the D.A.s office be afraid of retaliation? According to them, they have done nothing wrong at all.

Looks to me like someone just admitted that they know they went way overboard on this one and are just denying it to avoid the consequences they so deserve.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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