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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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We The People | 355 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Prenda Law's Attorneys Take The Fifth Rather Than Answer Judge Wright's Questions
Authored by: 351-4V on Wednesday, April 03 2013 @ 06:03 PM EDT
Prenda Law ELO = Good riddance.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Lawrence Lessig: We the People ...Republic we must reclaim T
Authored by: argee on Thursday, April 04 2013 @ 03:02 PM EDT
The easy way to fix this is to give voting power to the
corporations.

To make the equivalent of 'one person', we need to find out
how much money an american life is worth.

A good starting point is the amount of insurance paid for
a death in an automobile accident. Let us assume this is
$100,000 per life.

Now, if ABC, Inc has a "market cap" of $1 million, then
ABC, Inc gets 10 votes for the state it is incorporated
in.

I think Delaware might become the most populous state,
voter wise.

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argee

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

The Real Reason The Feds Can't Read Your iMessages
Authored by: JamesK on Thursday, April 04 2013 @ 03:32 PM EDT
Actually, this has been the case with encrypted email for years. Whether you
use PGP or X.509 certificates, the carrier has no knowledge of the key and so
cannot provide unencrypted access. Of course, this doesn't stop agencies, such
as the NSA, with sufficient computer power from attempting to break your
encryption. Also this sort of encryption can be applied to voice over IP calls.
SIP supports using IPSec for secure calls. To make things doubly fun for the
NSA, you can run your encrypted VoIP through an IPSec or other encrypted VPN.


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

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Do the Wright Brothers deserve a patent?
Authored by: hardmath on Thursday, April 04 2013 @ 05:52 PM EDT

Link

As I suspect many Groklaw readers are already aware, according to the authoritative Jane's, it seems they do not.

Gustav Whitehead, a German immigrant to the United States, accomplished longer and higher powered manned flight at least twice in the the years preceding Kitty Hawk, the second of which involved a three-axis controller.

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Recursion is the opprobrium of the mathists.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Rackspace sues “most notorious patent troll in America”
Authored by: ArtimusClyde on Friday, April 05 2013 @ 11:27 AM EDT
Rackspace sues another patent troll IP Nav, after being sued first

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Movie Studios Want Google to Take Down Their Own Takedown Request
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, April 05 2013 @ 12:07 PM EDT
Original Article

This gives me two brilliant money making ideas.

The first is to write software to crawl the web looking for take down notices for movies and videos and generate take down notices for those. After you sell that to the movie studios, you write software to look for take down notices for take down notices, and generate take down notices for those. After you sell that to the movie studios....

The second and even more brilliant idea is to create software that scours the web and automatically generates take down notices. Sell it really cheap, but the click through license agreement has you retain the copyright for all the generated notices. Then you sue all your customers when their take down notices are published on the internet. After all, your customers have deeper pockets than most of the other people posting copyrighted material on the web. Now where can I find those good people from Prenda Law? I'm sure they would be interested in this idea.

Did you like the way I got three references to recent articles/news picks in that last one? And for the humor impaired, this is an attempt at a joke and to exemplify some problems with our current laws. It is not intended in any way to advocate committing fraud on the court or any other illegal activity.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

OASIS Breaks the Traditional Standards Accreditation Barrier
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, April 05 2013 @ 12:13 PM EDT

Woot!

ISO is no longer the only ANSI-accredited document standards authority in the USA. Hotcha!

Clicky

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Now You See It, Now You Don’t:
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, April 05 2013 @ 04:54 PM EDT
MIT Technology Review

Uhuh. Just because you can't see it, has it disappeared? If it's SMS or MMS it will be on the telco's server for as long as they want to keep it, or as long as the spooks tell them to keep it. So these apps by encrypting the content and sending via the internet bypass that problem, but ... If you sent it from your mobile device with NAND storage it will still be there for a while, unless you're one of the freaks who read these columns and are destroying your chips running the levelling function on a cron job. And having it go "poof" after time=t on the public facing server hasn't stopped anyone who saw it from sending a copy to fb. Good luck with suing them for copyright infringement while you're wearing Federal cufflinks. I'm trying not to think of those black rooms at the bulk peering exchanges, since anything nowadays seems to invoke the CFAA...

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Untappable Apple or DEA Disinformation?
Authored by: hardmath on Friday, April 05 2013 @ 06:45 PM EDT

Link

The so-called cryptography expert quoted in the margin of the News Picks says that a "mud puddle" test can prove whether Apple has the keys to unlock your messages stored in the cloud.

Drop your phone in the mud puddle, and if Apple is able to restore your phone information, the expert claims, then it proves that they have said keys.

Someone is very confused here. Let's not put any precious smartphones in jeopardy, but let's ask ourselves if the fact that (say) Google is able to display our emails to us in a browser, provided we log-in, implies that Google has our password.

As most Groklaw readers know, this is not a valid argument. Most passwords (or keys) are not stored by service providers. They store a one-way encrypted ("hashed") version of the password, which suffices to verify what you enter is correct (by re-encrypting/re-hashing) your input.

This was an element of a recent story about a crack-in at a social media company, where the infiltrators were able to get names, addresses, content, and encrypted versions of the passwords, but not the original passwords themselves (which would be needed to impersonate said users).

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Recursion is the opprobrium of the mathists.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

We The People
Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, April 06 2013 @ 03:09 AM EDT
Sorry, this petition is by geeks, of and for geeks. As one of the people I'll ask a dumb question, "What is an API, and why is it's freedom so important?"
As can be seen in the Oracle v Google lawsuit ...
Huh? That was over in California wasn't it? Whichever way it went didn't make my car go faster, or give me cheaper groceries.

Sorry, I can hear the hackles rising from over the other side of the ocean. But the preamble should be written in plain English to explain the subject matter and reasons. This petition is written in jargon for the benefit of a minority sector group of "we the people". Reckless use of jargon and the assumption that everyone else understands what you're talking about have hindered the Linux desktop from conquering the world. I would not be surprised if this petition failed to achieve threshold status, or was rejected for failure to state a case. That would be a pity because I sympathise entirely with its intent, even if as a foreigner I can't subscribe.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Judge deals blow to high-tech workers’ lawsuit
Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, April 06 2013 @ 11:54 AM EDT
Labor » Employees are trying to prove tech giants colluded on wages, ‘poaching.’

A federal judge on Friday struck down an effort to form a class-action lawsuit to go after Apple, Google and five other technology companies for allegedly forming an illegal cartel to tamp down workers’ wages and prevent the loss of their best engineers during a multiyear conspiracy broken up by government regulators.

U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, Calif., issued a ruling Friday concluding that the companies’ alleged collusion may have affected workers in too many different ways to justify lumping the individual claims together. She denied the request to certify workers’ lawsuits as a class action and collectively seek damages on behalf of tens of thousands of employees.

Judge deals blow to high-tech workers’ lawsuit

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

What's Wrong with the US Smartphone Market?
Authored by: malcart on Saturday, April 06 2013 @ 03:18 PM EDT
What's Wrong with the US Smartphone Market?

This is a really interesting article, the part that really shocked me was how much more expensive it is to purchase a smartphone in the US than it is in here in the UK.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Andre Cassagnes dies at 86; Etch A Sketch inventor
Authored by: JamesK on Saturday, April 06 2013 @ 09:14 PM EDT
I had one of those when I was a kid. I recall cleaning off enough of the coating to see the mechanism behind the glass.

Dilbert

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

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Computer Pioneers - Pioneer Computers Part 1
Authored by: JamesK on Sunday, April 07 2013 @ 08:07 AM EDT
"but Grace Hopper is riveting. Her verbal descriptions of mechanical parts
or logic operations are lucid."

Years ago, 60 Minutes did a piece on her. One thing I recall was how she
demonstrated a nanosecond. She'd hand out pieces of wire, about 1 foot long,
and say that's how far light would travel in a nanosecond.

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

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Where The Free Software Movement Went Wrong (And How To Fix It)
Authored by: tiger99 on Sunday, April 07 2013 @ 11:03 AM EDT
I was not aware that it had gone wrong. GPL software is very much alive and well. The majority of developers still prefer it because they can be sure of getting back any improvements or bug fixes that others do to their work, so everyone wins.

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it" is one of the fundamental rules of every branch of engineering. FOSS therefore does not need fixing.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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