Year: 2002
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Have You Seen This Man?
Washington, DC police today intensified their search for missing news.com reporter and columnist Declan McCullagh, as evidence of his disappearance mounted. Police spokesman Harvey Hoax explained, “We believed initially that Declan was submitting his columns from an unknown location, but further examination of the columns revealed that they must have been written by someone else.”…
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Response to Declan's DMCA Piece
Declan McCullagh misses the boat at least twice in his August 19th column concerning the potential impact on computer science research of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act [“Debunking DMCA myths,” c|net News.Com, http://news.com.com/2010-12-950229.html]. First, the DMCA has two arms: one that prohibits devices that circumvent copy protection, and one that prohibits acts of circumvention. The…
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Keystone SpamKops (cont. 3)
Several people have asked me to expand upon a semi-cryptic comment I made in a previous post, saying that SpamCop’s system allows denial-of-service attacks. What I mean is that it appears that a malicious person could easily put you, or me, or anybody else on SpamCop’s block-list. There are at least three ways somebody could…
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Lawyers, Tiggers and Bears, Oh My!
That’s the title of a hilarious article in L.A. Magazine about the ongoing legal battle over the rights to Winnie-the-Pooh. It’s full of telling details about the state of “intellectual property” law today, and about the mindset of the people involved. My favorite example is a statement by Disney’s lawyer: “The legacy of Winnie-the-Pooh and…
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Keystone SpamKops (cont. 2)
Thomas Roessler is the person who sent the innocent email message that the Keystone SpamKops incorrectly characterized as spam, leading to my summary ejection from the net. He did nothing wrong, and once he heard about the problem he did his best to rectify it – but the SpamKops apparently ignored his messages as they…
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Washington Post: Break-Ins to Military Computers
Interesting article today in the Washington Post about some freelance consultants who apparently rummaged through a bunch of Department of Defense computers without authorization. What they found was pretty appalling. But what they did seems pretty appalling too – although the article takes pains not to mention this. Here is the beginning of the article:…
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Keystone SpamKops (cont.)
A reader, Florian Weimer, points out that there has already been at least one apparently successful lawsuit against spam blacklisters.
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Keystone SpamKops
Earlier this week, my ISP shut off this site, because the site had appeared on a list of “spammers” published by an outfit called SpamCop. Apparently, this happened because one person, whose identity I was not allowed to learn, had sent SpamCop an accusation saying that he had received an unwanted email message, which I…
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We're Back
Well, we’re back on the air after a three-day interruption of service. The interruption was due to bogosity at SpamCop, which I’ll explain more fully in the next post.
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Fuzzy Language, Fuzzy Thinking
One of the things I’ve learned in working with lawyers is that the language you use to describe something can powerfully shape your listeners’ ideas about it. Unless you’re very careful, you can fool yourself in the same way. Many have remarked upon the rhetorical trick of using the word “piracy,” which denotes a type…