Category Archives: Pedantry

More fun with the DMCA

It falls on me, as part of my job, to field DMCA complaints from time to time on behalf of customers that may or may not have been using their connections to download and share pirated software, videos, and such. While I totally understand that intellectual property is Serious Business, but when you’re hiring a firm to protect your rights to Young Tight Latinas 12, wouldn’t they look more credible if they weren’t based in a town named Cream Ridge?

Infringement Source: eDonkey
Infringement Timestamp: 2009-06-09 03:50:00 PST
Infringers IP Address: XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX
Infringers Port: 33241
Infringement Title: Young Tight Latinas 12
Infringement Filename: Young.Tight.Latinas.12.CD2.[XXX].[Latinas].[Sexoypelis.COM].avi
Infringement Hash: 3E554F0E5EB855AD9C6FF1A344220A77

You were informed in the notice that your infringing activity violated the U.S.
Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. 106, and that, as a result of the infringement, you may be
held liable for monetary damages, attorney's fees and court costs incurred as a result
of any action that is commenced against you. You also were offered the opportunity
to settle the matter but, as of the original transmission date of this correspondence,
you have failed to do so.

Therefore, this correspondence shall serve as our second and final notice to you in
regards to your infringement of the copyright referenced above, and shall incorporate
all the information contained in our original notice to you.

You have ten (10) calendar days from the date of this correspondence to access the
settlement offer listed below and settle online. If you fail to respond or settle within
the prescribed time period, we will refer this matter to our attorneys for legal action.
At that point the original settlement will no longer be an option and the amount will
increase as a result of us having to involve our attorneys.

Nothing contained or omitted from this correspondence is, or shall be deemed to be
either a full statement of the facts or applicable law, an admission of any fact, or
waiver or limitation of any of the RLD DISTRIBUTION LLC's rights or remedies, all of
which are specifically retained and reserved.

The information in this notice is accurate. We have a good faith belief that use of the
material in the manner complained of herein is not authorized by the copyright owner,
its agent, or by operation of law. We swear under penalty of perjury, that we are
authorized to act on behalf of RLD DISTRIBUTION LLC.

To access your settlement offer please copy and paste the address below into a
browser and follow the instructions:

https://www.videoprotectionalliance.com/?n_id=AB-XXXXXX
Password: XXXXXX

Regards,

Bonnie Gadsby
Copyright Enforcement Agent

Video Protection Alliance Services, LLC
PO Box 322
Cream Ridge, NJ 08514-0322
United States
+1-866-251-2631

Then again, maybe folks in New Jersey just have a healthier sense of humor than I do.

A simple admonition

Dear, phishermen trying to fleece the webmail passwords off of a credulous population, do not send your crap to addresses starting with “abuse” or “support” or “helpdesk,” or anything else that would clearly indicate that you are sending to people who both know better than to fall for your oh-so-clever scam and are probably in a position to prevent others using their mail server to actually reply to you with their passwords. This is stupid. You should feel stupid for having done it.

From somers@pei.sympatico.ca  Sat Aug 29 04:13:33 2009
Return-Path: 
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Date: Sat, 29 Aug 2009 8:13:29 -0300
From: "sonic.net" 
Reply-To: upgradteam6@aol.com
To: user@sonic.net
Subject: Warning Notice!!!
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-Priority: 3 (Normal)
Sensitivity: Normal
X-Originating-Ip: from 99.253.132.92 by webmail.bellaliant.net; Sat, 29
 Aug 2009 7:13:29 -0400
X-Sonic-SB-Ip-RBLS: IP RBLs .
X-Sontec-Pragma: force-group tech
A DGTFX virus has been detected in your folders
Your email account has to be upgraded to our new
Secured DGTFX anti-virus 2009 version to prevent
damages to our webmail log and your important
files.

Click your reply tab, Fill the columns below and
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PASSWORD:
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webmail.sonic.net - Webmail Technical Team


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Assholes.

Evil Government Bureaucrat

Do or die

With all the talk about “health care reform” going on these days, I figured I would eventually weigh in. Nobody is seriously proposing the adoption of a british-style health care system where the federal government owns the hospitals and employs the staff there. This isn’t health care reform, it is health insurance reform. If you are currently happy with your health care, that probably means you are either healthy or like your doctor. Nobody’s assuming control of your doctor.

My online tovarisch kcmeesha described the current push for health insurance reform as “hasty.” Hasty as in we’ve been arguing about the particulars since the early 1990’s when Clinton tried to get something done? Hasty like maybe we should let this situation simmer for another twenty years or so, when Medicare overruns are so ghastly that a trillion-dollar pricetag will look cheap? Politicians are not instrisically brave creatures. They act when pressured. They expose themselves to risk only when doing otherwise is more risky. Somebody has to apply pressure to them to get any real progress. Telling a congress-critter he has to act “or else” means nothing without a deadline. See how far the religious right has gotten with telling the Republicans to protect unborn babies; the pro-lifers enforce no deadline and get no action.

16-23% of private insurance premiums get eaten up by corporate bureaucracy, executive compensation, lobbying, and corporate profit (depending on the company in question). 97% of medicare’s revenue goes to patient care. If the government is inherently wasteful (generally this is true), then private insurance is six to thirteen times as wasteful. The health care reform act should consist of revising the existing medicare act to remove the phrase “over 65.” It would be more efficient and save billions of dollars. But that isn’t going to happen because, as I mentioned, congressmen are cowards.

Some of us would rather pay some honest taxes than fritter away a huge portion of our insurance premiums to a bunch of faceless vampires that primarily make their profit margins by denying care to sick customers.

HR3200, which nobody ever seems to honestly reference.

More Barriers to Entry

I’ve heard a lot about these new-fangled Facebooks and My Spaces and Twitters and such. They’re basically variations on the old-timey bulletin board systems I used to frequent before the world wide web hit. That 2400 baud Hayes modem was big pimpin’. But I digress. I know a lot of people that spend a fair amount of time an energy on Facebook. The CEO of the company I work for has a facebook page. So does my wife. And my sister. But not me.

Why? Well mostly because of how I was first introduced to it. Somebody comes across something interesting, publishes his thoughts about it and maybe a picture onto his page, and sends me a link. Or tweets about it. Or posts to a web forum. Doesn’t matter. I know the person, and am pretty numb regarding nonsense like duckrolls and rickrolls, so I follow it. When it lands on Facebook, the link provided invariably takes me to the following:

Thank you, come again!

No, thank you. I won’t be signing in or signing up to view what amounts to a random blog post. My opinion of the poster takes a hit every time I run across this error, particularly when the link was put somewhere open to the public. This is somehow even more obnoxious than CAPTCHA systems, as those are most frequently employed to deter automated spam.

The Sound of Drums

elections have consequences

It’s everywhere. Listen. Listen. Listen. Here come the drums. Here come the drums.

As you may have heard, Iran had their presidential election last Friday. This would come as a surprise to most people who base their knowledge of Iran on the news coverage they receive in the United States, because President Ahmedinejad is frequently referred to as a dictator in the press. We also get the impression that the president of Iran would be in a position to authorize military attacks against other countries. We also get the impression that Iran has been exceptionally belligerent since the 1979 islamic revolution.

None of those impressions are particularly true, but that hardly matters. When the official results were announced, the leading opposition candidate Mousavi cried foul. Credulous bloggers and tweeters around the world stood at attention and immediate cries of election fraud were echoing through the Internet. Ahmedinejad couldn’t have won! 75% of Iranians are under 27 years old! The youth hunger for reform! Mousavi is the great hope for democracy in Iran! Where is my vote! Holy shit, people got shot at the riots!

I’m a knee-jerk skeptic at heart, so I took all of this with a grain of salt and a bit of caution. When storefronts are being vandalized in the midst of a massive political protest, there’s going to be teargas. There are going to be policemen in scary riot armor. People are going to get beaten. This happens in any country over any issue. In most parts of the world, when protests of this scale and character take place, somebody gets shot. Unfortunate, but true.

The main problem I see with the outside world’s reaction to Iran’s election results, whether on blogs or Twitter or CNN or my local newspaper, is that we’re getting the same echo chamber effect I’ve seen before. This is the kind of coverage we got about Panama before we invaded to snatch up Noriega. This is the kind of coverage we got about Iraq before each time we invaded there. This is the kind of coverage we got about Serbia before we started bombing Belgrade and putting soldiers into Kosovo.

Step away from your keyboard for a second. Take a deep breath. Count to ten slowly. Exhale. Think for a second about the tone you’re adding to the public conversation of this matter. Are you being constructive? What are the foreseeable consequences of what you’re contributing to? Are you speaking to the facts, or echoing and amplifying rumor and propaganda?

“Where is my vote?” is a question asked by many in Tehran this week. It was asked by many in Ohio in 2004 and Florida in 2000 and Texas in 1960. In modern democracies we vote anonymously to avoid undue pressure, but anonymity removes accountability and requires some element of trust. Let them work it out.

related:

Back in 1989

Tianenmen Square, June 4 1989

In late 1989, democracy and market capitalism were finally winning the cold war. Solidarity was heading towards political victory against the incumbent Communist party in Poland. Germany was on the road to reunification. Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution was brewing. Hungary was adopting a multi-party electoral system. Bulgaria would follow soon after. The people of Eastern Europe were pulling the plug on International Communism’s life support.

But on June 3rd, twenty years ago today, the government of the People’s Republic of China wasn’t having any of that. Thousands of students and intellectuals seeking political and economic reforms had gathered in Tiananmen Square in April to honor the death of Hu Yaobang, a political reformer. After two weeks of martial law, and protesters blocking soldiers from entering the square, the army got serious and things went south in a hurry. Armored personnel carriers and troopers with fixed bayonets closed in. Shots were fired by the soldiers, firebombs thrown by protesters, and over the next two days an unknown number of people would die.

China’s still a communist dictatorship. Political freedom remains next-to-nonexistant. A great many economic reforms have come through, allowing many to benefit and suffer from the freedom and predations of a limited market economy. A search of images.google.cn for “tiananmen square massacre” still looks just like a search for “tiananmen square,” but at least they’ll bow to explicit searches for “tiananmen square tank.” Maybe there’s some political progress after all.

SRWare Iron

About Iron

There was a time when I used to post about Firefox in a kind, generous fashion. Then we had a falling out, but the alternatives just weren’t cutting it for me. I’d keep straying off to another browser for a while, lose interest, and end up back with the the most popular Google-funded communist web browser on the market. Google released Chrome. I’m not a big fan of Google as a company, but I gave it a spin. It was nice, but I don’t like the creepy multiple-year-duration cookies they dish out normally: I sure as heck wasn’t going to do my daily web browsing on something coded by those guys.

But it was pretty neato, so back in September when I found out about SRWare’s Iron browser, a stripped-down version of Chrome that doesn’t phone home, I went out and got it. Hadn’t written anything about it because I was waiting for that new-browser shine to wear off. It’s been a few months and a couple of updates, and I’m ready to render a verdict:

  • Iron has Chrome’s tab behavior, which is excellent. You can tear a tab off to form a separate window, consolidate disparate windows into one unit, switch between tabs far more smoothly than in Firefox, Opera, or IE.
  • Iron has Chrome’s light and responsive feel. By default it ties up a lot less screen real estate with control mechanisms.
  • Iron has Chrome’s nice ctrl+f search function that actually highlights where on the scrollbar you’ll find additional instances of the phrase you’re looking for.
  • Iron doesn’t rat you out to Mountain View every time you follow a link.

I recommend at least giving it a test drive. There is some IE-centric content on the ‘net that won’t render right, but that’s a problem I don’t find compelling enough to use IE as my go-to browser of choice. My only real complaint is that Iron doesn’t seem to be able to actually assert itself as the default browser in Windows Vista. This can be a little annoying when following links from other programs.

Polite DMCA Complaints

Piracy is very serious

I never thought I’d see this, but as part of my job I field DMCA take-down requests. My employer is an Internet Service Provider, and from time to time our end-users may take it upon themselves to skirt around the release schedules and pricing schemes of various intellectual property industries. Traditionally the owners of those properties have been quite strident in their tone towards alleged pirates. This morning I noticed that J.K. Rowling’s folks have taken a more fan-friendly approach for an audio-book version of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone:

Unauthorized file sharing is illegal.  However, we truly appreciate your
interest in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Audio).  We are making
every attempt to provide this wonderful content to you in a host of
legitimate ways, one of which is through the following
website:

http://www.apple.com/itunes

That’s a big change from the “You’re a criminal and we’ll see your ass in court” approach I’ve been seeing for years. A welcome change that I hope some of the other IP-enforcement types pick up on. Try to win back your customers. Barring that, stop twirling your mustaches and cackling evilly.

Full text of complaint follows
Continue reading →

Accidentally Telling the Truth

A gaffe is roughly defined as “when a politician accidentally tells the truth.” This is the kind of misstatement that results in press offices racing to rephrase things into a carefully-crafted slate of B.S. that fits better with the message of the day. Earlier today Joe Biden, vice president of the United States, was asked what he would tell his own family in regards to the possibility of a pandemic influenza. Don’t go on airplanes, subways, or other confined places where the air recirculates and the flu can easily spread. That was, unfortunately, a pretty good piece of advice, and politically unspeakable at the moment.

Don’t go on public transit if you have symptoms. That’s the official advice. If you have to cough or sneeze, cover your face. Again, the official advice. Wash your hands frequently. Finally some good advice for avoiding a flu. The other advice has to do specifically with not communicating a flu to other people. If you’ve got the dreaded swine flu, staying off the subway isn’t going to help you. If you have reason to think you have it, get your ass to a doctor.

Nobody wants a public panic or anything, but Joe was just telling it like it is. He doesn’t want his family to get sick in the first place. Oh no.