Slashback: Indymedia, Starfighter, Mozparty

Slashback, below, brings updates and followups to several recent Slashdot stories, including Diebold's (trivial) financial penalty for copyright abuse, reviews of 'The Last Starfighter,' an inquiry into the best response to the recent seizure of Indymedia's servers in the UK, and the upcoming, distributed Mozparty2 to celebrate the 1.0 releases of Firefox and Thunderbird. Read on for the rest.

An apology might be a nice start. Chris writes "The UK government has broken its silence on the Indymedia server raid and is claiming that there 'no UK law enforcement agencies were involved'; see Richard Allan's blog for the whole written answer. This means that the potential for taking legal action against Rackspace in the UK needs to be explored -- were any UK laws (eg the Data Protection Act 1984 or the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000) broken? Are there any UK cyber law experts on Slashdot with any suggestions...?"

Is Google private enough for you? XeRXeS-TCN writes "Following on from the recent concerns reported on Slashdot about the Google Desktop, the CEO of Copernic has warned about user privacy. Google Desktop Search allows users to opt out of sending the company back detailed usage data, but it isn't possible to firewall it completely. Much more ominously, Google's product manager Marissa Mayer said she expected the private queries to generate more hits for google.com. Most people, she believed, would choose to combine personal and web searches resulting in more revenue for Google's ad business. More on this at The Reg."

If this is a dupe, then Murphy was right. Vcullen writes "The Formula that scientists recently proposed to calculate Murphy's Law has recently been turned into an easy to use online Murphy's Law calculator. So now you can work out what the probability of it happening on any given situation!"

Nice shooting, kid. Bravo! Jason Scott writes "Inspired by the Slashdot story about the arrival of 'The Last Starfighter: The Musical' off-Broadway, I drove from Boston to New York City and back in one day to attend a matinee. I have written a review of what I experienced on my weblog. As I say in the review, 'If spoilers do not interest you, if you only want the simplest of directions and want to make the next right move, then heed these words: if you live within driving, walking, bus or train distance of New York City, see this musical. Immediately.'"

And ottffs writes with his own impressions: "I was recently in Manhattan presenting at ACM Multimedia 2004 conference. I was lucky enough to be able to attend the premiere of 'The Last Starfighter: the musical' on Friday night. I have posted a review and some pics to my blog."

There goes the next office party budget. JimMarch(equalccw) writes "After losing a major copyright case in which Diebold was punished for exercising their copyright in a wrongful fashion (copyWRONG?), the other shoe has dropped: the court says Diebold owes the ISPs and webmasters who complained a total of $125,000. "

Anyone care to start one for El Paso? loconet writes "Following the success of Mozilla's 1.0 release parties, where Mozilla supporters from all over the world celebrated the release of Mozilla 1.0, comes Mozparty 2 celebrating the upcoming 1.0 release of Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird. According to the Mozparty site, currently there are 1007 ppl partying in 109 parties from which the biggest party is in Mexico."

Don't start planning your mozparties yet.

[zerdood]

Firefox is notoriously bad at coming out on the days they say it will. November 6th? Not gonna happen.

Re:Google

[BenjyD]

Clearly nobody reads the articles, not even the mods. From TFA:

"users should know that the giant ad broker intends to mix public and private queries in the future,"

"Google Desktop Search allows users to opt out of sending the company back detailed usage data, but it isn't possible to firewall it completely"

"Eric Schmidt said the company's goal was to create a "Google that knows you""

Admittedly, the main source for the article is the CEO of a competitor to Google. But this isn't the multi-user issue.

I disagree...

[ArbitraryConstant]

If the Diebold machines were perfectly accurate, they'd still only be recording the votes of idiots.

Re:Google

[erick99]

Yes, a competitor who made unsubstantiated statements that do not reflect well on Google. It's a cheap shot and tells me they are afraid of Google and not confident of their own stable. But, hell, it worked. It fooled you.

Its all about the fear factor

[t_allardyce]

The Indymedia thing to me sounds like a case of an ISP doing everything it can not to get into trouble. Its been shown time after time and even tested, ISPs will remove/giveup anything if they told. Even random people on Hotmail accounts have been able to order that information be taken down because it violates copyrights even though the copyright is fully explained on the actual page. We've come to a time when ISPs have no interest in sticking up for their clients, if someone can sue Rackspace then maybe it will send a message that ISPs have 2 sides to respect OR perhaps the law could just be changed to take all legal responsibility off their hands?

Gunstar

[centauri]

I don't know what they called it in the stage show, but in the movie the Starfighter is not the name of the ship. The ship is called a Gunstar. The being who fires the weapon systems of a Gunstar is called a Starfighter.

(And the pilot of a Gunstar is called a Starnavigator)

Re:Don't start planning your mozparties yet.

[Conspiracy_Of_Doves]

That is probably because, unlike SOME Redmond-based monopolies whose names I won't mention, they try to actually get it RIGHT before they release it. Good software is preferable to timely software any day.

Copyright imbalance

[KjetilK]

Heh, well, I think your post illustrates how bad the imbalance with copyright law has become. Copyright law is supposed to be a balance between the public's right to freely participate in the cultural and scientific progresses of society, and the rights of the creators to be awarded for their contribution to said progress.

Nowadays, if you a little too freely participate in said culture, you're a pirate, one who can be imprisoned, bankrupted and hung out to dry in public. If you on the other hand deny the public the most basic right to participate in democratic discourse and attempt to destroy democracy, well, you'll be fined with pocket change...

When this latter behaviour is made criminal, then we can start talking about criminalising freeloading. Not before.

Re:Google

[Flexagon]

The software was never intended to be deployed in a business or other multi-user environment.

That rules out many (most?) home systems, shared by all family members. In fact, it rules out so many systems that it's hard to imagine this not getting addressed before the beta ends.

Re:Its all about the fear factor

[YOU LIKEWISE FAIL IT]

The Indymedia thing to me sounds like a case of an ISP doing everything it can not to get into trouble. Its been shown time after time and even tested, ISPs will remove/giveup anything if they told.

Hah! ISP's? Most people react this way. While many slashdotters would be familiar with Milgrams Experiment [wikipedia.org], I'm not sure how many realise what for me is the real insight here - not only will people submit before authority, they will submit before an unsubstantiated image or impression of authority. Rarely do people ask to see the papers, authorisations or justifications of those who seem to know what they're doing ( and I've experienced this effect first hand in the healthcare industry ).

Ok, rant over. But I think you'll be surprised how quickly the average person will be cowed by an authority figure ( lawyer, policeman, person in an expensive suit ) regardless of whether or not their claims have merit. The change that has to be made is not just for ISP's, but for all citizens.

YLFI

Re:Its all about the fear factor

[aquabat]

From the Rackspace [rackspace.com] website:

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Featuring Our Exclusive:
- Zero-Downtime Network(TM) with a Money-Back Guarantee
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The irony of this is almost too rich to believe. Did these guys actually just commit corporate suicide in front of the entire internet?

Re:I disagree...

[Atrax]

But at least they'd be correctly recording the votes of idiots. Democracy makes no special case for stupidity.

Re:Its all about the fear factor

[gcaseye6677]

An ISP's takedown policy is crafted purely as a business decision. Will the company make more money by sticking up for the legal rights of their customers, or will they make more by immediately taking down anything that anyone doesn't like. You could make a case for either side, but I'm guessing that most ISPs have chosen the side of avoiding all controversy and taking down anything in question. Sure, their customers will take their business elsewhere, but someone will come along to replace them. The hosting business has pretty slim profit margins, so it's unlikely that most ISPs will be willing to spend money on lawyers if they don't absolutely have to.

The nice thing is, a website can be hosted anywhere in the world, so it's not like you can't find another host if your site is taken down on dubious grounds. For that matter, even if your site is blatantly illegal, somebody somewhere will host it for the right price.

More hits means more searches

[Chuck Chunder]

Not more consumer awareness. It's got nothing to do with the "press" they are getting.

It's the simple fact that if people are searching their desktop/email/etc for something and they can also search the web with Google at the same time for no extra effort then a lot of people will do it.