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."

How long before...

[Anonymous Coward]

... a virus or worm could exploit this google privacy issue?

Re:Its all about the fear factor

[dbIII]

We've come to a time when ISPs have no interest in sticking up for their clients

If they do so it is entirely possible that they will be shutdown by some bloodyminded official. Bruce Sterling's non-fiction "The Hacker Crackdown" has some good examples of machines that were seized on very flimsy pretexts and not returned for months or well over a year - and that was over ten years ago before DVDs were considered worth protecting with a military reponse (Norway). Very few ISPs have the resources to rebuild an entire facility from scratch - it's not just the hardware, all available backups are seized as well.

I'm sure the words "National Security" would have been invoked in this case. It is not entirely impossible for people to be dragged away and locked in a cage in Cuba for two years without even being charged with a crime - so any ISP is likely to roll over as soon as some official looking types with US accents turn up and start talking about security.

Murphy's Law proves a few things.

[Dark Lord Seth]

3 out of 5 things regarding the equasion for Murphy's Law are easily manipulated. Put the right man ( skilled ) with the right experience ( frequency ) on the right job with plenty of time. ( urgency )

Complexity can also be influenced up to a certain level; A large complex task can be broken down into numerous less complex elements. So basically, Murphy's law proves that while heeding common sense, people are less likely to screw up. Well done!

Re:Its all about the fear factor

[poot_rootbeer]

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.

That basically seems to be what it boils down to.

Despite the claims that have been made on IndyMedia about IndyMedia (impartial observers, wot?), it appears that the decision to pull the plug the UK-hosted IndyMedia machines was unilaterally made by RackSpace, the hosting company.

Could RackSpace, a company that does business in both the US and the UK, have had its arm twisted by US law enforcement to pull the plug? Possible, but unlikely -- for one thing, we would have seen the fuzz go after IndyMedia resources located in the US as well. Claiming that US law enforcement was indeed involved in this action in the absence of any proof to that effect is speculation and irresponsible reporting.

More Hits? Not likely...

[shaneh0]

"she expected the private queries to generate more hits for google.com."

Google is a very mature brand in their market. Although I can't speak to it's veracity I read in Business 2.0 that Google has 96% awareness among (?domestic?) internet users.

While I think the press may slightly increase brand awareness among the non-internet using public, I really doubt they'll see more hits. As if people will read the story and rush to go online to see what 'this google thing' is all about.

Google has reached this point without any consumer facing advertising. I doubt a few dozen stories over a few weeks will actually increase their traffic in a statistically significant way.

Besides, this has a short shelf life. When was the last time you read about the GMail controversy (that is, until Desktop Search made it relevent again)

MozParty2

[killermookie]

Did anyone else cringe when they went to sign up for a Mozilla Firefox party only to stop and realize that the site is basically one giant spam harvesting board [openforce.at]??

--Matt

Spyware Install?

[Goo.cc]

If I was Indymedia, I would look very carefully at the server before using it again. For all they know, monitoring software or a trojan could have been installed.

Re:Its all about the fear factor

[Doc Ruby]

No, it's worse than that [theregister.co.uk]. A US court sent its order out of its jurisdiction to a Bologna, Italy court with which it has a mutual "MLAT" agreement. Bologna sent the order out of its jurisdiction along a similar agreement with the UK. So Rackspace complied, as it was probably legally obligated to do. They probably folded too quickly, but the system of going through a couple of backdoors to enforce a US court order seems not only to have worked, but not to have even raised an eyebrow at the UK officials who do have jurisdiction. This is the one world government people have talked about for years: collusions between international courts that let foreign governments do the dirty work of local governments, while all those governments whine about the UN, and politicians get elected defending citizens from a UN that is powerless over them.

Re:Its all about the fear factor

[demachina]

This post doesn't deserve any kind of positive mod. It was established at the time the FBI was involved in this seizure. All the stuff here just said no UK agency was involved which tends to suggest the FBI bypassed the law enforcement agencies that had jurisdiction in the UK which make this especially reprehensible and scary.

The FBI is with each passing day trying to make itself in to a global police force with or without the cooperation of the rest of the the world. They brag about their globalization on their web site. They now how have hundreds of agents spread around the globe. Its is just one more manifestation of America's unilateral move to establishing a global empire based on a triad, military, law enforcement and economy.

It sure would be interesting to know exactly how the FBI pulled off trampling international borders. I'm guessing they threatened Rackspace in the U.S. and made their U.K. office roll over when clearly they had no obligation to and without getting UK law enforcement involved at all. I wonder what threats the FBI used that made ratting on Indymedia the desirable of the two available options for Rackspace.

They should look into this before 1.0

[forgoil]

http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/378632/2004 -10-15/2004-10-21/0

Very easy to crash your browser, and should be fairly easy to set up and start finding crashing bugs. I already run firefox, but would love to see it not fail this easily.

Re:Google not collecting data

[ricotest]

Google keeps trying to use my HTTP proxy even with the 'phone home' option off. This happens at fairly random intervals, not when I'm doing a web search. Why the hell does it need to use the Internet if it is so 'local'?