Slashdot Mirror
Dialectizer Shut Down
endisnigh writes: "Another fun, interesting and innovative online resource goes the way of corporate ignorance - due to threats of legal action, the author of the dialectizer, a Web page that dynamically translates another Web page's text into an alternate 'dialect' such as 'redneck' or 'Swedish Chef' and displays the result, has packed up his dialectizer and gone home - see the notice here."
That's true... I wouldn't do anything over a C&D, but a subpoena (or whatever you get when someone takes you to court) would probably do the trick.
Eric
Well, at least Slashdot is standing up against Microsoft. I hope others would follow the example.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
I don't know. Sue them for caching your homepage and we'll see :-)
Mucking Forons Death To Stupidity!
Long Live GNU/Linux!
Sure you're missing something... like the fact that they are too stupid to realize they can block access from particular IP addresses. I mean, what do you want from an IT department consisting of a bunch of failed tellers who took an MCSE class?
Eric
I am not 100% sure, but it seems to me Google had some trouble (or anticipated it) with their cache (which is, by the way, a great thing, since even when the site you've found is not down, Google is still much faster 80% of the time), so they "repackaged" the feature - it is now called "show matches" and highlights the keywords you're looking for. This enhancement is marginally useful, but as long as it keeps them from legal trouble, I'm fine with it.
Hey, that gives me an idea! I can run my site through Babelfish and then sue for theft of content!
Got Rhinos?
How is this different than any other http proxy, other than it tweaks the text in transit? Sites like Bank of America (the culprit in this case) don't seem to have any problem at all with corporate proxy servers, which, unlike this service, typically store a local copy of the material for caching purposes. Bank of America didn't seem to be concerned with the fact that the service was tweaking their page in transit, more that it was redistributing copyrighted material.
You make a good point - if the opposition can afford much better lawyers and then you have to pay their fees, you're screwed. How about a system where a losing plaintiff's lawsuit can be given a special "frivolous" judgement, in which case the plaintiff must pay as much of the defendant's fees as is reasonable (so if M$ spends $10mil on legal fees and you make 30k/year, you only pay what you can). This wouldn't discourage legitimate lawsuits but hopefully cut down on the stupid ones. Of course, it's still open to abuse, but probably no more than our current legal system.
Say hello to zMac.
-Elendale (blahblahblah, see .sig)
IANAT (I Am Not A Troll)
But the dialectizer takes the site, changes it, and then presents it as the property of the original owner (e.g., Microsoft). MS can control how their site looks in browsers, but they can't control what the Swedish Chef does to it bork bork.
Got Rhinos?
Don't bother boycotting in silence; express yourself.
The text filters you're thinking about probably come from the GNU Talkfilters package. You can get them here.
Yeah, and what's up with them changing the spelling to slahsdot? It used to be so easy - I mean, just spell out "slash", then "dot", but now they make us transpose the h and the s in the middle....
;^}
--Fesh
--Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
I've already written to the guy that runs the site and offered to host a version of the Dialectizer if he opens up the code. I suggest that others do the same. Even if he decides not to, I'm sure that the basic translation rules could be figures out by running the filters on a good sample set of texts, and re-created. I look forward to my letter from BofA's lawyers. Viva la resistance!
Here's a description from Micro Star v. Formgen Inc.:
As the site argues, the dialectizer only offers another means of viewing publicly accessible web documents. It uses its own rules to redisplay a public copy. What's next, an argument that all web browsers infringe because they don't follow HTML specs and so display the pages differently from the page authors' intent?(I had these cites handy because I've been waiting to see the same misguided challenge raised against ThirdVoice or my poky annotation engine for offering web page annotation.)
-- Openlaw: Fighting for fair use and the public domain
If ad-stripping isn't okay, why was Netscape screwing around with it?
Got Rhinos?
That would be a very good idea. I have (or at least had) the source for the Encheferizer at one point. In fact, a wizard ported it to LPC for Darkwind. We call it the "Viking Curse" there.
Anyway, if it were a client-side plug-in, who could complain? Nobody would be distributing alterned versions of corporate sites. No harm, no foul! It could add a menu with the supported dialects, or something.
o/~ Plug it in, plug it in! o/~
Constitutionally Correct
I don't know why that defense couldn't be used for the Dialectizer then .. it merely reads and 'routes' the page to the user and filters it on the fly. It doesn't store the data for any length of time either.
.. but that AND the parody fair-use defense I think would mean that any sentient judge would cause the case to dismissed with prejudice. Once the precedent for companies to think before they get the lawyers out is set, the better.
IANAL
--
Delphis
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^.*rinkworks.*
ReWriteRule ^.* http://moron.corp.com/polite_message.html [NC,R,L]
endisnigh writes: "T'other fun, interestin' an' innovative online resource goes the way of co'po'ate igno'ance - due t'threats of legal ackshun, th' autho' of the dialeckizer, a Web page thet dynamically translates t'other Web page's text into an alternate 'dialeck' sech as 'redneck' o' 'Swedish Chef' an' displays th' result, has packed up his dialeckizer an' gone home - see th' notice har."
-vert-
-vert-
love the penguin
Nothing is fair use in America. Everything is a reason to sue.
Got Rhinos?
I only now realise that my brain could be used to translate websites between Dutch, English and German, and therefor almost certainly violates copyright laws in roughly the same way as the dialectiser(tm).
Should I take my brain offline, until there is a certified way to make sure it can only translate sites I own? What could be the legal consequences if I fail to comply?
Don't tell me they actaully spent money on checking the legal use of routers?!?!? I do remember that proxies/mirrors was up in the EC legal-something. Don't know if I should laugh or cry, probably cry.... Got this nasty feeling in the gut that the net's moving towards some corporate bullS**t network. just lots of shopping sites with banners everywhere...
if (!signature) { throw std::runtime_error("No sig!"); }
Funny, it always seemed appropriate for CowboyNeal articles.
kwsNI
fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.
/., and it seems quite appropriate for the occasion:
There's a signature I've seen on
Fuck the system? Nah, I don't want to catch something.
This is The most obserd thing I have ever heard of.
I've even read the Bible In PigLatin.. Well maybe parts of it. This is a _program_ which allows a user to Voluntarily translate a page. These Pages are not stored in anyway on their website and How can they be held responsible by people Translating stuff thorugh the site?
Whats next Babelfish?
--------========+++Dont Feed The Lab Techs+++========--------
That brings up the question...
What if the dialectizer were a program that you ran on your computer that translated the pages?
It would be perfectly okay, right? Now what's the difference between that and running the program off of someone elses computer to be sent back to you?
-- Dr. Eldarion --
It's not what it is, it's something else.
The previous in jive:
... and in redneck:
... and in "swedish chef":
I dunno about ya' dudes, but ah' fo' one am glad t'see dis doodad gone. Who wants's "JIBE" rap anyway? Do ya' real dink seein' "slap ma' fro" all de time be funny? Do ya' dink dat real sucka's uh African descent rap dat way? I'm glad ah' wuzn't raised on 70's blaxploitashun films.
And whut about "redneck"? Soudern-Americans gots it baaaad enough, whut wid de Yankess harassin' dem about da damn flag dey flew in de War uh No'dern Aggression. 'S coo', bro. ah' duzn't dink makin' fun uh de way dat dey say "y'all" be very propuh'.
And lastly, de Swedish chef. Can we real tolerate da damn amount uh anti-Scandinavian bigotsry which we is bombarded wid daily in de media? Linus himself wuz uh Swedish 'estracshun, and it be no secret dat his Big Daddy wuz some chef. Granted, he had some tendency t'drow chickens around wildly and make noises dat kin't quite be described as speech, but dat's no reason t'rub salt in old wounds.
Shame on ya' Slashdot, fo' suppo'tin' dis monstrosity. Slap mah fro!
ah dunno about yo' guys, but ah fo' one is glad t'see this hyar thin' gone. Who be hankerin' "jive" speak ennyway? Do yo' pow'ful reckon seein' "slap ma' fro" all th' time is funny? Do yo' reckon thet real varmints of African dexcent talk thet way? ah's glad ah warn't raised on 70's blaxploitashun films.
An' whut about "redneck"? Southern-South Car'linans haf it bad inough, whut wif th' Yankess hareessin' them about th' flag they flew in th' War of No'thern Aggresshun. ah doesn't reckon makin' fun of th' way thet they say "y'all" is mighty right.
An' lastly, th' Swedish chef. Kin we pow'ful tolerate th' amount of anti-Scan'inavian trimenjusotry which we is bombarded wif daily in th' media? Linus hisse'f was of Swedish extryckshun, an' it is no secret thet his Pappy was a chef. Granted, he had a tendency t'throw possums aroun' wildly an' make noises thet kin't quite be dexcribed as speech, but thass no reason t'rub salt in old woun's.
Shame on yo' Slashdot, fo' suppo'tin' this hyar monstrosity.
I doonnu ebuoot yuoo gooys, boot I fur oone-a em gled tu see-a thees theeng gune-a. Vhu vunts "jeefe-a" speek unyvey? Du yuoo reelly theenk seeeeng "slep me' fru" ell zee teeme-a is foonny? Du yuoo theenk thet reel peuple-a ooff Effreecun descent telk thet vey? I'm gled I vesn't reeesed oon 70's blexplueeteshun feelms. Um gesh dee bork, bork!
Und vhet ebuoot "redneck"? Suoozeern-Emereecuns hefe-a it bed inuoogh, vhet veet zee Yunkess heresseeng zeem ebuoot zee fleg zeey floo in zee Ver ooff Nurzeern Eggresseeun. Bork bork bork! I dun't theenk mekeeng foon ooff zee vey thet zeey sey "y'ell" is fery pruper. Hurty flurty schnipp schnipp!
Und lestly, zee Svedeesh cheff. Cun ve-a reelly tulerete-a zee emuoont ooff untee-Scundeenefiun beegutry vheech ve-a ere-a bumberded veet deeely in zee medeea? Leenoos heemselff ves ooff Svedeesh ixtrecshun, und it is nu secret thet hees fezeer ves a cheff. Grunted, he-a hed a tendency tu throo cheeckens eruoond veeldly und meke-a nueeses thet cun't qooeete-a be-a descreebed es speech, boot thet's nu reesun tu roob selt in oold vuoonds. Um gesh dee bork, bork!
Sheme-a oon yuoo Sleshdut, fur sooppurteeng thees munstruseety. Bork bork bork!
This straight to you from the "it's-funny-laugh" dept.
I realize, or at least sincerely hope, that your post was satirical but in making your point you neglected include an important link on the dialectizer site concerning discrimination/racism.
--
You can be an atheist and still not want to succumb to some weird cross-over sheep disease -- AC
"Pull!"
Now excuse me, I'm off to sue my college German professor for not interpreting my German correctly. Just because he didn't like what I said doesn't mean it's wrong...
B1ood
Note to self: pasty-skinned programmers ought not stand in the Mojave desert for multiple hours. -- John Carmack
Sorry, I wasn't very clear in that post. The case wasn't about routers really. IIRC, the defendant compared their actions to that of routers and other equipment that copy data. The judge didn't buy the router comparison because they don't hold data very long. I wish I could remember what the case was actually about. Then it might make a bit more sense.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Does this mean something like Babelfish would be in violation of copyright laws? And dosen't copyright law allow for parodies of sites?
Though the intent of translating the pages was humor,
:P
ever try 'back translations' with babelfish? Where you translate from English to some other language then back again. It's really pretty funny: P
This is a horrible precedent.
No precedent has been set whatsoever, at least no legal precedent. Remember, no case has been lost here. These guys just didn't want any trouble, so they pulled the pages. I wouldn't have done it without a little more provocation, but its there decision, really. But, no legal precedent has been made. It's the same thing as settling the case. Without a judge's ruling no precedent is set.
Can you imagine how trying to use this in a court case would go?
Defendant: "This is a parody, and therefore fair use."
Plaintiff: "The last time someone translated our page we sent 'em a letter and they got scared and took down the page"
Judge: "So?"
Plaintiff: "Um..."
Defendant: "Can I sue for a bogus lawsuit?"
Judge: "Um, sure! You get $10,000,000!"
Well... maybe not quite like that
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Just a thought, but wouldn't stuff like that be considered a parody, and thus fair use?
-- Dr. Eldarion --
It's not what it is, it's something else.
This is just a guess, but wouldn't the dialectizer be more legal than a translator?
I know that fair use protects parody... but I'm not sure how it deals with translation.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
It's not what it is, it's something else.
Our legal system has transformed from a mechanism for justice (if it ever was this way) to something that people with money use to get their way. Don't seriously tell me that these sites actually believe this is copyright infrigement. They just don't like having their pages translated into these "dialects", so they get out their wallets and have it shut down. Our legal system needs to be fixed to prevent this, but I honestly can't think of how. Maybe a loser-pays system would help. I dunno. Anybody have some decent suggestions on this?
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Really he says it much better than I can:
l ect= redneck&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.rinkworks.com%2Fdiale ct%2Fcopyr.shtml
http://www.rinkworks.com/dialect/dialectp.cgi?dia
--
blue
i browse at -1 because they're funnier than you are.
I'm already going with a .cx domain, I've decided =) com, net, and org are getting overdone. Especially com.
--
"I personal[ly] think Unix is "superior" because on LSD it tastes like Blue." -- jbarnett
Convert it to java and run it on the client end then the suits can't complain at all. It becomes just another rendering engine.
Give money to the EFF( Electronic Frontere foundation). That's what there for. I would, if I had any.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
What then of Google and it's locally cached copies?
Web sites give or deny permission to cache via the facilities provided by various headers returned on HTTP requests. See RFC 2068: Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1
Ever hear of the CBLDF, Comic Book Legal Defense Fund? It's a fund to help comic book writers targeted by ridiculous legal action, mainly independent titles.
Last time I checked many of the books CBLDF was supporting were basically porn like Cherry Poptart. Most of the people suing them are not big corporations but are large parent groups who (understandably) don't think that porno comics should be sitting next to Batman on the comic store shelves (where their kids could easily buy them). I tend to agree with the parents. These stories are not meant for children and should be careful not to represent themselves that way. They should be kept in special section (like they are in my comics shop.)
BTW I know Cherry Poptart was started (at least in part) as a parody of many 60s teen comics like Archie. I am just saying that few people buy it solely on the merits of its writing...
So far I've gotten all my Karma from telling people they are wrong... :)
the current issue with Dialetizer is not the tool, it's the parodied HTML pages. and since all the pages reside at one place (albeit briefly) - it's a target.
the author of Dialectizer should offer it as a small executable to be downloaded and used locally. users can parody whatever they want with it. and hypersensitive corporations can spend their time chasing after the hard-drives of 100,000 Joe-Bobs.
"I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things." -R.P.Feynma
Yes, seeing "slap ma' fro" all the time *is* funny. Natalie Portman told me so. And was Linus Swedish or Finnish? Someone told me he was Finnish.
Got Rhinos?
Well said. Even as adults, nerds can't seem to escape being bullied :P ...), take a stand. It's all about David and Goliath.
Though things like this have severely lowered my faith in the legal system, I still am hopeful that a judge with an ounce of sanity would see how ridiculous this suit would be (should it go to court). I say rinkworks should take Bank of America to the bank on this one (sorry
you all knew it was going to happen!! =D ------------------------------------------ © 2000 Microsof' Co'po'ashun. All rights resarved, cuss it all t' tarnation. Microsof' Confidential, ah reckon. This hyar Specificashun is provided pursuant t'th' terms an' corndishuns of th' Agreement fo' Microsof' Autho'izashun Data Specificashun v. 1.0 fo' Microsof' Windows 2000 Operatin' Systems (th' "Agreement") fo' th' sole purpose of allerin' review of th' Specificashun fo' security analysis, as further specified in th' Agreement. Eff'n yo' haf not downloaded th' Specificashun fum Microsof''s website an' agreed t'th' terms an' corndishuns of th' Agreement, yer not an autho'ized licensee of th' Specificashun. Page 1 of 12 Microsof' Autho'izashun Data Specificashun v. 1.0 fo' Microsof' Windows 2000 Operatin' Systems April, 2000 © 2000 Microsof' Co'po'ashun. All rights resarved, cuss it all t' tarnation. Microsof' Confidential Please review this hyar Specificashun copy only eff'n yo' licensed an' downloaded it fum Microsof' Co'po'ashun's website; eff'n yo' did not, please destroy this hyar copy, but yer welcome t'license th' Specificashun at http://www.microsof'.com/technet/security/kerberos . Eff'n yer an autho'ized licensee, when yo' downloaded th' follerin' Specificashun, yo' agreed to th' Agreement fo' Microsof' Autho'izashun Data Specificashun v. 1.0 fo' Microsof' Windows 2000 Operatin' Systems (th' "Agreement"). Fo' yer future reference, thet Agreement is reprodooced at th' end of this hyar docoomnt. Abstrack Microsof' Windows 2000 includes OS specific data in th' Kerberos V5 autho'izashun data field thet is used fo' autho'izashun as dexcribed in th' Kerberos revishuns Internet Draf' [1]. This hyar data is used fo' user logon an' t'create an access token, as enny fool kin plainly see. Th' access token is used by th' system t'enfo'ce access checkin' when attemppin' t'reference objecks. This hyar docoomnt dexcribes th' struckure of th' Windows 2000 specific autho'izashun data thet is carried in thet field, cuss it all t' tarnation. Top-Level PAC Struckure Th' PAC is junerated by th' KDC unner th' follerin' corndishuns: durin' an AS requess thet has been validated wif pre-authenticashun durin' a TGS requess when th' client has no PAC an' th' targit is a service in th' domain o' a ticket grantin' service (referral ticket). Th' PAC itse'f is included in th' IF-RELEVANT (ID 1) po'shun of th' autho'izashun data in a ticket. Wifin th' IF-RELEVANT po'shun, it is incoded as a KERB_AUTH_DATA_PAC wif ID 128. Th' PAC is defined as a C data type, wif integers incoded in li'l-endian o'der. Th' PAC itse'f is made up of sevahal layers. Th' outer struckure, corntained direckly in th' autho'izashun data, is as follers. Th' top-level struckure is th' PACTYPE struckure: Windows 2000 Kerberos Autho'izashun Data April 2000 © 2000 Microsof' Co'po'ashun. All rights resarved, cuss it all t' tarnation. Microsof' Confidential, ah reckon. This hyar Specificashun is provided pursuant t'th' terms an' corndishuns of th' Agreement fo' Microsof' Autho'izashun Data Specificashun v. 1.0 fo' Microsof' Windows 2000 Operatin' Systems (th' "Agreement") fo' th' sole purpose of allerin' review of th' Specificashun fo' security analysis, as further specified in th' Agreement. Eff'n yo' haf not downloaded th' Specificashun fum Microsof''s website an' agreed t'th' terms an' corndishuns of th' Agreement, yer not an autho'ized licensee of th' Specificashun. Page 2 of 12 typedef unsigned long ULONG; typedef unsigned sho't USHORT; typedef unsigned long64 ULONG64; typedef unsigned char UCHAR; typedef struck _PACTYPE { ULONG cBuffers; ULONG Vershun; PAC_INFO_BUFFER Buffers[1]; } PACTYPE; Th' fields is defined as follers: cBuffers - corntains th' number of intries in th' array Buffers Vershun - this hyar is vahshun zero Buffers - corntains a cornfo'mant array of PAC_INFO_BUFFER struckures Th' PAC_INFO_BUFFER struckure corntains info'mashun about etch piece of th' PAC: typedef struck _PAC_INFO_BUFFER { ULONG ulType; ULONG cbBufferSize; ULONG64 Offset; } PAC_INFO_BUFFER; Type fields is defined as follers: ulType - corntains th' type of data corntained in this hyar buffer. Fo' Windows 2000, it may be one of th' follerin', which is explained further below: #define PAC_LOGON_INFO 1 #define PAC_CREDENTIAL_TYPE 2 #define PAC_SERVER_CHECKSUM 6 #define PAC_PRIVSVR_CHECKSUM 7 #define PAC_CLIENT_INFO_TYPE 10 Offset - corntains th' offset t'th' beginnin' of th' data, in bytes, fum th' beginnin' of th' PACTYPE struckure. Th' data offset muss by a multiple of 8. Eff'n th' data pointed t'by this hyar field is complex, th' data is typically NDR incoded, cuss it all t' tarnation. Eff'n th' data is simple (indicatin' it includes no pointer types o' complex struckures) it is a li'l-endian fo'mat data struckure. Windows 2000 Kerberos Autho'izashun Data April 2000 © 2000 Microsof' Co'po'ashun. All rights resarved, cuss it all t' tarnation. Microsof' Confidential, ah reckon. This hyar Specificashun is provided pursuant t'th' terms an' corndishuns of th' Agreement fo' Microsof' Autho'izashun Data Specificashun v. 1.0 fo' Microsof' Windows 2000 Operatin' Systems (th' "Agreement") fo' th' sole purpose of allerin' review of th' Specificashun fo' security analysis, as further specified in th' Agreement. Eff'n yo' haf not downloaded th' Specificashun fum Microsof''s website an' agreed t'th' terms an' corndishuns of th' Agreement, yer not an autho'ized licensee of th' Specificashun. Page 3 of 12 PAC Credential Info'mashun PAC_INFO_BUFFERs of type PAC_LOGON_INFO corntain th' credential info'mashun fo' th' client of th' Kerberos ticket. Th' data itse'f is corntained in a KERB_VALIDATION_INFO struckure, which is NDR encoded, cuss it all t' tarnation. Th' output of th' NDR incodin' is placed in th' PAC_INFO_BUFFER struckure of type PAC_LOGON_INFO. typedef struck _KERB_VALIDATION_INFO { FILETIME LogonTime; FILETIME LogoffTime; FILETIME KickOffTime; FILETIME Passwo'dLastSet; FILETIME Passwo'dKinChange; FILETIME Passwo'dMussChange; UNICODE_STRING EffeckiveName; UNICODE_STRING FullName; UNICODE_STRING LogonScripp; UNICODE_STRING ProfilePath; UNICODE_STRING HomeDirecko'y; UNICODE_STRING HomeDirecko'yDrive; USHORT LogonCount; USHORT BadPasswo'dCount; ULONG UserId; ULONG PrimaryGroupId; ULONG GroupCount; [size_is(GroupCount)] PGROUP_MEMBERSHIP GroupIds; ULONG UserFlags; ULONG Resarved[4]; UNICODE_STRING LogonServah; UNICODE_STRING LogonDomainName; PSID LogonDomainId; ULONG Resarved1[2]; ULONG UserAccountControl; ULONG Resarved3[7]; ULONG SidCount; [size_is(SidCount)] PKERB_SID_AND_ATTRIBUTES ExtrySids; PSID ResourceGroupDomainSid; ULONG ResourceGroupCount; [size_is(ResourceGroupCount)] PGROUP_MEMBERSHIP ResourceGroupIds; } KERB_VALIDATION_INFO; Th' fields is defined as follers: LogonTime - th' time th' client last logged on, as enny fool kin plainly see. Windows 2000 Kerberos Autho'izashun Data April 2000 © 2000 Microsof' Co'po'ashun. All rights resarved, cuss it all t' tarnation. Microsof' Confidential, ah reckon. This hyar Specificashun is provided pursuant t'th' terms an' corndishuns of th' Agreement fo' Microsof' Autho'izashun Data Specificashun v. 1.0 fo' Microsof' Windows 2000 Operatin' Systems (th' "Agreement") fo' th' sole purpose of allerin' review of th' Specificashun fo' security analysis, as further specified in th' Agreement. Eff'n yo' haf not downloaded th' Specificashun fum Microsof''s website an' agreed t'th' terms an' corndishuns of th' Agreement, yer not an autho'ized licensee of th' Specificashun. Page 4 of 12 LogoffTime - th' time at which th' client's logon sesshun sh'd expire. Eff'n th' logon sesshun sh'd not expire, this hyar field sh'd be set t'(0x7fffffff,0xffffffff). KickOffTime - th' time at which th' sarver sh'd fo'cibly logoff th' client. Eff'n th' client sh'd not be fo'ced off, this hyar field sh'd be set t'(0x7fffffff,0xffffffff). Th' ticket ind time is a replacement fo' th' KickOffTime. Th' service ticket lifetime will nevah be longer than th' KickOffTime fo' a user. Passwo'dLastSet - th' time th' client's passwo'd was last set. Eff'n it was nevah set, this hyar field is zero. Passwo'dKinChange - th' time at which th' client's passwo'd is allered t'change. Eff'n thar is no restrickshun on when th' client may change its passwo'd, this hyar field sh'd be set t'th' time of th' logon, as enny fool kin plainly see. Passwo'dMussChange - th' time at which th' client's passwo'd expires. Eff'n it doesn't expire, this hyar field is set t'(0x7fffffff,0xffffffff). EffeckiveName - This hyar field corntains th' client's Windows 2000 UserName, sto'ed in th' Ackive Direcko'y in th' SamAccountName propuhty. This hyar field is opshunal, ah reckon. Eff'n lef' blank th' len'th, maxlen'th an' buffer is all zero. FullName - this hyar field corntains th' friendly name of th' client, which is used only fo' display purpose an' not security purposes. This hyar field is opshunal, ah reckon. Eff'n lef' blank th' len'th, maxlen'th an' buffer is all zero. LogonScripp - This hyar field corntains th' path t'th' client's logon scripp. This hyar field is opshunal, ah reckon. Eff'n lef' blank th' len'th, maxlen'th an' buffer is all zero. ProfilePath - This hyar field corntains th' path t'th' client's profile. This hyar field is opshunal, ah reckon. Eff'n lef' blank th' len'th, maxlen'th an' buffer is all zero. HomeDirecko'y - This hyar field corntains th' path t'th' client's home direcko'y. It may be eifer a local path name o' a UNC path name. This hyar field is opshunal, ah reckon. Eff'n lef' blank th' len'th, maxlen'th an' buffer are all zero. HomeDirecko'yDrive - This hyar field is only used eff'n th' client's home direcko'y is a UNC path name. In thet case, th' share on th' remote file sarver is mapped t'th' local drive letter specified by this hyar field, cuss it all t' tarnation. This hyar field is opshunal, ah reckon. Eff'n lef' blank th' len'th, maxlen'th an' buffer is all zero. LogonCount - This hyar field corntains th' count of how menny times th' client is currently logged on, as enny fool kin plainly see. This hyar statistic is not accurately maintained by Windows 2000 an' sh'd not be used, cuss it all t' tarnation. BadPasswo'dCount - This hyar field corntains th' number of logon o' passwo'd change attempps wif bad passwo'ds, on account o' th' last successful attempp. * UserId - This hyar field corntains th' relative Id fo' th' client. PrimaryGroupId - This hyar field corntains th' relative ID fo' this hyar client's primary group. * GroupCount - This hyar field corntains th' number of groups, wifin th' client's domain, t'which th' client is a member. * GroupIds - This hyar field corntains an array of th' relative Ids an' attributes of th' groups in th' client's domain of which th' client is a member. * UserFlags - This hyar field corntains info'mashun about which fields in this hyar struckure is valid, cuss it all t' tarnation. Th' two bits thet may be set is indicated below. Havin' these flags set indicates thet th' co'respondin' fields in th' KERB_VALIDATION_INFO struckure is present an' valid, cuss it all t' tarnation. #define LOGON_EXTRA_SIDS 0x0020 #define LOGON_RESOURCE_GROUPS 0x0200 LogonServah - This hyar field corntains th' NETBIOS name of th' KDC which perfo'med th' AS ticket request. Windows 2000 Kerberos Autho'izashun Data April 2000 © 2000 Microsof' Co'po'ashun. All rights resarved, cuss it all t' tarnation. Microsof' Confidential, ah reckon. This hyar Specificashun is provided pursuant t'th' terms an' corndishuns of th' Agreement fo' Microsof' Autho'izashun Data Specificashun v. 1.0 fo' Microsof' Windows 2000 Operatin' Systems (th' "Agreement") fo' th' sole purpose of allerin' review of th' Specificashun fo' security analysis, as further specified in th' Agreement. Eff'n yo' haf not downloaded th' Specificashun fum Microsof''s website an' agreed t'th' terms an' corndishuns of th' Agreement, yer not an autho'ized licensee of th' Specificashun. Page 5 of 12 LogonDomainName - This hyar field corntains th' NETBIOS name of th' client's domain, as enny fool kin plainly see. * LogonDomainId - This hyar field corntains th' SID of th' client's domain, as enny fool kin plainly see. This hyar field is used in cornjunckshun wif th' UserId, PrimaryGroupId,an' GroupIds fields t'create th' user an' group SIDs fo' th' client. UserAccountControl - This hyar fields corntains a bitfield of info'mashun about th' client's account. Valid values are: #define USER_ACCOUNT_DISABLED (0x00000001) #define USER_HOME_DIRECTORY_REQUIRED (0x00000002) #define USER_PASSWORD_NOT_REQUIRED (0x00000004) #define USER_TEMP_DUPLICATE_ACCOUNT (0x00000008) #define USER_NORMAL_ACCOUNT (0x00000010) #define USER_MNS_LOGON_ACCOUNT (0x00000020) #define USER_INTERDOMAIN_TRUST_ACCOUNT (0x00000040) #define USER_WORKSTATION_TRUST_ACCOUNT (0x00000080) #define USER_SERVER_TRUST_ACCOUNT (0x00000100) #define USER_DONT_EXPIRE_PASSWORD (0x00000200) #define USER_ACCOUNT_AUTO_LOCKED (0x00000400) #define USER_ENCRYPTED_TEXT_PASSWORD_ALLOWED (0x00000800) #define USER_SMARTCARD_REQUIRED (0x00001000) #define USER_TRUSTED_FOR_DELEGATION (0x00002000) #define USER_NOT_DELEGATED (0x00004000) #define USER_USE_DES_KEY_ONLY (0x00008000) #define USER_DONT_REQUIRE_PREAUTH (0x00010000) * SidCount - This hyar field corntains th' number of SIDs present in th' ExtrySids field, cuss it all t' tarnation. This hyar field is only valid if th' LOGON_EXTRA_SIDS flag has been set in th' UserFlags field, cuss it all t' tarnation. * ExtrySids - This hyar field corntains a list of SIDs fo' groups t'which th' user is a member. This hyar field is only valid eff'n th' LOGON_EXTRA_SIDS flag has been set in th' UserFlags field, cuss it all t' tarnation. * ResoooceGroupCount - This hyar field corntains th' number of resource groups in th' ResourceGroupIds field, cuss it all t' tarnation. This hyar field is only valid eff'n th' LOGON RESOURCE_GROUPS flag has been set in th' UserFlags field, cuss it all t' tarnation._ * ResourceGroupDomainSid - This hyar field corntains th' SID of th' resource domain, as enny fool kin plainly see. This hyar field is used in conjunckshun wif th' ResourceGroupIds field t'create th' group SIDs fo' th' client. * ResourceGroupIds - This hyar field corntains an array of th' relative Ids an' attributes of th' groups in th' resource domain of which th' resource is a member. Fields marked wif a '*' is used in th' NT token, as enny fool kin plainly see. When used in th' KERB_VALIDATION_INFO, this hyar is NDR incoded, cuss it all t' tarnation. Th' FILETIME type is defined as follers: typedef unsigned int DWORD; typedef struck _FILETIME { DWORD dwLowDateTime; DWORD dwHighDateTime; } FILETIME; Windows 2000 Kerberos Autho'izashun Data April 2000 © 2000 Microsof' Co'po'ashun. All rights resarved, cuss it all t' tarnation. Microsof' Confidential, ah reckon. This hyar Specificashun is provided pursuant t'th' terms an' corndishuns of th' Agreement fo' Microsof' Autho'izashun Data Specificashun v. 1.0 fo' Microsof' Windows 2000 Operatin' Systems (th' "Agreement") fo' th' sole purpose of allerin' review of th' Specificashun fo' security analysis, as further specified in th' Agreement. Eff'n yo' haf not downloaded th' Specificashun fum Microsof''s website an' agreed t'th' terms an' corndishuns of th' Agreement, yer not an autho'ized licensee of th' Specificashun. Page 6 of 12 Times is encoded as th' number of 100 nanosecond increments on account o' January 1, 1601, in UTC time. When used in th' KERB_VALIDATION_INFO, this hyar is NDR incoded, cuss it all t' tarnation. Th' UNICODE_STRING struckure is defined as: typedef struck _UNICODE_STRING USHORT Len'th; USHORT MaximumLen'th; [size_is(MaximumLen'th / 2), len'th_is((Len'th) / 2) ] USHORT * Buffer; } UNICODE_STRING; Th' Len'th field corntains th' number of bytes in th' strin', not includin' th' null terminato', an' th' MaximumLen'th field corntains th' total number of bytes in th' buffer corntainin' th' strin'. Th' GROUP_MEMBERSHIP struckure corntains th' relative ID of a group an' th' co'respondin' attributes fo' th' group. typedef struck _GROUP_MEMBERSHIP { ULONG RelativeId; ULONG Attributes; } *PGROUP_MEMBERSHIP; Th' group attributes muss be: #define SE_GROUP_MANDATORY (0x00000001L) #define SE_GROUP_ENABLED_BY_DEFAULT (0x00000002L) #define SE_GROUP_ENABLED (0x00000004L) Th' SID struckure is defined as follers: typedef struck _SID_IDENTIFIER_AUTHORITY { UCHAR Value[6]; } SID_IDENTIFIER_AUTHORITY, *PSID_IDENTIFIER_AUTHORITY; Th' constant value fo' th' NT Autho'ity is: #define SECURITY_NT_AUTHORITY {0,0,0,0,0,5} typedef struck _SID { UCHAR Revishun; UCHAR SubAutho'ityCount; Windows 2000 Kerberos Autho'izashun Data April 2000 © 2000 Microsof' Co'po'ashun. All rights resarved, cuss it all t' tarnation. Microsof' Confidential, ah reckon. This hyar Specificashun is provided pursuant t'th' terms an' corndishuns of th' Agreement fo' Microsof' Autho'izashun Data Specificashun v. 1.0 fo' Microsof' Windows 2000 Operatin' Systems (th' "Agreement") fo' th' sole purpose of allerin' review of th' Specificashun fo' security analysis, as further specified in th' Agreement. Eff'n yo' haf not downloaded th' Specificashun fum Microsof''s website an' agreed t'th' terms an' corndishuns of th' Agreement, yer not an autho'ized licensee of th' Specificashun. Page 7 of 12 SID_IDENTIFIER_AUTHORITY IdentifierAutho'ity; [size_is(SubAutho'ityCount)] ULONG SubAutho'ity[*]; } SID, *PSID; Th' SubAutho'ityCount field corntains th' number of elements in th' acshul SubAutho'ity confo'mant array. Th' maximum number of subautho'ities allered is 15. Th' KERB_SID_AND_ATTRIBUTES struckure corntains intire group SIDs an' their co'respondin' attributes: typedef struck _KERB_SID_AND_ATTRIBUTES { PSID Sid; ULONG Attributes; } KERB_SID_AND_ATTRIBUTES, *PKERB_SID_AND_ATTRIBUTES; Th' attributes is th' same as th' group attributes defined above. Client Info'mashun Th' client info'mashun is included in th' PAC t'aller a sarver t'vahify thet th' PAC in a ticket is applicable t'th' client of th' ticket, which prevents splicin' of PACs between tickets. Th' PAC_CLIENT_INFO struckure is included in a PAC_INFO_BUFFER of type PAC_CLIENT_INFO_TYPE. typedef struck _PAC_CLIENT_INFO { FILETIME ClientId; USHORT NameLen'th; WCHAR Name[1]; } PAC_CLIENT_INFO, *PPAC_CLIENT_INFO; Th' fields is defined as follers: ClientId - This hyar field corntains a cornvahshun of th' AuthTime field of th' ticket into a FILETIME struckure. NameLen'th - This hyar field corntains th' len'th, in bytes, of th' Name field, cuss it all t' tarnation. Name - This hyar field corntains th' client name fum th' ticket, cornvahted t'Unicode an' incoded usin' "/" t'separeete parts of th' client principal name wif an "@" separeetin' th' client principal name fum th' realm name. Th' strin' is not null terminated, cuss it all t' tarnation. Supplemental Credentials Th' KDC may return supplemental credentials in th' PAC as fine. Supplemental credentials is data assosheeated wif a security package thet is private t'thet package. They kin be used t' return an appropriate user key thet is specific t'thet package fo' th' purposes of authenticashun. Supplemental creds is only used in cornjunckshun wif PKINIT[2]. Supplemental credentials is allus incrypped usin' th' client key. Th' PAC_CREDENTIAL_DATA struckure is NDR incoded an' Windows 2000 Kerberos Autho'izashun Data April 2000 © 2000 Microsof' Co'po'ashun. All rights resarved, cuss it all t' tarnation. Microsof' Confidential, ah reckon. This hyar Specificashun is provided pursuant t'th' terms an' corndishuns of th' Agreement fo' Microsof' Autho'izashun Data Specificashun v. 1.0 fo' Microsof' Windows 2000 Operatin' Systems (th' "Agreement") fo' th' sole purpose of allerin' review of th' Specificashun fo' security analysis, as further specified in th' Agreement. Eff'n yo' haf not downloaded th' Specificashun fum Microsof''s website an' agreed t'th' terms an' corndishuns of th' Agreement, yer not an autho'ized licensee of th' Specificashun. Page 8 of 12 then incrypped wif th' key used t'encrypp th' KDC's reply t'th' client. Th' PAC_CREDENTIAL_INFO struckure is included in PAC_INFO_BUFFER of type PAC_CREDENTIAL_TYPE. Supplemental credentials fo' a sin'le package is NDR incoded as follers: typedef struck _SECPKG_SUPPLEMENTAL_CRED { UNICODE_STRING PackageName; ULONG CredentialSize; [size_is(CredentialSize)]PUCHAR Credentials; } SECPKG_SUPPLEMENTAL_CRED, *PSECPKG_SUPPLEMENTAL_CRED; Th' fields in this hyar struckure is defined as follers: PackageName - This hyar field corntains th' name of th' package fo' which credentials is presented, cuss it all t' tarnation. CredentialSize - This hyar field corntains th' len'th, in bytes, of th' presented credentials. Credentials - This hyar field corntains a pointer t'th' credential data. Th' set of all supplemental credentials is NDR incoded in a PAC_CREDENTIAL_DATA struckure: typedef struck _PAC_CREDENTIAL_DATA { ULONG CredentialCount; [size_is(CredentialCount)] SECPKG_SUPPLEMENTAL_CRED Credentials[*]; } PAC_CREDENTIAL_DATA, *PPAC_CREDENTIAL_DATA; Th' fields is defined as follers: CredentialCount - This hyar field corntains th' number of credential present in th' Credentials array. Credentials - This hyar field corntains an array of th' presented supplemental credentials. Th' PAC_CREDENTIAL_DATA struckure is NDR incoded an' then incrypped wif th' key used t' encrypp th' KDC reply. Th' resultin' buffer is returned in th' follerin' struckure: typedef struck _PAC_CREDENTIAL_INFO { ULONG Vershun; ULONG EncrypshunType; UCHAR Data[1]; } PAC_CREDENTIAL_INFO, *PPAC_CREDENTIAL_INFO; Th' fields is defined as follers: Vershun - This hyar field corntains th' vahshun field of th' key used t'encrypp th' data, o' zero eff'n th' field is not present. Windows 2000 Kerberos Autho'izashun Data April 2000 © 2000 Microsof' Co'po'ashun. All rights resarved, cuss it all t' tarnation. Microsof' Confidential, ah reckon. This hyar Specificashun is provided pursuant t'th' terms an' corndishuns of th' Agreement fo' Microsof' Autho'izashun Data Specificashun v. 1.0 fo' Microsof' Windows 2000 Operatin' Systems (th' "Agreement") fo' th' sole purpose of allerin' review of th' Specificashun fo' security analysis, as further specified in th' Agreement. Eff'n yo' haf not downloaded th' Specificashun fum Microsof''s website an' agreed t'th' terms an' corndishuns of th' Agreement, yer not an autho'ized licensee of th' Specificashun. Page 9 of 12 EncryppType - This hyar field corntains th' encrypshun type used t'encrypp th' data. Th' encrypshun type uses th' same values as th' defined incrypshuns types fo' Kerberos [1]. Data - This hyar field corntains an array of bytes corntainin' th' encrypped supplemental credential data. Signatures Th' PAC corntains two digital signatures: one usin' th' key of th' sarver, an' one usin' th' key of th' KDC. Th' signatures is present fo' two reasons. Fust, th' signature wif th' sarver's key is present t'prevent a client fum juneratin' their own PAC an' sendin' it t'th' KDC as incrypped autho'izashun data t'be included in tickets. Second, th' signature wif th' KDC's key is present t' prevent an untrested service fum fo'gin' a ticket t'itse'f wif an invalid PAC. Th' two signatures are sent in PAC_INFO_BUFFERs of type PAC_SERVER_CHECKSUM an' PAC_KDC_CHECKSUM respeckively. Th' signatures is contained in th' follerin' struckure: typedef struck _PAC_SIGNATURE_DATA { ULONG SignatureType; UCHAR Signature[1]; } PAC_SIGNATURE_DATA, *PPAC_SIGNATURE_DATA; Th' fields is defined as follers: SignatureType - This hyar field corntains th' type of checksum used t'create a signature. Th' checksum muss be a keyed checksum, dawgone it. Signature - This hyar field cornsists of an array of bytes corntainin' th' checksum data. Th' len'th of bytes may be determined by th' wrappin' PAC_INFO_BUFFER struckure. Fo' th' sarver's checksum, th' key used t'junerate th' signature sh'd be th' same key used t' encrypp th' ticket. Thus, eff'n th' enc_tkt_in_skey opshun is used, th' sesshun key fum th' sarver's TGT sh'd be used, cuss it all t' tarnation. Th' Key used t'encrypp ticket-grantin' tickets is used t'junerate th' KDC's checksum, dawgone it. Th' checksums is computed as follers: 1. Th' complete PAC is built, includin' space fo' both checksums 2. Th' data po'shun of both checksums is zeroed, cuss it all t' tarnation. 3. Th' entire PAC struckure is checksummed wif th' sarver's key, an' th' result is sto'ed in th' sarver's checksum struckure. 4. Th' sarver's checksum is then checksummed wif th' KDC's key. 5. Th' checksum wif th' KDC key is sto'ed in th' KDC's checksum struckure. Windows 2000 Kerberos Autho'izashun Data April 2000 © 2000 Microsof' Co'po'ashun. All rights resarved, cuss it all t' tarnation. Microsof' Confidential, ah reckon. This hyar Specificashun is provided pursuant t'th' terms an' corndishuns of th' Agreement fo' Microsof' Autho'izashun Data Specificashun v. 1.0 fo' Microsof' Windows 2000 Operatin' Systems (th' "Agreement") fo' th' sole purpose of allerin' review of th' Specificashun fo' security analysis, as further specified in th' Agreement. Eff'n yo' haf not downloaded th' Specificashun fum Microsof''s website an' agreed t'th' terms an' corndishuns of th' Agreement, yer not an autho'ized licensee of th' Specificashun. Page 10 of 12 PAC Requess Pre-Auth Data No'mally, th' PAC is included in ev'ry pre-authenticated ticket received fum an AS request. Howevah, a client may also explicitly requess eifer t'include o' t'not include th' PAC. This hyar is done by sendin' th' PAC-REQUEST preauth data. KERB-PA-PAC-REQUEST ::= SEQUENCE { include-pac[0] BOOLEAN -- eff'n TRUE, an' no PAC present, -- include PAC. ---Eff'n FALSE, an' PAC -- present, remove PAC } Th' fields is defined as follers: include-pac - This hyar field indicates whether a PAC sh'd be included o' not. Eff'n th' value is TRUE, a PAC will be included independent of other preauth data. Eff'n th' value is FALSE, then no PAC will be included, even eff'n other preauth data is present. Th' preauth ID is: #define KRB5_PADATA_PAC_REQUEST 128 References 1 Neuman, C., Kohl, J., Ts'o, T., "Th' Kerberos Netwawk Authenticashun Service (V5)", draf'-ietf-cat-kerberos- revishuns-05.txt, March 10, 2000 2 Tung, B., Hur, M., Medvinsky, A., Medvinsky, S., Wray, J., Trostle, J., " Public Key Cryppography fo' Initial Authenticashun in Kerberos", draf'-ietf-cat-kerberos-pk-init-11.txt, March 15, 2000 Windows 2000 Kerberos Autho'izashun Data April 2000 © 2000 Microsof' Co'po'ashun. All rights resarved, cuss it all t' tarnation. Microsof' Confidential, ah reckon. Page 11 of 12 Legal Notice This hyar Specificashun is provided t'yo' pursuant t'th' terms an' corndishuns of th' Agreement fo' Microsof' Autho'izashun Data Specificashun v. 1.0 fo' Microsof' Windows 2000 Operatin' Systems (th' "Agreement") fo' th' sole purpose of allerin' yo' t'review th' Specificashun fo' security analysis, as further specified in th' Agreement. Eff'n yo' haf not downloaded th' Specificashun fum Microsof''s website an' agreed t'th' terms an' corndishuns of th' Agreement, yer not an autho'ized licensee of th' Specificashun. Fo' yer reference, th' Agreement is reprodooced below. Agreement fo' Microsof' Autho'izashun Data Specificashun v. 1.0 fo' Microsof' Windows 2000 Operatin' Systems IMPORTANT--READ CAREFULLY: This hyar Microsof' Agreement ("Agreement") is a legal agreement between yo' (eifer an indivijool o' a sin'le intity) an' Microsof' Co'po'ashun ("Microsof'") fo' th' vahshun of th' Microsof' specificashun identified above which yer about t'download ("Specificashun"). BY DOWNLOADING, COPYING OR OTHERWISE USING THE SPECIFICATION, YOU AGREE TO BE BOUND BY THE TERMS OF THIS AGREEMENT. IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO THE TERMS OF THIS AGREEMENT, DO NOT DOWNLOAD, COPY, OR USE THE SPECIFICATION. Th' Specificashun is owned by Microsof' o' its suppliers an' is protecked by copyright laws an' internashunal copyright treaties, as fine as other intelleckual propuhty laws an' treaties. 1. LICENSE. (a) Provided thet yo' comply wif all terms an' corndishuns of this hyar Agreement, includin' wifout limitashun subseckshuns (b)-(d) below, Microsof' grants t'yo' th' follerin' non-exclusive, wo'ldwide, royalty-free, non-transferable, non-sublicenseable license, unner enny copyrights o' trade secrets owned o' licensable by Microsof' wifout payment of cornsiderashun t'unaffiliated third parties, t'reprodooce an' use a reasonable number of copies of th' Specificashun in its intirety fo' th' sole purpose of reviewin' th' Specificashun fo' security analysis. By way of clarificashun of th' fo'egwine, th' Specificashun is provided t'yo' solely fo' yer info'mashunal purposes (fo' review as specified above) an', pursuant t'this Agreement, Microsof' does not grant yo' enny right t'implement this hyar Specificashun. (b) Th' Specificashun is cornfidential info'mashun an' a trade secret of Microsof'. Tharfo'e, yo' may not disclose th' Specificashun t'ennyone else ('cept as specifically allered below), an' yo' muss take reasonable security precaushuns, at least as great as th' precaushuns yo' take t'proteck yer own confidential info'mashun, t'keep th' Specificashun cornfidential, ah reckon. Eff'n yer an intity, yo' may disclose th' Specificashun t'yer full-time employees on a need t'knows basis, provided thet yo' haf executed appropriate writ agreements witcher employees good 'nuff t'enable yo' t'comply wif th' terms of this hyar Agreement. Yer also permitted t'discuss th' Specificashun wif ennyone else who has downloaded th' Specificashun an' agreed t'these terms an' corndishuns. (c) Yo' may not remove enny of th' copyright notices o' other lejunds fum enny copy of th' Specificashun. (d) Microsof' resarves all other rights it may haf in th' Specificashun an' enny intelleckual propuhty tharin, as enny fool kin plainly see. Microsof' may haf patents o' pendin' patent applicashuns, trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets o' other intelleckual propuhty rights covahin' subjeck matter in th' Specificashun. Th' furnishin' of this hyar Specificashun does not give yo' enny license t'these patents, trademarks, trade secrets, copyrights, o' other intelleckual propuhty rights, 'cept as specifically set fo'th in subseckshun (a) above wif respeck to sartin copyrights an' trade secrets. Windows 2000 Kerberos Autho'izashun Data April 2000 © 2000 Microsof' Co'po'ashun. All rights resarved, cuss it all t' tarnation. Microsof' Confidential, ah reckon. Page 12 of 12 2. ADDITIONAL LIMITATIONS. (a) Th' fo'egwine license is applicable only t'th' vahshun of th' Specificashun which yer about t' download, cuss it all t' tarnation. It does not apply t'enny addishunal vahshuns of o' extenshuns t'th' Specificashun. (b) Wifout prejudice t'enny other rights, Microsof' may terminate this hyar Agreement eff'n yo' fail t'comply wif its terms an' corndishuns. In sech event yo' muss destroy all copies of th' Specificashun in yer postesshun o' unner yer corntrol, ah reckon. 3. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS. All ownyship, title an' intelleckual propuhty rights in an' t'th' Specificashun are owned by Microsof' o' its suppliers. 4. DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTIES. To th' maximum extent permitted by applicable law, Microsof' an' its suppliers provide th' Specificashun (an' all intelleckual propuhty tharin) AS IS AND WITH ALL FAULTS, an' harby disclaim all warranties an' corndishuns, eifer express, implied o' statuto'y, includin', but not limited to, enny (if enny) implied warranties o' corndishuns of merchantability, of fitness fo' a particular purpose, an' of accuracy o' completeness, all wif regard t'th' Specificashun an' enny intelleckual propuhty tharin, as enny fool kin plainly see. ALSO, THERE IS NO WARRANTY OR CONDITION OF TITLE OR NON-INFRINGEMENT WITH REGARD TO THE SPECIFICATION AND ANY INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY THEREIN. 5. EXCLUSION OF DIRECT, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL AND CERTAIN OTHER DAMAGES. TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, IN NO EVENT SHALL MICROSOFT OR ITS SUPPLIERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, INDIRECT, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES WHATSOEVER (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, DAMAGES FOR LOSS OF PROFITS OR FOR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) ARISING OUT OF OR IN ANY WAY RELATED TO THE USE OF OR INABILITY TO USE THE SPECIFICATION, ANY INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY THEREIN, OR OTHERWISE UNDER OR IN CONNECTION WITH ANY PROVISION OF THIS AGREEMENT, EVEN IF MICROSOFT OR ANY SUPPLIER HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES. 6. LIMITATION OF LIABILITY AND REMEDIES. Notwifstan'in' enny damages thet yo' might incur fo' enny reason whutsoevah, th' entire liability of Microsof' an' enny of its suppliers unner enny provishun of this hyar Agreement an' yer exclusive remedy fo' all of th' fo'egwine shall be limited t'th' greater of th' amount acshully paid by yo' fo' th' Specificashun o' U.S.$5.00. Th' fo'egwine limitashuns, exclushuns an' disclaimers shall apply t'th' maximum extent permitted by applicable law, even eff'n enny remedy fails its essential purpose. 7. APPLICABLE LAW. This hyar Agreement is govahned by th' laws of th' State of Warshin'ton, as enny fool kin plainly see. 8. ENTIRE AGREEMENT. This hyar Agreement is th' entire agreement between yo' an' Microsof' relatin' t'th' Specificashun an' it supersedes all prio' o' corntempo'aneous o'al o' writ communicashuns, proposals an' representashuns wif respeck t'th' Specificashun.
Have you got the money to fund a legal battle against a multinational bank with trillions of dollars at its hands (yes, that's a t, not a b or m)? I don't.
Disregard the fact that you might well win money in a countersuit... would you want to risk the chance that you'd lose (think... this is the wonderful American judicial system we're talking about here) and have to pay off BoAs high priced lawyers? I wouldn't.
I agree that BoA are just being ruthless bastards, but I'm sad to say that with the current status of the judicial system, might (read money) does make right...
Eric
[see subject]
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Don't resort to the threats of lawyers when a technical solution is in your own hands. There's even a legal theory that one can't use the courts when one hasn't attempted to mitigate the damage using the means under your own control.
Anomalous: inconsistent with or deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
Anomalous: deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
Canard: a false or unfounded repor
Enjoy.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Suddenly I have visions of T-shirts with Dialectizers source code printed on them....
Got Rhinos?
Wow.
I've always held the belief we should invite all the state govt officials to DC for some BS pork-barrel-sponsored shindig with all the feds then tac-nuke the whole lot of them. Most people thought I was some hilljack backwoods militia type.. but the infestation of corrupt, self-preservation, lust-for-power types in US government is simply overwhelming. To find someone else thinks along the same lines as myself.. let alone in ./ ... wow.
As any country we need leaders. What we don't need are leaders who THINK they are leaders and do everything to preserve that leadership instead of bettering their governed society.
-'fester
But what about Daily Mail then??? Now THAT'S a SCARY paper!!! (or was it Daily Express - can never remember...) And mind you, some of those english rednecks can be quite lethal as well.. I stay away from them...
if (!signature) { throw std::runtime_error("No sig!"); }
As I said, if it came to an actual suit that might be a different matter--but a C&D letter is NOT legal action, it's just a damned letter. It would actually be risky for BofA to take real legal action, so there whores, er, lawyers would probably advise against it.
--Lee Daniel Crocker : http://www.etceterology.com My life is in the public domain.
I know it must be rough having big corps breathing down one's neck, but this just seems like one instances were the web-liberty's spinal chord needs to stand strong. This isn't about copyright infringment or any of that jazz, its about corporations not wanting to be insulted, and corporations are always going to try to stop people from corrupting their public image. I would be nervous too if big companies gave me that legal bullshit, but in this case, theres really nothing to fear.
Next time you're up against a multi-trillion dollar company, and their army of lawyers, please tell us how you respond. It's easy to criticize someone when you're not the one on the verge of being sued. And even if he did win if this went to court, would you want to risk it if it didn't?
That's right.
I got a C&D letter from MPAA lawyers telling me to remove deCSS from my account. They sent a copy of the letter to our sysadms, too.
Administrators threw their copy straight to the bin ("Ridiculous! We have no intention of doing any of this crap."). I also sent a short to-the-point e-mail to the address I found on C&D letter telling basically that "I do not admit any wrongdoing nor do I recognize your authority. I will not comply."
Today a copy of the MPAA letter is hanging on my cubicle wall like a trophy of some kind - right next to the news of Microsoft being found a monopoly and its practises anti-competetive. Haven't heard from MPAA ever since.
While that particular piece of Microsoft news cheers me up, the MPAA letter is there to remind me of the corporate crap that's now infecting the net. It just never ends. Especially if you don't do anything to anything about it.
Refuse, resist! Just say no!
...would make a great plug-in for Mozilla.
cripes! and now i've gone and linked to it! we're schrod!!
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
By restricting the use of the script to his own site, the owner is creating one heck of a big increase in traffic for his advertising supported site. Isn't it at least possible, that the change took that into effect, and not just annoying letters threatening vague future legal consequences? How many of you would have otherwise looked at his main site? The dialectizer is funny, but I could imagine it also being a bit of a strain on his servers. In passing, I'd also like to note that passing your banking records through a proxy seems like a HORRIBLE idea.
"Don't you know you're going to shock the monkey?"- Peter Gabriel
hey, you're making fun of it, but I actually had someone argue to me that the jive filter was racist. a pretty humorless way to see things, if you ask me..
Oh for god sakes, the dummies thing is a completely different matter. It didn't involve copyrights at all, but rather trademarks. And no one is stopping you from saying the words "for dummies" (If they were, you couldn't say "IDG" ether, now could you?). Rather, they are stopping people from Titling things with the words "for dummies" in them. There is a pretty big difference, and they really have a valid point. Not to mention that were ok with the title "for dummiesZ"
. Should I be able to call anything I want "Linux"?
Or Solaris? And why aren't all of you people pissed at ESR for when he tried to trademark "Open Source" for himself?
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Your personification of our country's currnet walking-on-eggshells culture, IMHO, creates a more hostile environment than that in which people can *gasp* speak their minds. In all truth, the more reactionary people become, the less our society feels it is able to think, and therefore say. Isn't this mass-repression just as bad as supressing the thoughts and voices of one or a handful of groups?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"I'm disrespectful to dirt! Can you see I am serious?"
Open up the code to the Dialectizer. Let others host the page-viewing portion. That has to be a better alternative than letting these rich uneducated cocksuckers get their way.
I'd put that up on my site in a heartbeat.
-- www.bteg.com | bleh.n3.net | hac47.dhs.org
Cherry Poptart has as much right to be on the shelf as batman.
:)
Most comic store owners have the sensibility to keep adult titles behind the desk. And to those that don't, its up to parents to deny their children access to these stores. So good for the CBLDF for supporting cherry poptart and her coke-snorting dick-sucking activities
no
Does this mean The Shannonizer will be next? Will they stomp on them all?
----
I wonder how far and wide this type of reaction has or could spread. It'd be nice to see that this type of thing were happening here and there, and maybe then, BoA might realize that placating their customers is more important that stomping out a small site that maybe-kinda-sorta dilutes their brand. Alas, as is the case with many large banks, they lose money on all but the largest accounts they hold, and, as a result, are happy to see most of us "Average Joes" leave. Ahh capitalism....~ ~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"I'm disrespectful to dirt! Can you see I am serious?"
Can anybody reccomend an affordable (Around 20 USD/month) hosting service that's outside the US, offers linux/unix-based hosting, and has a decent selection of features? (See here for a good idea of what I'd like ["Bronze" version])
--
"I personal[ly] think Unix is "superior" because on LSD it tastes like Blue." -- jbarnett
#!/usr/bin/perl
#
# Really simple dialectifying Perl script.
# Written by Christopher Thomas
#
# This can be transformed into a CGI very easily. Sample code for this
# has been included but commented out.
#
# This code may be freely used, distributed, and modified.
#
#
# Libraries.
#
# use whatever_cgi_library; # CGI
use strict;
#
# Translation tables.
#
# Make up a set of these tables for each dialect you want to produce.
# Remember that this is case-sensitive.
#
#
# Jar-Jar table.
#
# I've set this translation table up to mimic the "Jar-Jargonizer" that
# was featured in Quickies a while back.
# I've forgotten many of the suffix translations the original script did.
# No great loss.
#
# Translate prefixes of words.
my (%jarjar_prefix_trans);
%jarjar_prefix_trans =
(
);
# Translate suffixes of words.
my (%jarjar_suffix_trans);
%jarjar_suffix_trans =
(
"'re"=>"sa be"
);
# Translate whole words.
my (%jarjar_word_trans);
%jarjar_word_trans =
(
"me"=>"meesa",
"I"=>"meesa",
"you"=>"yousa",
"am"=>"be",
"I'm"=>"meesa be",
"are"=>"be",
"people"=>"Gungans",
"person"=>"Gungan",
"microsoft"=>"the Sith"
);
#
# Translation table hook pointers.
#
my (%jarjar_table);
%jarjar_table =
(
"prefix"=>\%jarjar_prefix_trans,
"suffix"=>\%jarjar_suffix_trans,
"word"=>\%jarjar_word_trans
);
#
# Master table indexing hook tables.
#
my (%dialect_tables);
%dialect_tables =
(
"jarjar"=>\%jarjar_table
);
#
# Utility functions.
#
#
# This function translates the specified list according to the specified
# dialect rules.
#
# Arg 1 is an array reference pointing to the text to modify.
# Arg 2 is a hash reference pointing to a dialect hook table.
#
# Returns 0 if successful and an error code if not.
sub translate
{
my ($text_p, $htable_p);
my ($prefix_p, $suffix_p, $word_p);
my ($errcode);
my ($this_line);
my ($index);
my ($key);
# Default to success.
$errcode = 0;
# Read arguments.
$text_p = $_[0];
$htable_p = $_[1];
# Sanity check.
if ((!(defined $text_p)) || (!(defined $htable_p)))
{
# Bad arguments.
$errcode = 1;
}
else
{
# Extract hook pointers.
$prefix_p = $$htable_p{prefix};
$suffix_p = $$htable_p{suffix};
$word_p = $$htable_p{word};
# Blithely assume that these hook pointers are valid.
# Translate.
for ($index = 0; defined ($this_line = $$text_p[$index]); $index++)
{
# Pad the string, to make life easier.
$this_line = " $this_line";
# Replace prefixes.
foreach $key (keys %$prefix_p)
{
# Take precautions against munching HTML tags.
$this_line =~ s/([^\w\])/$$suffix_p{$key}$1/g;
}
# Replace words.
foreach $key (keys %$word_p)
{
# Take precautions against munching HTML tags.
$this_line =~ s/([^\w\])/$1$$word_p{$key}$2/g;
}
# Remove padding.
$this_line =~ s/^.//;
# Store this line back in the array.
$$text_p[$index] = $this_line;
}
}
# Return the result.
return $errcode;
}
#
# Main program.
#
my ($target_URL);
my ($dialect_choice);
my (@page_text);
my ($hook_p);
my ($index);
# OUTPUT CONTENT-TYPE HEADER HERE # CGI
# Get arguments.
# CGI READING GOES HERE # CGI
$target_URL = $ARGV[0];
$dialect_choice = "jarjar";
# Get a table to the hook table for this dialect.
$hook_p = $dialect_tables{$dialect_choice};
# Sanity check.
if (!(defined $hook_p))
{
# No such dialect.
print "ERROR: Can't find dialect \"$dialect_choice\".\n";
}
else
{
# Try to read the specified web page.
@page_text = `lynx -source $target_URL`;
# Blithely assume that this worked.
# Translate the page.
translate(\@page_text, $hook_p);
# Dump the page contents to standard output.
for ($index = 0; defined $page_text[$index]; $index++)
{
# Don't add newlines; we've kept the old ones.
print $page_text[$index];
}
# Print a trailing newline, just in case the web source didn't have one
# and a human is viewing the output.
print "\n";
}
Looks like he needs to add two new filters: - The politically correct-izer - and the lawyer-izer
Uh-oh. That may have been me.
The truth is I am neither black nor am I even remotely offended by these things (on the contrary, it's tough to type such vitriol when you're ROTFL). Now I actually feel kinda bad. What I considered a fun troll at the time has actually come to pass.
YHBT. WAHL. INHANDAA. :^(
You Have Been Trolled. We All Have Lost. I'm Not Having A Nice Day At All.
Now how the heck are my Kentucky in-laws supposed to understand the Web without the Dialectizer?
I've been maintaining a free checking account with them for years- with about $18 in it. They mail a monthly statement...
--Fesh
--Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
if Bank of America will be going after users who have caching enabled. After all, we *are* copying their website to our hard drive when we peruse their website. Gee Gads!
>I think it is sick how corporate America is
>snatching the rights to everything and
>everyone. You can't even have fun anymore
>without some lawyer somewhere getting bent out of shape!
"To be fair, the lawyer was actually pretty nice (I talked to him on the phone),but he had to do what his clients asked him to. But your point is well taken. I feel the same way you do. Big corporations have an awful lot of power, which, in itself, isn't necessarily a bad thing, but combined with a culture in which the courtroom is looked upon as the first, not last, line of defense, it's a nasty mix for ordinary guys like you and me. I have little doubt that I'm right and no doubt that I'd lose a lawsuit, were one to be filed.
I thought of your idea of allowing the Dialectizer to hit sanctioned web sites, but you point out the problem yourself. It would take several hundred thousand sanctioned web sites before it would make much of a difference, and by then the script would be nasty on the server, as several hundred thousand pattern matches would have to be done per request.
At the very least, though, I guess you can copy and paste text from other web pages into the "Dialectize Text" box.
Thanks for your letter of support."
ah propose a noo dialeckic:
F*ck yo'! Fry mah hide!
Lawyer Translashun: Yer hyarby o'dered t'cease an' desist eemeejutly unner CFR 938.10 subpareegraph b, which states: "No parody o' other hoomah may take place via a purely online fo'um which modifies language wifout th' consent of th' varmints usin' said language". Furthermo'e, plaintiff hyarby declares...
Bank of South Car'lina, wif $656 billion in assets as of March 31, 2000, is th' largess bank in th' United States. Th' compenny sarves mo'e than 30 million households an' 2 million businesses acrost th' country, offerin' cestomers th' largess an' most cornvenient delivery netwawk fum offices an' ATMs t'tellyphone an' internet access. It also provides comprehensive internashunal co'po'ate financial services fo' clients doin' business aroun' th' wo'ld, cuss it all t' tarnation. Th' compenny creates financial relashunships featurin' a full array of financial services, fum tradishunal bankin' producks t'investments an' capital raisin' wifin th' securities markets. Bank of South Car'lina stock is listed on th' Noo Yawk, Pacific an' London stock exchanges an' sartin shares is listed on th' Tokyo Stock Exchange.
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
(of course it's absured, BUT...)
What about opt-in? I already sent permission for the dialectizer to do its evil work upon my website. It's a possible source of hits, good PR...
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
I remember reading about a web service that would let users post notes on various 3rd party sites. Your browser would connect to a site, then to the service to see if other users had tagged the site with their own notes. It was like opt-in graffiti or something. It sounded cool but I didn't follow up and lost the links. Probably didn't survive in our Orwellian world...
Ask Jesus!
1. Go to http://www.bankofamerica.com/
2. Click on "Contact Us", and choose your state.
3. Go down to the bottom of the second column and click on "General Inquiries and Customer Service".
4. At the top of the page, click on "Click here to send a secure e-mail using SSL to Bank of America".
5. Write your message, using "Comments and Suggestions" for your subject.
I'd be respectful but firm.
Actually you only get a lawyer in a criminal case, and then not even in all criminal cases. Misdemeanors come to mind. I seem to remember Texas won a supreme court case in which they did not want to pay for lawyers, but wanted to prosecute lots fo people...
In any event in civil cases you put your money where your mouth is.
What the site does is obviously fair use. If the lawyers are concerned about content appearing to originate at the parody site, use a google-style header that explains the meaning of parody.
If the lawyers keep rattling their sabers after that then one could provide a tag or a robots.txt-style file which will stop translation and instead put up jerk error. The biggest disadvantage of this is it suggests that you don't have the right to do it in the first place. Maybe explain in ingratiating detail how you provide the opt-out for squeemish webmasters and companies without the confidance to be laughed at.
I realize that this message is probably futile and it is totally off-topic but I'm going to post it anyway. I've sent this story to /. twice but it was rejected both times. I've read a lot lately about the RIAA taking legal action to prevent the illegal trading of Mp3's. I don't really agree with this legal action, however I can understand why they are suing most of the companies that they are suing. That is until today. I am a Linux user and Unix Systems Administrator for a large Networking Corporation. I have been using Linux on my Home PC for a number of years now. There was always a couple of things that I have found Linux lacked as compared to Windows. Linux lacks the multimedia features of Windows and the only other thing that I couldn't find for Linux was a really good News reader, something comparable to Forte Agent for windows. The other night I did a search for "linux news readers" and found one called "pan" I downloaded it, compiled it and found that it worked Great! It had almost all the features that Forte Agent had, I was able to download and decode binary attachments in newsgroups, it had great posting capabilities etc. So I decided to check out the developers web site. SuperpimpSoft I couldn't believe what I saw when I got there.
This company is being sued by the RIAA. The RIAA is suing them because their news reader is capable of decoding binary attachments. I'd like to know when the hell the RIAA is going to realize that the entire internet doesn't revolve around Mp3's. I mean come on, because it is capable of decoding binary attachments, that could possibly be Mp3's!! Hell why not sue AOL, MSN and every other ISP that enables people to connect to the internet, because if it weren't for them there is no way people would be trading Mp3's online.
Words cannot express how angry I am right now. Because of the RIAA, a great, open source news reader will have to stop development because it could potently be used to download Mp3's .. well news flash so can Netscape, Internet Explorer, WS_FTP, DOS FTP, Cute FTP, Lynx and the list goes on!!
So I did a Thought for a while .. why would the RIAA want to bully around such a small company that has only one software product, and that product is open source anyway? Then it hit me.. The RIAA knows that these guys can't fight back and they know that they'll probably win in court. This will set a precedent, opening the doors for the RIAA to sue other companies that make news readers, Most popular Windows newsreader .. Forte Free Agent. So I went to Forte's site to do a little digging. When I got there I read that Forte had recently been acquired by a company by the name of Genesys. Genesys is owned by Alcatel! I think that Alcatel should help out the guys at SuperPimpSoft I mean, it would be great PR for Alcatel, not to mention that they would be helping to avert a future lawsuit against one of the companies that they've acquired.
I think the most important thing is letting as many people as possible know about this. And that's my 2 cents..
---
---
Here is my Direct Violation of Microsoft's Copyrig
2. People on the prowl to boost thier damaged self-image through unconstructive criticism are unspeakably needy. Please kiss my ass now.
======
"Rex unto my cleeb, and thou shalt have everlasting blort." - Zorp 3:16
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
nah, it wasn't you, it wasn't on slashdot, and it wasn't a troll. and as a troll, I find it funny :)
If those of us who have our own domains were to request that babelfish not be allowed to retransmit our copyrighted material, I bet that we could coax AltaVista into a law suit. Of course, we want AltaVista to win, so our legal bills will not be very expensive. Once AltaVista wins, there will be case law in Dialectizer's favor.
Would it be possible to get Mr. Stoddard to allow the Dialectizing of Slashdot material?
I just love translating flamebate into Swedish!
"A sample size of one is really just statistical masturbation."
F*ck you!
Lawyer Translation: You are hereby ordered to cease and desist immediately under CFR 938.10 subparagraph b, which states: "No parody or other humor may take place via a purely online forum which modifies language without the consent of the people using said language". Furthermore, plaintiff hereby declares...
The above posting contains information that is proprietary and confidential intellectual property of the Church Of Scientology, Inc. ("Scientology") and/or of the Hubbard Dianetics Foundation ("HDF"). Slashdot.Org, its corporate parent Andover.Net, and any and all other organizations facilitating or enabling the transmission of the above posting are hereby warned that they are committing contributory infringement of Scientology's and/or HDF's intellectual property, and are further ordered to cease and desist from the continued publication of such information, to remove the above posting from any or all Internet sites or servers on which it may reside, and to provide Scientology and HDF with conclusive proof of the destruction of any and all "bits" of information employed in said posting's creation, maintenance, and dissemination.
Very truly yours,
C. Orgue
for the Church of Scientology
and the Hubbard Dianetics Foundation
By the time you get the subpoena, it's too late. You are screwed, and you need a lawyer.
--
that is the same exact idea that the dialectizer is doing, i think that it's bull-hockey for them to do that to him
Actually, depending on your interpretation of the wave equations involved, they are not the original photons, or waves.
Think of lenses - they modify the image by bending the lightwaves. Do people with glasses need explicit permission to view a copyrighted work, just because their glasses produce a virtual image of the work that is at a distance that their eyes can naturally focus to?
What happens when a light wave (or the probability distribution associated with a photon's presence) hits a refracting material? It produces another wave within the refracting material that has a different wavelength and usually heads in a different direction. On getting to the other side, a new wave is produced in the air. A derivative work!
(ducks for cover before a real physicist has a chance to correct me)
-- open source? sounds like the real book --
The U.S. seems to be filled with ridiculous legal threats ... I am a US citizenm, and I don't go around making ridiculous legal threats.
The US is full of a bunch of lawers who do not understand any aspect of the internet, so respond with these ridiculous law suit, that do nothing more then prove there ignorance, harm people who have done nothing wrong, and make there prefession appear as tho' it is filled with money sucking bastards with no ethics.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
After reading this article a strange idea came to mind: a list of companies along with brief descriptions of all their cowardly shots at companies, individuals, or groups smaller than them.
Bank of America would be in there thanks to this ridiculous claim against the Dialectizer. Microsoft would probably lead the pack and I don't need to give examples here.
This sort of thing would serve two purposes. Firstly, it would be a permanent, searchable record of "dumb things companies do". A boon for historians. Secondly, it would allow people to get a feel for what the companies attitude is if they happen to be considering working for them, buying their products or even, heaven forbid!, poking a bit of fun at them.
Is anyone keeping such a list? If so where? If not, want to help me start one?
"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge, and where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"-T.S.Eliot
What does this mean for:
--
--
fat lenny's gonna lick your brain today.
and it can be found here:
http://www.radwin.org/michael/projec ts/eudora/ by Michael J. Radwin.
It makes me laugh _all_ the time !
"We'll reach that bridge when we find it" - Suzy Romer, prime minister Netherlands Antilles '98-'99
What about Babelfish or Silk? Does this mean we all net translation software would amount to a copyright infringement? This is a horrible precedent. Though the intent of translating the pages was humor, there is little difference between dialect translation and language translation. Scary.
How about a mungers.txt standard for exclusion of web-munging programs? Worried corporations could then add "Dialectizer: *" or "ThirdVoice: *" to their mungers.txt file and not have to worry about it.
Taking this idea one step farther, we could exclude User-Agents entirely. If you're not going to design an accessible page, your mungers.txt file should say so. Use it to exclude Lynx, Netscape, Amaya, MSIE, or any browser you choose. Or just put a big fat asterisk in mungers.txt and proclaim to the world that your web design is so bleeding-edge that there aren't any browsers available yet to handle it. It's your choice.
mungers.txt: I See A Great Need.
That's a very good point. Racial and sexual harassment lawsuits generally require companies to show they took due diligence against reported behavior. If somebody complained about the site being translated to Jive, the lawyers would certainly recommend firing off a letter.
Still clearly the bank would have very little chance if they go to court.
What would be interesting would be if somebody gave a cease and desist to Babelfish which is a lot closer to a genuine copyright violation.
I don't understand how the Dialectizer would have been violating copyrights.
Can anyone explain this to me? What was the reasoning behind suing them in the first place?
-------- "All I want in life's a little bit of love to take the pain away" --Spiritualized
There is no greater power in the world today than that wielded by the manipulators of public opinion in America. No king or pope of old, no conquering general or high priest ever disposed of a power even remotely approaching that of the few dozen men who control America's mass news and entertainment media.
Their power is not distant and impersonal; it reaches into every home in America, and it works its will during nearly every waking hour. It is the power which shapes and molds the mind of virtually every citizen, young or old, rich or poor, simple or sophisticated.
The mass media form for us our image of the world and then tell us what to think about that image. Essentially everything we know -- or think we know -- about events outside our own neighborhood or circle of acquaintances comes to us via our daily newspaper, our weekly news magazine, our radio, or our television.
It is not just the heavy-handed suppression of certain news stories from our newspapers or the blatant propagandizing of history-distorting TV "docudramas" which characterizes the opinion-manipulating techniques of the media masters. They exercise both subtlety and thoroughness in their management of both the news and the entertainment which they present to us.
For example, the way in which the news is covered: which items are emphasized and which are played down, the reporter's choice of words, tone of voice, and facial expressions; the wording of headlines; the choice of illustrations -- all of these things subliminally and yet profoundly affect the way in which we interpret what we see or hear.
On top of this, of course, the columnists and editors remove any remaining doubt from our minds as to just what we are to think about it all. Employing carefully developed psychological techniques, they guide our thought and opinion so that we can be in tune with the "in" crowd, the "beautiful people," the "smart money." They let us know exactly what our attitudes should be toward various types of people and behavior by placing those people or that behavior in the context of a TV drama or situation comedy and having the other TV characters react to them in the Politically Correct way.
Read More
--Clay
In protest I think that as many of us who have servers of our own should offer to run the dialectizer on our own machines. The US is a country run by fear of lawyers. I can't believe you Americans put up with it.
--
-- SIGFPE
I dunno about you guys, but I for one am glad to see this thing gone. Who wants "jive" speak anyway? Do you really think seeing "slap ma' fro" all the time is funny? Do you think that real people of African descent talk that way? I'm glad I wasn't raised on 70's blaxploitation films.
And what about "redneck"? Southern-Americans have it bad enough, what with the Yankess harassing them about the flag they flew in the War of Northern Aggression. I don't think making fun of the way that they say "y'all" is very proper.
And lastly, the Swedish chef. Can we really tolerate the amount of anti-Scandinavian bigotry which we are bombarded with daily in the media? Linus himself was of Swedish extraction, and it is no secret that his father was a chef. Granted, he had a tendency to throw chickens around wildly and make noises that can't quite be described as speech, but that's no reason to rub salt in old wounds.
Shame on you Slashdot, for supporting this monstrosity.
The setup you describe, with a server containing scripts in an interpreted language that are then downloaded directly to the end user's client machine to be interpreted, is an accident of history. Computers don't have to be set up this way, as seperate Von Neumann boxes on a network, with language source transmitted directly between the two, stored on one and interpreted on the other. If some other design besides the Von Neumann had appeared, the situation would be totally different. When other designs beside the Von Neumann are made feasible, the situation will be totally different. Carving laws into stone based on transitory accidents is foolish government.
-------
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man
Given that a democratically elected Austrian with strong nationalist sentiments made life miserable for all of Europe about 50 years ago, you must at least be willing to acknowledge that international fears of fascism in Austria are not completely unfounded.
For everybody's sake, I sincerely hope that we are wrong, and you are right... but don't pretend to be alarmed at the cautious attitudes towards your current government; you had to have known that this would happen.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
In an age where site traffic is almost a type of currency, sites like this begin to fall under a bit of a legal problem. The site is technically profiting off ad revenues (assuming he has banners, if he doesn't, then it has the possibility of profiting), generated by the use of other people's copyrighted work as fodder for his humor engine. His site, however falls under parody and is thus exempt. However, what about sites like Babelfish, which redistribute someone elses copyrighted material, in a new form, in order to gain ad traffic. While I agree that this should be legal, I don't think it currently is.
-- Colin Cross
Damn, too bad it was a CGI-based site... Not easy to mirror unless you have access to the scripts... Speaking of which, does anybody have a copy of the CGI? Did the author every release it?
Don't want to pay Lars? Sue him!
I'm the one person left on this planet that didn't get to see it... any chance you could email me a URL?
--cyphergirl
--Insert catchy
I'm beginning to think that the law needs to be made clearer, not by precedent-making lawsuits, but by legislation. Yes, I know that most legislation relating to the 'Information Age' (or 'Digital Millennium') has been stupid, misguided or downright corrupt - but for the sake of argument, imagine for a moment that legislatures in whatever country were capable of making intellectual property law to benefit consumers.
Explicity define what is fair dealing for works which are made electronically available, via the Web or otherwise. I would say that the following should be allowed:
- Saving copies of a file to local disk, to look at later. (Like timeshifting a TV programme.)
- Printing out copies for personal use. (If you can read it on screen, why not on paper?)
- Distributing copies to others, provided those other people would themselves be able to get a copy, if they could be bothered to. Thus if you save yahoo.com/index.html on disk and give it to a friend, that's explicitly allowed. And if both of you subscribe to the same paid service (eg stock quotes) it should be allowed for you to pass on information which your friend could access, if his modem weren't broken. He pays the fees too, after all.
- Caching and indexing; such labelling and modification of the document as is necessary to store it in a cache or index it efficiently. Returning the document or part of it, perhaps highlighted, as the result of a search.
- Hyperlinks are allowed. This is a no-brainer, but just as well to get it in there explicitly.
- Archives of historical documents and files which were publicly available. There might have to be exceptions in here for libellous material and other nasties, but in general I don't believe that copyright law should be a tool for suppressing leaks.
- Finally, translation and parody, as long as it is made clear that the content has been modified in this way, and of course the people who are given the modified copy could also have gotten the original copy for themselves.
Now, I realize that some of these are probably already allowed by copyright law in most countries. Perhaps they all are. But I'd rather have these things laid down with certainty; uncertainty about what the law says makes anyone vulnerable to an expensive lawsuit from a firm with deep pockets. They might just win, or at least manage to bankrupt you before they lose.
I don't think that any of the above would reduce the incentive for authors and publishers to create new works. And that is the purpose of copyright law, with the intent of benefiting the public. The Web could become a very unpleasant place with legally enforceable bits of JavaScript preventing you from printing pages, people being sued over hyperlinks, and other nastiness. Some of this is happening already.
There probably isn't a snowball's chance in hell of any legislative body working out fair dealing for the Web any time soon. But it's another thing to add to the wishlist.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Why does no one realize that skin color and national origin really do not matter? Judge a person on merit and that person's individual traits--not on arbitrary organization into a subgroup.
Another victory for those who wish to oppress us. United we stand, divided we fall.
www.alarmist.org
I happen to agree and have also been saying for
years that this government needs to fall. I like
the "Invite all the state government people to DC
and nuke the lot"...hadn't thought of them.
Its funny...the sentiment is rampent these days.
I was pissed off after my 2nd time in one day
trying to get my new motorcycle registered at the
RMV, I was ranting outside the building about
how "This government just needs to fall" and some
random guy who was leaving th ebuilding turned to
me and said "Now that ill agree with".
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Good point. Is this really any different than babelfish?
Or the jesus translator (sorry lost the link), or the candaianizer and all the rest (there are a LOT of these things).
Bablefish is probably the best example though, it is doing the same thing that this guys was.
The bablefish doesn't do the same thing this guy was at all. Though the technological process may be similar, the transformation of the work is completely different.
The bablefish takes a peice of text and changes the language that it is written in. The content, and more importantly, the context of the message is unchanged. A political rallying call in french is still a political rallying call when translated to english. A bunch of blond joke in spanish are still blond jokes in english. (though puns would just sound dumb). A health alert in english is still a health alert in portuguese. Ad nauseum.
But the entire point of these dialect "translaters" is to change, not preserve context. Any text read through it becomes a joke. A person who writes on political topics might be perfectly happy for people to read them in other languages, but annoyed to have them turned into a swedish chef joke by someone who isn't even creative enough to do the "parody" on their own.
Again, this is not a legal argument, so save those flames for someone else. But there is a reason that this guy has been flooded with requests to not link to people's sites while bablefish likely hasn't recieved any such requests. They aren't the same thing and people who have worked hard on a site know the difference. If you don't recognize that (possibly non-legal) difference, you won't understand the context of this announcement.
-Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
I theenk thees seete-a is ixtremely clefer und ectooelly qooeete-a heeleriuoos. Um gesh dee bork, bork! It is a sheme-a zeere-a ere-a su muny sooeets oooot zeere-a veet ebsulootely nu sense-a ooff hoomur und hefe-a ebsulootely nu thuooght thruooghuoot zee dey oozeer thun, "Hoo cun I generete-a zee must emuoont ooff press menshuneeng oooor cumpuny in zee shurtest emuoont ooff teeme-a fur free-a?" Iff yuoo esk me-a thees vhule-a theeng is poore-a stoopeedity. Bork bork bork!
Translation:
I think this site is extremely clever and actually quite hilarious. It is a shame there are so many suits out there with absolutely no sense of humor and have absolutely no thought throughout the day other than, "How can I generate the most amount of press mentioning our company in the shortest amount of time for free?" If you ask me this whole thing is pure stupidity.
--Ben
But in all seriousness, releasing the code to the dialiectizer would allow us to enjoy it without putting rinkworks at risk of lawsuit, and without overloading rinkworks' server. Not having thoroughly examined their site, I don't know that they don't offer the code -- I just didn't see it upon casual inspection.
Alternatively, perhaps recoding it as a plug-in would be a good idea. Same benefits, plus it'd be seamless -- just click a "dialectize" button.
Christopher A. Bohn
cb
Oooh! What does this button do!?
Linus is finnish, but he is from the swedish-speaking minority of Finland.
1) why not allow cut and paste, rather than url entering
2) why not host it somewhere else (outside the states)
3) i thought the good `ol us of a allowed what would otherwise be (C) violations if its a parody (fair use)
4) couldnt the site only translate a little of the url`d site?
arent there other things that could be done that just pulling the plug? Sad...
Want to work at Transmeta? MicronPC? Hedgefund.net? AT&T?
Can your IM do this?
It's getting to the point that virtually anything, even completely harmless parodies that don't deprive copyright owners of the use of their work or profit from it, will immediately get swamped by cocksucking legal whores out to make a buck by running google and then filing "point-and-sue" lawsuits against everything imaginable.
This is just ridiculous. Is Bank of America somehow harmed by people reading its website in "Swedish chef" talk? I am almost of the opinion that copyright law is getting so ridiculous it ought to be just defiantly ignored, and fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.
To start - Ob'IANAL'.
I have to agree with a previous post that states this is Fair Use - for two reasons: The first is that this is parody. The second is that this is for non-commercial 'academic' use. If somebody opened a completely separate site with the entire contents of say, Bank of America, but in 'Elmer Fudd' then _maybe_ that _might_ be infringment. This is just as bad as the 'F*r Dumm*es' a-holes.
Now I just wish I was one of those Internet Millionares - I'd be quite inclined to start a legal defense fund and lobbying group against foolish companies (like IDG).
These corporate entities are abusing the copyright laws... and the little people are the ones who suffer. These lawyers are just sophists looking to stuff their mattress. Shameful at best.
[Connection closed by foreign host]
-p.
You really must be naive if you think the States, western europe, and Russia feel the way they do due to political correctness. The main point of concern is that sixty years ago nearly 100 million people died when a freely elected government in Germany, with Austria as an at least semi-willing accomplace, went insane.
That said, it was sixty years ago, and denying freedom to support freedom is moronic. I disagree with our (the US) actions regarding your elections just as I disagree with Germany's banning of Nazi lterature. As for Americans not acting out against a broken justice system, you are mostly correct. The problem is, we've got bigger worries than a web site getting shutdown. You do see action in cases like the Rodney King trial where it was made evident that the police can do what they will with little fear of reprimands; so they burned down south central LA. Needles to say, I believe we need more of such protests (heh, on the night I was born my father had to get a special curfew pass because of race-riots... I picked up the bug young). The only problem is negative media portrayal (of course, they are big corps too), so we need to blow them up too. ;-)
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
The good part about this is that it also chases off most of the anklebiters from bringing less-winning lawsuits. Also, when they lose, they've usually chased off the low-value lawsuits, so the cost of David's lawyer is usually much less than the value of the case itself.
If Mean Nasty GoliathCo unfairly sues David, Loser Pays means he's got to come up with an amazingly strong defense or settle right away - because he's got to pay for GoliathCo's Horde Of Lawyers, so even if his attorney is Pro Bono or defending him free-up-front in return for a chance at legal costs if he wins, he's got a good chance of losing big.
On the other hand, if Unfairly Ripped Off GoliathCo legitimately sues Nasty Little David, Loser Pays means they need to keep their costs low because they may not recover much from the case if David settles, which he's got even more incentive to do if he's the Bad Guy. So they're likely to start off with a Threatening Form Letter rather than a well-structured case even when they're right.
So why haven't the Brits descended into pre-Neanderthal chaos? They haven't? (:-) More precisely, it's tough to sue or even criticize misbehaving big companies in the UK, because of Loser Pays. It's especially bad because British libel law doesn't have the American development that truth is an adequate defense against libel, so you can get sued, and lose, for saying true but unfriendly things about them in public. There was a celebrated case a few years ago where somebody's bank card glitched his money, and he tried to get it reimbursed, and they sued him for libeling their Totally Bug Free bank card system, because after all they could lose immense amounts of money if the public thought it could possibly be their fault, therefore it *couldn't* have been their fault, therefore he's liable for immense amounts of money plus legal costs. (I forget the details; I think it may have been Midland Bank, but I could be wrong, and yes, the cash machine system *was* wrong.)
By the way, people also propose "reforming" the tort law system by forbidding lawyers from taking cases on contingency (e.g. no money if they lose, 33% of the take if they win.) This also would make it hard for the little guy to afford to sue the big guy, even if he's willing to risk the Loser Pays costs.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Yes, I would agree that is it true that most people would not be willing to attempt to go against someone like Bank of America even on something like this which is a no brainer, and there is already enough of case law to back up against.
Personally, I believe that the lawyers are bluffing, even if they weren't, I would love to take them on. I believe I could cost Bank of America Millions of dollars as well as a ton of bad publicity, and make a tidy sum for my effort.
It has been my experience that even high priced lawyers make plenty of exploitable mistakes, and if you are on the side of the right and know how to use their mistakes against them, you will be in a very good position.
That said, you can only win if you are willing to take the time and effort to do the research needed and not be intimidated by the actions against you, and be ready for anything.
Also, it is worth considering the fact that generally, the lawyers don't care whether or not they win, they are getting paid anyway. If they had a personal stake in the matter, and could be hurt by a loss, they would not even think about pursuing the matter when they recognise they are up against someone who knows just about as much as they do, or more. However, if they see that they are going to be made to look utterly stupid in front of their client, and that they may lose a huge account because of their stupidity, they just might change their toon. (yes, toon, not tune, as in cartoon :-)
I gave my scripts for The Universal Translator to the Rinkworks guy a couple of years ago for him to use in return for a credit. Well, he dropped the credit, passed it off as his own, and started selling advertising on the pages, so I for one am not too sad that he's been bhut down. The Universal Translator remains available, free and unhindered by advertising...... I have also added several new languages, including h@kK3r and Cockney rhyming slang. Suggestions for new filters always welcome! cheers, nick.
Nick Donaldson mailto:psyclops@psyclops.com Bit Wrangler Extraordinaire! http://www.psyclops.com/
Nonono. "Y'all" is still singular. "All y'all" is the plural.
Slashdot's token middle-aged housewife
I herby give dialectizer permission to touch anything from my domain(s).
Now all I have to do is put up a proxy server.
Okay,
other brought it already up with Babelfish etc. But I wonder if that doesn't make Google Illegal? They cache the text of websites to search it later? Or am I missing something here (besides that google is a company and not an individual?).
Michael
If you want to e-mail me, use my PGP Key.
It's painfully obvious that these sites would not threaten bablefish or other such "non parody" translation engines.
Some dumb shit probably linked through the dialectizer to Bank America, was outraged that Bank America was so rascist as to be written in 'Jive' and threatened to sue. And Bank America seeking refuge from the countless bullshit lawsuits claiming discrimination found this a relatively cost-effective way to reduce possible attacks from sleazy trial lawyers.
Makes sense in a twisted way...
Blar.
From some link off de same page ya' could git de source. What it is, Mama! Dough not 'esplicitly stated ah' always assumed it wuz public domain and free t'copy; I've neva' seen any dojigger, copyright, o' license in de source. What it is, M ama!
I used t'gots' some version uh it runnin' around, but kin't find it right now. As ah' recall it compiled fine unda' AIX and Solaris, but poo'ly unda' Red Hat and DOS (Bo'land CPB 4.0 afta' runnin' it dru de lex on AIX)
I dun did some quick search and found a link t'de same source ah' o'iginally had. So, if ya' plum wanna JIBE some little yo'self o' start an jimmey source version u h de serva' dat should be some baaaad start.
or for the jive impaired ...
I'm surprised no one else has seen these filters elsewhere! About 4 years ago I saw the jive'd version of the GPL and could't stop laughing.
From a link off the same page you could get the source. Though not explicitly stated I always assumed it was public domain and free to copy; I've never seen any name, copyright, or license in the source.
I used to have a version of it running around, but can't find it right now. As I recall it compiled fine under AIX and Solaris, but poorly under Red Hat and DOS (Borland CPB 4.0 after running it thru the lex on AIX)
I did a quick search and found a link to the same source I originally had. So, if you just want to jive a little yourself or start an open source version of the server that should be a good start.
Sorry, taking the ENTIRE original work and then modifying it is not a fair use parody. You are certainly welcome to emulate the parodied conent, but using it wholesale generally loses, like those "Dilhole" cartoons. You can draw your own cartoons that roughly look like Dilbert and say they are a parody, but you can't take Dilbert comic itself and change the text bubbles and call it fair use. The ringworks guy takes a much smarter approach- he claims that this is akin to simply looking at the original content through "dialect" goggles. Essentially that his program is a filter, not a work or art in itself. This is a much more useful argument.
Man, I'm really bummed that I can't read the KKK's web site in Jive anymore- that was a blast.
:) I'll happily run it on my 11-hits-a-month site!
But I really can't see how this is that big of a problem, considering the T'inator and that Jesus filter thing that do more or less the same thing as dialectizer.
With the popularity of the dialectizer soon to be severly diminished (how many times can you read the same ONE website in Redneck) why don't we just propagate the idea to all of our servers? Like DeCSS, but with higher load
--
Does narcissism count as a hobby? --Shawn Latimer
But in all seriousness, releasing the code to the dialiectizer would allow us to enjoy it without putting rinkworks at risk of lawsuit, and without overloading rinkworks' server.
This is actually very straightforward to clone. Back when Quickies featured the "jar-jargonizer", I'd spend half an hour fidding with Perl and posted a clone script as a comment.
I'll do the same here.
My point is that for a program this simple, you may be off simply writing your own version rather than asking for source, if the simple clone will be adequate for your needs.
They are a vital resource, but they DO store copyrighted material for re-distribution. If the original material is changed, the change does not immediately propagate, thus creating a situation where the copyright holder can notice that they no longer are in control of the distribution of their work.
Surely there is some precedent in law covering proxy servers. I would expect that same precedent to apply. If there is no precedent, I'm willing to bet that there will be a legal challenge sometime in the future.
This insanity has got to STOP! (Says the preacher to the choir.)
-Eldurbarn
Why don't we all just pack it up, cut our lines, and restrict the use of our web pages to ourselves. Copyright infringement, indeed. The absurdity of this is that a bank, as a powerhouse with billions of dollars and a team of lawyers larger than many sizeable companies, can frighten the average citizen into shutting down, when properly represented in a court of law, he would likely be awarded a counterclaim for frivolous lawsuit. Next thing you know, the President will be suing Leno & Letterman for doing impersonations. Streisand will be suing Matt Stone & Trey Parker for using her image in their Halloween 'Spookyvision', and Microsoft will shut down Slash for the use of the Borg Gates image. Let's just declare fair use dead, wipe it from the books. Large powerful corporations now own the copyright to everything. You can no longer express your own ideas, because someone else has already thought of them. You must first get permission from the Company. Permission denied.
These people looked deep into my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined.
BoA & its lawyers were terrified of being able to hijack their URL, pass it through Dialect and have the results returned to some unsuspecting customer in all of its politically incorrect-ositude. They don't want the heat, can't claim they didn't know anything about it and would prefer not to make a headline on CNN about it. Self righteous or not you should expect this sort of thing by now.
The legal actions have generally tried to get the adult comics pulled entirely, often by criminally charging the owners of the shops (which turns it into a first amendment issue).
Well, you dialectize or translate the page for your own use. Like if you had a book in German, and translated it for yourself on a piece of paper. These services don't do any "dissemination", they do it just for the person reading it. On the other hand, what if somebody registered "Sweedish Chef CNN" at AltaVista?
So does this mean that a site that provided blind people an audio translation of other web sites would be in violation of copyright, as defined by the harrassers of Dialectizer? Wouldn't this conflict with the accessibility provisions of the Americans With Disabilities Act? The Department of Housing and Urban Development reportedly once paid to translate a pamphlet into what it considered a Haitian creole ("Yuh as a rezedent, ave di rights ahn di rispansabilities to elp mek yuh HUD-asisted owzing ah behta owme fi yuh ahn yuh famibly.") Isn't the Dialectizer essentially providing the same sort of service?
I personally think that under the circumstances it would be a good idea to open source the software behind it.
Yes, it'll just be a simple page fetcher followed by a case/if statement and then a whole load of 'global search and replace' calls, but it'll be nice to be able to base the code on something. After all, half the fun of the Dialectizer was being able to translate other peoples sites (and your own) into 'other tongues'.
If people were able to download the code and use it on their own website, it'll keep a hell of a lot of people happy.
I'm now worried about things like this affect BabelFish and AskJesus...
Richy C.
--
thet yu shoodn't mess with ze sveedish chef!!
Second, it is a JOKE. No one gets hurt, and I can't think of any reason beyond the novelty factor to even use a site like this.
Further, afik, BofA has no proof that their site as been viewed through the dialectizer, so they have no proof of any copyright violations.
Perhaps all the people who bank at BofA should sue them for posting their corporate earnings on the web, because, 'Hey, somewhere in that figure is the $20 fee I had to pay for bouncing a check! That's a violation of my privacy.' That is how anal this C&D order is.
IANAL... But I play one on
If it's so bad, why haven't the Brits descended into pre-Neanderthal chaos?
The IPCC has purposely engineered a massive scientific fraud.
Why not let site enable their Dialectizing by adding a special custom meta tab to the top of the HTML.
Citrix
Leknor
http://Leknor.com
"So many idiots, so few comets"
Does this mean I am in copyright violation if I have the Bank of America web site in my browser's cache? Wouldn't Babelfish be shut down if this sort of thing was not allowed?
The Dialectizer's author, Samuel Stoddard , puts it best. As for me, I think we are way overdue for copyright law reform, because current laws are doing more harm than good.
And shouldn't B.O.A.'s legal department have better things to do?
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
If it really is copyright infringement to re-serve someone else's webpage in an altered state, then www.askjeeves.com is infringing with its search result pages. When you click to go to a search result, it still looks like you are at AskJeeves. Of course if you read the text it says they are not affliated. I find this type of alteration more offensive than a user-requested translation of a web-page.
Hey.. that was not trolling. A few weeks ago, the cached links were not showing up in searches. They appear to have been added since the semester ended.
-- Thrakkerzog
Actually, if you think about it, there is no discrete "third-person-plural" word in english.
How does one address a group of people, without ambiguously referring to any individual in that group.
"Y'all" is the answer - unfortunately, it's not a part of proper english.
I find myself using y'all all the time in emails, and I was born and raised in Chicago. What if you start a thread with one person, and either one of you cc:s a couple of others in, and someone says, "well, what do you think?" Is he talking to one person, or the group? There are no visual cues in email, you could use the cumbersome "you all", or you could use "y'all". I think it's time we add "y'all" to the lexicon of proper english. (my apologies to the queen).
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I can't believe it. IP laws in this country are out of control.
Maybe it works different, but if I had any reason to view Bank of Amerika's pages now, it would be through the zippy filter. Fuck 'em!
Got a beef? Plug a name into the Bizarre Rumour Generator!
This is horrid! If this is accepted, and a court backs this action up, then things like translations are copyright infringments. You thought not being able to watch DVDs under Linux was bad? How about not being able to read documentation because it can't be translated?
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
What type of legal copyright use would this fall under?
My understanding is that for something to be fair use, it has to be either any kind of manipulation for your own use only (copy, modify, translate), excerpting small amounts for review or other noncompeting purposes, or parody.
In the case of the dialectizer, pages are manipulated and distributed to others, they are distributed in their entirety, and while the resulting pages are funny, for a parody to be legal, it can't be a derivative of the work it is parodying, but has to be an independent creative effort. The output of the dialectizer is definitely derivative of the input.
I'm no happier about this than anyone else here, but by my understanding, the dialectizer almost certainly violates copyrights. The way to make it legal would be to actually do the translation on the user's machine rather than send the user modified documents.
By the way, I think that Babelfish also violates copyrights. It has the same problem: It takes documents that it has no rights to, modifies them, and redistributes them.
pornking
back in the old school world of the printed page, when things moved at a sane enough pace that legal censorship could kill something overnight, there was a concept called fair use which protected the use of copyrighed materials under a number of circumstances, particularly for criticism, review, or parody. This is the same concept that has kept aolsucks alive. If reading the Banc of America web page in redneck doesn't count as parody, I don't know what does.
What we SHOULD do is start a clean-sweep policy - no incumbents on the ballot, ever. By doing this, our elected officials can focus on doing their jobs and not how they're going to get re-elected 3 or 4 years down the road. We'd get a steady supply of fresh concepts and practices at every election, the bad laws would be easier to knock down without their old-crony support, good laws would maintain because they're proven.
The Jargonizer's only fault is that the guy who wrote and maintains it can't afford to fight off a bullshit legal threat.
-72
-Those who dance are considered insane by those who can't hear the music.
...we frequently refer to as lawyers are nothing but analy retentive idiots.
:)
Why do we let them rule our world? Dialectizer was supposed to be a fun thing, just like Ask Jeesus.
Maybe we should load them all up into a giant spaceship (along with marketing types) and fire them into an unknown direction (sort of like what they've done in THGTTG).
Actually, I have a better solution but I think it is banned under Geneva Convention
Strange. I just used my BOA ATM machine today.
It brought up the message:
Our logo is changing.
However, our staff and services are not.
I guess they just hired Yoda as an advertising
agent. Is there a Yoda dialectizer?
The Nazi's were democratically elected too...
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
If I hold up a glass mirror to my monitor, I can read crappy corporate websites as mirror images. Does that violate their sanctimoneous copyright? Should I seek to stop Pilkington's making glass to prevent such infractions.
I'm staggered that there are people sufficiently pea-brained out there that they'd consider such a site a threat.
How in the hell is The Dialectizer a violation of copyright law? Is it because it's exporting certain parts of a "copyrighted" work to a user? If so, then doesn't the "Save as" feature of just about any ol' web browser do the same thing? I mean, it's exporting copyrighted material to someone. And I can assure you, I'll have an easier time understanding the data written out by the "Save as" button than I will the garbled mess spewed forth by The Dialectizer.
I'm not wholly anti-corporate, after all, I want to be employed like any other fool. Still companies large enough to have "people down in Legal" increasingly seem to enjoy weighing-in on Joe Citizen, all in the name of Protecting Shareholder Interest. What will happen when they realize that Netscape and IE are nothing more than convenient ways to download their precious intellectual property? Double-checking copyright law or respecting a company's misguided wishes won't lead to the AOLization of the Web. But I can imagine that in not too many years, things will become more 'e'-TV than electronic frontier. What can we do about this?
You're either not reading the above posts, or you're a troll. Either way-
Why has "Show Matches" replaced the "Cached" link ?
How do I request that Google not return cached material from my site?
if (Thrakkerzog.is_troll() { cout "IHBT. IHAND.\n"; }
See http://www.internet2.edu/dsi/ for a discussion of the NSF-sponsored Internet 2 research project to enable cacheing.
This is going to be a major culture clash, and hopefully will result in some new laws dealing with cacheing & these other issues. On the one hand, everyone from AOL to Google to the NSF (via Internet 2) agree that cacheing is a great way to make content more readily available. On the other hand, clueless corporations want to use the DMCA and other copyright baseball bats to keep utter control over what happens to their stuff.
PS: Sorry for posting this as a top-level comment, but the other discussions on cacheing seemed specific, rather than addressing the more general issue.
So they're going to pay Lawyers $$$$, threaten freedom of speech, and look like complete idiots whereas they could have achieved what they wanted by just adding this line to httpd.conf:
Deny from rinkworks.com
Fucking clueless corporate bullies. Too bad stupidity is not lethal.
As everyone can see from the Swedish chef and jive posts that the dialectizer isn't actually shut down. It is still available, you can copy and paste text into it. You just can't aim it at a website. I bet half of the people here didn't read the notice and assumed that it's actually completely shut down. It does have decreased functionality, however, and I think it's a great injustice that he has to change it.
It makes sense to have a distinction between what you can do as a local user, and what you can do in a server and then retransmit to random people.
That would make all proxy servers illegal. Squid essentially does what you describe.
-John
start shooting people!!!
The current Slashdot moderation system is made by gay communists!
This does have a problem. England uses the Loser pays system. Microsoft once attempted to use the fact that a company sueing them for copyright violations wouldn't be able to pay MS's legal costs if MS won.
Unfortunately for Microsoft, they were being sued under Scottish law. The article didn't actually explain how that works, but did say something about scottish law allows you to be poor and right.
I did hear a suggestion that damages should be based on a multiple of the loser's costs. Quite a nice idea, but breaks down if someone decides to defend themselves.
It's a shame that guy didn't have the spare dough to defend his site. He is clearly in the right. And if he isn't, that makes translators like Babelfish and go.com wrong. After all, they translate sites into something that is pretty darned close to gibberish.
FYI: Jive translators have been around in one form or another for years. I remember using an MS-DOS command line version on my 286-8mhz. Some people used it to post in Prodigy message bases. Very, very annoying. :)
If it's so bad, why haven't the Brits descended into pre-Neanderthal chaos?
Because crooks either moved to US or are too busy exploiting anti-free-speech uses of local laws (ex: "defamation" lawsuits against ISPs)?
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
I mentioned this in a another post on this article. As well as another possible way of working out who pays.
No...it doesn't make sense at all. One of the advantages of a client-server architecture is distribution of the application. The Dialectizer is an application embodied in a Web site. The server isn't serving pre-crafted content that some author composed to parody another site. The user invokes the application and so creates the parody using the application. It shouldn't matter whether or not this runs on the server or the client. Equating the protection of the Dialectizer to filters or browser settings on the client end is appropriate.
On another note, I wonder when About.Com will come under fire for framing (with advertising) links to external references or Anonymizer.Com for altering proxied pages with its own brand.
Get Veiled
This has got to be the stupidest thing I've ever heard of. I swear to god, some people have got such an idiotic attachment to there 'intellectual property' what the hell is that? I mean, If this were illegal so would be babelfish, and any kind of proxy server. How does converting a document into a 'dialect' differ from converting something to another language?
The people who threatened this person are probably a lot like the people who had a problem with ThirdVoice, The same people who have a problem with people linking to there sites, idiots (The same people who had a problem with there comments being quoted in the Hellmouth book to, IMHO). What the hell is the problem here? They didn't loose any add revenue did they?
I've tried to understand why people who invest enough into there websites to consider it 'intellectual property' are willing to go so far as to try to destroy everything that the web is.
My favorite quote on the topic comes from Chuck D "People who have a problem with copying [IP] are people who are afraid that they won't be able to create anymore"
These people are pathetic.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Why not just re-write the dialectizer as a Java applet, so that the translation is done on the users machine? Surely this would constitute fair use?
Jeff
stty erase ^H
"I don't care if it rains or freezes - long as I got a .org called AskJesus!" Can they really take away the amazing AskJesus and his hamburgers? THAT would be -wrong-
If I were a clueless moron, like Bank of America, I'd also threaten to sue Microsoft and Netscape, since their browsers violate copyright law by stripping out all of my web site's HTML tags and comments before displaying the data to the user.
It was sad (bork bork bork)
Oh, it was sad (bork bork bork)
It was sad when that great site went down (to the bottom of the)
Husband and their wives, little surfers lost their jives
It was sad when that great site went down!
Next thing you know, it'll be illegal to do a translation by using a dictionary.
In fact, this gives me an idea. These corporations are threatening legal action because the Dialectizer is translating their webpage. Perhaps he can counter-sue them for not making their webpage accessible to non-english speakers (and in fact taking steps to make it *only* accessible to english speakers),
I run a service that converts (read: translates) files from some random format to another format. Can a site decided it does not like how it's web page is formated when people do the html->pdf or pdf->text conversion and sue me? What is the difference between encoding a text with MIME base64 and encoding a text with JIVE or VALLEY GIRL? Where will this stop?
I get just as tired of "Boycott this! Boycott that!" as the next person, but I think a boycott of BofA would actually be effective in this case.
Dialectizer is not hurting anybody. It's not taking traffic away from BofA's site. If anything, it might *increase* traffic. It's just a fun toy. There is no reason to get the legal department involved.
I am not *calling* for a boycott, but if my bank were to engage in this silliness, I know what I would do. I would transfer my accounts and send them a letter explaining why. As a customer, I prefer not to do business with companies who pay their legal departments to threaten harmless web sites like Dialectizer. There are too many other banks who want my business and have more important things to worry about. It's that simple.
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
I think a way that would work out well is that if the plaintiff loses the case, they would have to pay for all the defendant's legal fees, along with compensation for all the time they could have spent doing better things.
I think our UK ounterparts can clarify/correct this: Isn't this the way it's done in England? I mean, loser pays the winner's fees. I'm sure I read somewhere that there is a legal system out there that does this.
the lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne. - Chaucer
So, what if I view the Bank of America web site while wearing X-Ray Specs or 3-D glasses, or through the bottom of a gin bottle? I wouldn't want to get the X-Ray Specs company in trouble for copyright infringement. More importantly, is it "fair use" for the images from the Bank of America website to be copied and displayed on my retina? Otherwise, my rods and cones will have to establish a legal defense fund... (not to mention the thousands in royalties that my inner ear will owe)
<rant>When will corporate and legal America learn that the Internet is a transmission medium, like air, while simultaneously being the world's largest public library? Try suing either of those and see how the public reacts.</rant>
--
Zero tolerance equals zero intelligence
no, we get rednecks in the uk.
Fat, balding, drunk, slobbish, stupid, ignorant, Sun reading twats...
often seen abroad, wrapped in the union jack, getting the shit kicked out of them by the police, or foreign rednecks about half their size...
much to the amusement of all who are embarrassed by these losers.
Check out the news re Copenhagen today, for example.
Cultural note (and i use the term in its loosest possible sense) - the Sun is like a newpaper for morons - sort of like National Enquirer, but without the sense of humour. Its `reading age` was about 6, last i heard.
Something nobody has mentioned yet -- I don't think the corporations would actually be able to win this court case, since there is clearly no copyright violation. Maybe they could sue for plagiarism if he kept a log of the translated pages.
I hope some big company with money decides to host the Dialectizer for him, then we can have blood. Blood!
<grin>
excellent. that makes some of the UK banks even dumber.
I've got an account with NatWest that has £0. that's right nada, nothing, nowt in it. Never has, never will. I even tried to close it, (asking them to send me the closing balance - don't think they saw the humour).
They wouldn't let me until I sent the unused cheque book and card back.
a$%holes. Anyone better that?
But if there's any kind of legal basis for shutting down the dialectizer, it's also applicable to the Anonymizer services.
And I'm *quite* sure there are (commercial/governmental) interests that would really, really like to shut down Anonymizer so that they can track everyone on the net.
Scary...
Since it is the plaintiff bringing the lawsuit they should be the only ones to pay should they lose. (No one should be forced to pay more for having attempted a defense of themselves.) However, what should happen instead of repaying the defendants lawyer fees, is the plaintiff should be required to pay the defendant the amount equal to the plaintiff's lawyer fees.
Thus, the higher priced your lawyers when you sue the more you have to pay when/if you lose. A large corporation spending a fortune in lawyers to defend itself will only be due the amount payed by the plaintiff which, if it is some random individual, is not likely to be all that much. Of course, a large corporation suing someone who manages to win without spending all that much might owe the defendant quite a bit more then the they actually paid. A nice little bonus.
You have complete control over how much you are risking and the defendant has a chance to be repaid for lawyer fees.
-prak
-prak
Uses That Are Generally Fair Uses Subject to some general limitations discussed later in this article, the following types of uses are usually deemed fair uses:
Seems like fair use under the parody clause but we all know that he with the lawyer and the money wins. Call the ACLU.
Ever hear of the CBLDF, Comic Book Legal Defense Fund? It's a fund to help comic book writers targeted by ridiculous legal action, mainly independent titles.
We need one for Internet sites facing this kind of bizarre legal harassment. We need an organization of people banded together (and taking donations, lets face it, it takes money), to help people fight this blossoming ridiculous legal activity.
My guess is lawyers are now engaged in preventative-and-predatory maneuvers, first strikes against any possible percieved threat no matter how bizarre or untrue. I've seen legal departments go on automatic before, and it seems this is happening more and more often on the net.
So, it's time to band together and fight.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
I think that the people at Andover should immediately give 'explicit permission' for dialectizer to include their servers and keep /. available for 'dialectization' - is that a word? :)
rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb.
Now, maybe I've missed something, but don't we ALL dialectize something when we read it?
Here's a scenario:
A blind friend of mine is looking for a bank to setup a checking account with. He says he'd like to know more about Bank of America. So I proceed to load up said bank's website, and read it ALOUD to him.... what if I have a speach impediment or simply an accent. Am I not "Dialectizing" the website?
I'd have to say that my position in this scenario is the same as the dialectizers position.
...I'm now waiting for MY letter from the lawyers telling me to stop reading their website with an accent.
--Eric
People see the world as they are, not as it is.
This is a parody site, satirical speech is protected by fair use laws. That's why Wierd Al Yankovic can put out all those spoof albums. The webmaster, by backing down has abetted further erosion of our human rights. He should not have done so END OF STORY.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
"Democracy would appear to be the worst conceivable form of government... until one considers the alternatives."
- Winston Churchill
(Paraphrased, because I can't be bothered to look up the original.)
I think most Americans can relate to the concept of choosing between two parties that are broadly disliked.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
For less money than they paid their law firm to fire off a "cease and desist" letter, they probably could have hired a network engineer to make the changes.
POLITICAL RANT = ON
I live in Austria, Europe, a small country that has recently received a fair amount of flak on an international level due to the fact that the new government is considered too right-wing. The main point of concern was and is that one of the parties in the new coalition government has a rather poor track record with respect to political correctness. Numerous outside governments (including the US) made copious amounts of well-meaning and patronizing remarks about how the free world has to watch that the standards of democracy and free speech have to be upheld in Austria now that this new administration is in charge, and so on.
All of which is, of course, total drivel because said government was democratically elected and has so far shown not the slightest intention of altering the political system for the worse.
If something like the shutting down of Dialectizer had taken place in Austria, free speech advocates would probably already be spraying swastikas on Austrian embassies in some places. But if this takes place in the USA with its sacred legal system that leans towards corporate fascism, everything is all right. How very nice >:-)
Perhaps the citizens of the US should start giving some thoughts as to whether their own political and judical systems are still up to standards that allow them to preach to the entire world how things ought to be done...
The only way to diminish lawsuits is to make them less palatable to the lawyers filing them. Currently there's no downside to filing a lawsuit that can be won purely by wearing down the defence (monetarily/chronologically), but if lawyers know that they could eventually lose their job by doing it too much, they might actually discourage clients from suing anything and everything.
If everone who actually gives a damn sent in one dollar, we ought to be able to hire someone to inform corporate attorneys that 1) Their case is groundless, and 2) If they don't give it up and go away it's going become expensive and embarassing.
If every issue had to be handled at trial, it could be very expensive. In the real world, a large number of these corporate bozos would disappear in a puff of smoke - once they realized that the intimidation trick was not going to work.
Total cost per bozo should be a few hundred bucks, but a larger fund is probably necessary - to make the counter-threat believable.
Besides the satisfaction of a job well done, we could have hours of amusement debating which causes deserve support. If nothing else, we could make a great improvement in the quality of trolling and flamebait on slashdot.
When you are dancing with wolves, never limp
Although there are lots of other webpage translators out there, I wouldn't worry about altavista or askjesus. Other than the fact that no one wants to take on someone large like altavista, having people be able to read their webpage in another language is a benefit to any company. And as for askjesus.org, many people wouldn't threaten to sue them because there's a referance to god. Sounds corny, but religion is a major factor in a large precentage of the population's lives and has been for centuries. Bad publicity is avoided at all costs.
http://www.hoe.nu/text/hoe-0468.txt
Thanks.
-Mogel
You're quite right, Bank of America could have easily solved the "problem" on its own end, without legal threats. That's why I went down to my local BoA branch and spoke with a banker there. They gave me an upper-level customer service officer's number, and I gave him the same message.
Actually, they had received email about this, but hadn't received the Dialectizer's address. I suggested they look at the Slashdot story. (It's tough spelling slashdot.org over the phone; I wanted to spell out all of http://slashdot.org, but didn't think they'd get it.)
If their legal antics bother you, please contact Bank of America and explain, politely, why you're bothered. This is particularly effective if you have an account at BoA.
Perhaps, in order to avoid setting dangerous precedent like this, the EFF should offer their services to the Dialectizer, even if the maintainer was willing to back down. We don't know if anyone was planning to sue, but only one of the complainers would have to sue and lose to set the correct precedent, whereas now, all the companies know that they can pull the same thing against other translators people have mentioned on this page, and they will back down.
This message is for the Bank Of America... the people who told the Dialectizer that they couldn't translate their page.
Online Bankin' Services t'meet yer needs Varmintal Opshuns Online Bankin' View account info'mashun, transfer funds, an' mo'e -- free of a monthly service charge. Online Bankin' wif Quicken® Pay bills online, transfer funds, manage finances an' mo'e via th' Internet an' yer Quicken financial management sof'ware. Business Opshuns Online Bankin' View account info'mashun, transfer funds, an' mo'e -- free of a monthly service charge. Online Bankin' wif Quicken®/QuickBooks® Pay bills online, transfer funds, manage finances an' mo'e via th' Internet an' yer Quicken financial management sof'ware. Business Conneck Review account balances an' transackshuns, transfer funds, view an' print daily status repo'ts an' setup payroll direck deposits.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
It's not what it is, it's something else.
Nope...
bash-2.03$ telnet bankofamerica.com 80
Trying 165.37.203.7...
Connected to bankofamerica.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
HEAD / HTTP/1.0
HTTP/1.1 500 Server Error
Server: Netscape-Enterprise/3.6 SP3
Date: Wed, 17 May 2000 23:44:18 GMT
Content-length: 305
Content-type: text/html
Connection: close
What about Altavista and other robots that actually reproduce the first few sentences of websites in the search?
In fact, this search reproduces two BoA pages in the first three hits.
This also clearly falls under fair-use parody law.
Simply setting a DENY rule wouldn't get them any press. This whole thing is a temper tantrum. Someone has to see it for it to be effective.
Of course, BoA is still chock full of morons, and arguably their entire legal staff should be dragged away to my Alaskan Labor Camps.
I'm just glad they're not my bank. And now, they never will be.
I have no
Now, if only we could get them to go after "The Onion". That site is making a mockery of the more respectable media like Fox or Weekly World News!
I was not too impressed with the site that went down, but I am concerned about the implications that this has for translation sites (Babelfish) as well as Metasearch engines that present modified content as their own, without the original sites consent.
This should be considered fair use. While the site whose content is being taken may claim that it is simply a derivative work, it would seem to add addition functionality while only using the original site's content as a springboard for innovation. Whatever happens with this type of site will set important Internet precedent.
ByteMyCode.com: A Web 2.0 code sharing community.
Actual reply from Bank of America. I recommended you all use their Contact web page to give them a (intelligently-written) piece of your minds:
- --------------------------------------- c t.cfm?lob=news - -----------------
Subject: Re:Msg from E-Mail an Expert (Comments and Other Inquiries)
Bank of America did not request that the owner of the domain name rinkworks.com
shut down his/her site. Bank of America did, however, request - because
of copyright infringement - that the owner not convert the text on its website into dialect.,,
-----------------------------------------------
The internet response to your inquiry has been initiated from a secure server,
but may not travel on secure lines. For further correspondence with
Bank of America, do not choose reply. We recommend returning to
the Contact Us site at
http://www.bankofamerica.com/contact/data/conta
or newsroom for a secure e-mail transmission.
-----------------------------------------------
They sic the dogs on the dialectizer but what about http://www.askjesus.org/? I think that may be prejudicial action, if they go after one they have to go after all of them don't they?
Rick B.
As long as you filter the ads yourself, I don't think that the Dialectizer story is relevant. However, there was another development elsewhere that actually has brought us a step closer to banning ad filtering: DMCA.
DMCA goes beyond the "old fashioned" restrictions on copyrighted material, which basically prevented you from redistributing copyrighted works. With DMCA, they now have a foot in the door, toward the goal of telling you what other things you cannot do with a copyrighted work. Look at how they are trying to keep a monopoly on DVD players, which by extension, allows them to force people to watch "preview" ads on DVDs.
Under DMCA, banning advertisement is easy: just use a "protected" proprietary format. That makes it illegal for anyone to create a player/reader for that data format, without signing an agreement with you. And that agreement can prohibit ad filtering. So effectively, you have the force of law backing your ban.
This isn't currently possible using open formats and protocols like HTTP/HTML. But watch for megacorps to replace these formats with proprietary "decommoditized" alternatives. For example, Microsoft has gained a lot of marketshare with their Windows Media Player protocols. There's nothing preventing them from putting ads into WMP files and using the force of law to prevent people from taking the ads out. With proprietary XML extensions and their integrated web browser, it's just a matter of time before they offer a new "technology" for presenting pages/text.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
s/Under DMCA, banning advertisement is easy/Under DMCA, banning advertisement filtering is easy/
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Reedeeng zee Bunk ooff Emereeca seete-a in zee Svedeesh Cheff deeelect geefes noo meuneeng tu bunkeeng und cummerce-a. Zee Ingleesh-Impeured HEFE A RIGHT tu reed in zeeur neteefe-a perudy deeelect!!!!
-Babelfish, eat your heart out...
There are some really nasty issues here that have to be addressed. I won't miss dialectizer, but its demise is a symptom of a really nasty problem: censorship by legal brief. It seems that anybody can invent a legal theory that claims that a given web page is somehow libelous, trademark infringing, or unnecessarily cruel to parakeets. The theory doesn't have to have a legal leg to stand on. What it does need is deep pockets, so that authors can't afford to defend their first amendment rights.
If Stoddard wants to fight this blatant stomping of his civil rights, we of the web community should back him financially. A small contribution from enough people could amount to a useful defense fund.
The fact that corporations are using the threat of lawsuit to force individuals to conform to their dictates just frosts my butt! They won't go after a big outfit like AltaVista because they have big legal groups, and it wouldn't make an economic dent, like it would with an individual or a small company.
Some states have laws against using corporate might in (SLAPP) lawsuits to harass private citizens. SLAPP = Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation. SLAPP suits (or a threat of same) is what is occuring here, and with /. vs M$. After all, free speech, including parody, is the most fundamental form of public participation.
From http://www.psu.edu/ur/oped/richards.html:
"SLAPP targets must hire attorneys to defend rights they already have under the Constitution, notably free speech and the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
Some states have laws against SLAPP suits. Those who are confronted with such tactics should check their state laws to see what recourse against the corporations they have.
See also:t mlt ml
http://www.sirius.com/~casp/welcome.html
http://www.sirius.com/~casp/cal425.html
http://www.prwatch.org/prw_issues/1997-Q2/slapp.h
http://www.sscf.ucsb.edu/SAABulletin/16.1/SAA21.h
http://www.thefirstamendment.org/cases.htm
California's anti-SLAPP law CCP 425.16:t ion=ccp&group=00001-01000&file=425.10-42 5.16
http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?sec
use Sig::Witty;
Personally, I like Pimp-Speak.
-- This sig is only a test. If this were a real sig it would say something witty. --
Turn on your sarcasm detector. Especially read what he has to say about Linus (or his father) throwing chickens around.
"Oh, I hope he doesn't give us halyatchkies," said Heinrich.
What really is the difference between Dialectizer and babelfish? I can't think of any difference.
If you read the comments on the website, it's quite obvious that it isn't being shut down because there is any valid copyright infringment complaint. It's being shut down because they're tired of constantly being harrassed by lawyers claiming copyright infringment.
If enough people hassle you about it, whether they're right or not, sometimes it's easier just to shut it down then fight with them.
When can a paraphrasing be considered illegal copyright infringment? This site was only conveying the original web sites from a different perspective. Will individuals now be held liable if they incorrectly misquote the contents of Bank of Amerika's website? What an arrogant and pompus group of companies and webmasters (made my fingers hurt to type that) that want a complete reign on the display of "their" contents. What kind of heat would a sweedish chef plugin for mozilla get? It would only be a client-side changing of the text. I bet they would freak if they knew something like this existed, but they would have no way of telling if someone was using it... :) We could all taunt BoA and they woudl be powerless to stop because it would be an anonymous taunting.
Therefore, I propose a whole range of text mutilation plugins for mozilla.
- mime plugin: Text is converted into a series of little pictures denoting movement.
- lawyer plugin: All text is made completely unintelligible, not that it would matter anyway, because the font size of 0.03 renders it invisible too.
- corporate plugin: All text would be converted into ass kissing phrases or legal disclaimers concerning use. Content itself dosen't matter in this context, only the control of the content.
- Slashdot plugin: Automatically filters out Ms. Portman, hotgrits and first post posts. Takes interesting posts and stories that match user preferences and fires up a web search for more relevant information in a new window.
That brings me to a question. Does the viewer of a website, tv or reader of a book have an obligation to the publisher to view only in the context said information was created and distributed? That seems to be the message behind the requests for exclusion that the dialectizer has gotten.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
Whether y'all like it or not, "y'all" fills a void in the English language, and one that needs filling: a word for the second person plural pronoun. Consistency with Latin among other languages demands this, and "y'all" is an extraordinarily useful construct. I count myself as fortunate to live where I can use it regularly without fear of retribution.
For evidence that English speakers (in general) think it needs filling, look at the variety of ways various English-speakers fill this void - in addition to y'all (which I think is more graceful, elegant, and consistent than the following), there are you'uns/yunz/yins/y'uns (Pennsylvania for sure, and probably other areas as well), and youse/yous (parts of England, Ireland, New York, and New Jersey). Y'all is certainly more elegant than these, and is a proper contraction to boot.
Those who dislike Southerners' use of y'all can convince me to give it up when they propose a better, non-silly alternative. Until then, those of us that recognize a good, necessary, and vibrant addition to the English language will continue to offend y'all that don't...
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Our system of jurisprudence is perfectly alright; we just don't go by it. The Constitution and Bill of Rights, beautifully constructed, are simply ignored in practice. Things won't change unless enough people here start a) actually reading the documents; and b) caring enough about what they say to fight for them.
Legal bullying?
bun-fhuinneog agam!
Ask Jesus about inside the BOA
What, a Hyundai can't go that fast!?!? You mean the cops were lying!?!? Whoda thunk it. For chrisake, you admit excessive force was used. And when the hell is excessive force neccesary?
And if you think the same rules of justice apply to cops as regular people you are an idiot. What a drone.
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
They could have done that.
;-)
But they are prolly running IIS
In 400-something posts, someone's probably already said it, but:
I think the precident is interesting... how about someone suing Anonomyzer.com for proxying, or manufacturers of proxy servers in general - they don't translate, but they do request, process and pass along someone elses content at the end user request, and what about the Babelfish and other translation sites??? They DO request, translate, and pass on other's copyrighted content, and they also make no attempt to claim ownership of the content or hide its origins... I only wish that the owners of translation sites would see the danger and jump in on the side of dialectizer...
FAT CHANCE! but they should be concerned.
The Digital Sorceress
It is complete legal garbage such as this that turns my stomach. Tell me how on earth Bank of America was negatively effected by this sight. Did it offer a link to the bank of america sight and say something negative about it. It is basically a "Wierd Al" song for the internet. This truly make me sick.
Propigating the dialectizer source code is an excellent idea. If BoA is going to try and kill an idea, lets show them why it's hard to do so - ideas can be spread with little or no material cost and replicated easily.
When a few hundred of these are running, lets see what they think - even if they try to shut them all down, ONE shutdown will become prominent enough to bring the news down on their case.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
Dialeckizer Shet Down Th' Internet | Posted by emmett on Wednesday May 17, @12:40PM fum th' this-is-sad-bawk-bawk-bawk depp. endisnigh writes: "T'other fun, interestin' an' innovative online resource goes th' way of co'po'ate igno'ance - due t'threats of legal ackshun, th' autho' of th' dialeckizer, a Web page thet dynamically translates t'other Web page's text into an alternate 'dialeck' sech as 'redneck' o' 'Swedish Chef' an' displays th' result, has packed up his dialeckizer an' gone home - see th' notice hyar."
--
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
If you are sincerely opposed to Bank of America's attempted action against the Dialectizer, review your personal accounts and your credit cards and switch banks. The following is a list of cards that Bank of America distributes: BoA Credit Cards Check your wallets and see if the logo is on your credit card. Apply for a new credit card, do a transfer balance, and cut up the BoA credit card. Money talks. Remove your money from the bank and let them know why you did it. Perhaps suggest a formal apology to the author of the Dialectizer...
Now they won't be able to read websites in their native language!
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Someone else will invariably create a web front end for these programs and put them back up for the world to enjoy for a few weeks or months. That's one of the nice things about the net: it's decentralized, which makes it hard to pin something like this down and kill it off for good. In fact, that's the whole point of the net, at least in its incarnation as a DARPA research project, i.e., a communication system without a central location that can be taken out.
Why is it that everyone who gets a worthless C&D letter feels like he has to fold? Where's the backbone? Why don't they send the appropriate FOAD response and be done with it? If it were a subpoena or court order, that might be different, but a C&D is just blowing smoke. This one is so clearly contrary to law that the appropriate response is not only to refuse, but to insult the education of the lawyers who sent it. Fight back for a change. Demand your rights or lose them.
--Lee Daniel Crocker : http://www.etceterology.com My life is in the public domain.
He kinda just shrugs and moves on.
However, it seems that some of the media (besides slashdot) may pick up this story from the sounds of it, so maybe he'll be persuaded to take a stronger stance
my other post is +5 insightful
Every time this happens, I see some people blaming idiotic laws for allowing this kind of junk to happen, and others blaming the corporations doing the sueing, and others blaming the lawyers who advised it. I may be missing a group here, but all three are responsible. The lawyers for creating such a culture of fear and blame and litigation, the corporate management that does anything and everything it's legal department says, and the goverment for passing unconstitional laws in the first place.
This is one of the reasons "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;
or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
The First Amendment has many purposes, but this is one of them. We should remember this, next time someone seemingly violates the GPL, or copies into a book something one of us says. Freedom of speech is a two-edged sword, and sometimes it does things we don't like. We should sit back and let it happen when someone violates our copyrights.
As long as they are not limiting our freedoms, let's not limit theirs.
Imagine for a second that you write some cool code, and that Microsoft steals it. Are you going to sue MS? Do you think you have a chance at winning? Do you think for a second that you could pay Microsoft's court costs? Just because you think the case is clear-cut, doesn't mean you'll win. I think looser pays is a sever disincentive for people without a lot of money to sue. On the other hand, M$ would have nothing to worry about when suing you.
To be honest, and I know this seems counter intuitive, is that the solution to lawsuits is more lawsuits. If someone pulls a frivolous lawsuit, you could sue them for it. There would be restrictions on this kind of suit though; you wouldn't be able to do it all the time. Lawyers would have to figure out how to do it. Maybe it wouldn't, I don't know.
What I think what we need, and wouldn't lead to any real problems I don't think Is laws stating that you can't send threatening legal letters that distort the law. For instance, if you wanted a parody taken down, a lawyer would have to discus the reasons why you could keep the page up. In other words, misinterpreting the law to threaten someone would be against the law.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Sad thing is, last time I looked The Sun was the UK's best selling newspaper. Not a very encouraging statistic!
Life sucks but death doesn't put out at all....
Perhaps we should start a series of class action suites against such companies as well. There are like some Shi^H^H^H lawyer that would take this on spec. Time to turn the system against its self. I Know I have suffered deep emotional stress because the Dialectizer have been limited multiply that by say 50 kpeople and that has to be worth enough to be someone. To check it out.
Grey (Chris Lusena)
I wonder if I could sue MS for rendering my page differently than I intended?
How about a class action suit by the posters of Slashdot?
Hey! Being an asshole is fun!
My anger is not only at the stupid thread, but also that the guy running the site is backing down. Yes! I am very angry at him. What is going on? Everyone who gets threatned today backs down? How about fighting these evil forces? When are we going to begin? When?
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
Here is another, it is cut and paste though. http://www.shortbus.net/dialect.html
I'm not backing the argument, I'm just trying to understand it. Even though a work is published for free, that doesn't give you the right to re-write and republish it. I suppose that's what they were claiming people were doing to their web sites. It would be like taking a story and re-writing it switching all the men to women and all the women to men -- on the fly. In a way, you're republishing that work in its entirety, and you're also altering it. I'm not sure how the parody fits in -- I always thought you could parody freely but someone got their Elian Gonzalez parody site taken down by the AP when that was clearly parody. On the other hand, this would seem to also apply to tools that filter dirty words from web sites or even usenet postings. Since they're altering the original document they fit into the same ballpark. Ralph
Just because someone caved at the first whiff of potential legal maneuvering, doesn't mean anything at all. Other then the fact that the people at rworld.org are wussies (witch is there choice).
No precedent has been set, other then that you can probably scare people off with a letter with a lot of legal crap in it. But we've known that for a long time.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n