Slashdot Mirror
Blogger Threatened For Publishing JS Hack
An anonymous reader writes "Internet radio station Atlanta Blue Skye LLC has warned a Romania-based technology enthusiast that his blog has been 'copied' and turned over to its lawyers. The issue stems from his posting of a widely known workaround for bypassing JavaScript functions that try to disable a mouse's right-click context menu functionality, and the radio stream information gathered from the Properties function of Windows Media Player."
Mr Radu-Cristian Fotescu appears to have licensed his work under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license which would allow the radio station to copy his work.
However, it does not allow for commercial exploitation of his work so we enter a grey-area. Is the use of his work to prosecute a lawsuit for monetary damages a commercial exploitation of his work?
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
The user is in control of web content or any code a website decides to run on the client, clueless bullshit like this isn't even funny.
In other news, the recent js dependent google.com facelift is less useful to me because I have javascript disabled. It seems that most sites expect users have javascript enabled these days, sad that google deliberately broke their site. If I don't know if I can even be bothered hacking a functional interface when there are other search engines that work perfectly.
The user is in control of their machine, not the web site!
Suppose the Atlanta blue Skye LLC knew they were launching a claim that ignored basic realities, including basic realities of the internet, that is distribution of information and how-to; If this can be shown to be the case, then the Atlanta Blue Skye LLC should be open to frivoulous lawsuit charges. Here are the merits of such a case: 1) There are 1,420 web pages that include the term "Bypass Javascript" (from google.com) 2) As the other posts have mentioned, even major browsers have ways of disabling script. This clearly represents the realm of basic technical understanding. To not know this, and then suppose that doing so would be illegal, is to ignore what has long been established by the major shapers and designers of the modern internet. This is what counts for frivolousness.
Still, though, just as a crackable WEP WiFi point is no longer a "open invitation", circumventing an access-control device that is easily circumvented does not mean that it was open.
I think a better argument would be that there was no "hacking" of a poorly-made access-control mechanism, because the mechanism was flat-out not an access control device in the first place.
Interpretation and execution of the JavaScript language that the right-click blocking used is an optional browser feature, so the blocking itself is inherently optional. Furthermore, the feature of JS that they were trying to exploit (the modality of the alert() box) is not specified as an access control feature, nor is it specified (and it's certainly not guaranteed) to function in a manner that would control access.
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
The original email message is posted here. The message headers are as follows:
The Text of the message:
This doesn't look like a legitimate email to me in the least - from the earthlink origination to the cheesy wording of the message. Sounds like Slashdot has either been blog-spammed, or this guy is another chicken little.
Isn't this kinda equivilent to the guy who received a DMCA notice for holding down the shift key while inserting a CD in order to not load the DRM installed on it?