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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."
the Atlanta Blue Skye LLC company are irreparably harmed financially when they are hit with the clue stick. There is NO way to suppress information on the Internet globally, and those who try to are more ignorant of the facts than should be believable.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Maybe they should turn this over to their intrepid band of lawyers.
They copied his blog? That's copyright infringement - and that's against the law. It's no different to walking into a store and stealing a CD.
But the DMCA has other ideas:
http://www.eff.org/IP/Video/MPAA_DVD_cases/
Karma: Non-Heinous
The fact that he worked out a 'Javascript hack' wasn't the issue. The issue was that people actually wanted to listen to their radio stations ;)
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
My electricity, my computer, my browser, my choice. If I don't want my browser to disable the context menu then that's my decision. And some company disabling the browser's context menu without Law to back them up really pisses me off. In the IP gold rush the US initiated, people are trying to own every little facet of information that we used to just take for granted being free. Locking everything up may or may-not benefit the economy but it sure-as-hell prunes cultural-enjoyment (ie. a more limited musical taste due to finite resources to acquire content) and development (ie. remixes and interpretations) in the long-term.
Shh.
I don't know if there's anything more annoying then some shitty website that tries to block secondary mouse button clicks (maybe those shitty websites that use the word-highlighting advertising that pops up some fucking shit when your roll over the words). For all the cool stuff that JavaScript can enable, sometimes I think it might be worth it to get rid of it if we could wipe stupid fucking shit like this off the face of the planet.
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!
I have a method for bypassing advertisements on all forms of television currently in existence:
When the commercials start: go to the bathroom, get a snack/drink, perform small errands, talk to other people in the room.
Be careful, not scrupulously watching every single advertisement makes you a criminal pirate thief.
Possibly the best thing to come out this will be the complainant's phrase "hacker calisthenics". Let's all use it!
Share and Enjoy: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
"Romania-based technology enthusiast"
;)
Is that what we're calling them now?
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
What year is this, 1998? Trying to block right clicking as a means of 'protection'? That puts you on par with Geocities members pre-2000, and about one minor step above using js to spoof the status bar or hide the address bar. I suppose next they'll be petitioning the ISPs for surveillance to see who's been viewing their page source, claiming it as violation of 'trade secrets'.
View -> Page Source? I mean, that's the main thing they usually wanna block by blocking the context menu anyways. Or how about CTRL+U? Let's see you block that!
Or how about Tools -> Options -> Content -> JavaScript -> Advanced -> Disable or replace context menus? That's even a more direct way to stop it!
Of course this is Firefox. I'm sure none of the other major browsers such as IE7 (Page -> View Source / View -> Source) or Opera 9 (View -> Source / CTRL+F3) have easy ways around this, thus the cause for concern over the "hack".
Let's also not forget that any JavaScript is essentially open source, since it can't be compiled (obfuscated, maybe, but even then you can usually figure it out) and new JavaScript functionality can be added and existing functionality changed (or "hacked" as it is so ineloquently put) and tweaked to suit a user's needs through tools such as Greasemonkey.
Your laws do not apply outside your borders.
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.
You'd think a station would be all for something that brings it more listeners and thus more advertising revenue.
:)
Are they completely out of their minds? If someone told me that the way my site is implemented prevented some people from listening, the FIRST thing I would do would be to fix my site, and the second would be to thank the person for getting me more listeners!
Idiots. Yet I'm still listening to their station, on my Mac, because they're actually playing pretty good music.
-Z
Rude assholes deserve protection of the law as much as anyone else.
Repeat after me: Romania is not part of the USA. Defamation, jury and other shit like that doesn't apply.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Kinda like Idaho, but with lettuce instead of potatoes.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Lisp is actually doing quite well -- check out cliki.org, as well as the SBCL project.
It's not so obsolete a language as you seem to imply.
Any legal notice still needs to be issued within respective jurisdiction. Otherwise it carries no legal weight.
They at least hid the actual embed in an iframe, so you can't just see the stream URL by selecting View Source (which doesn't need right-click at all!). Of course, the iframe URL is in the page source, so you can navigate to that page DIRECTLY and voila! there is your player (without any ads) and, of course, you can view source that page and see the embedded player's URL (again, without right-click, which is still disabled in IE). The URL for the player (128kbps) is http://www.atlantabluesky.com/jazz/DISPLAYS.html.
Ironically, the whole reason for the blogger posting this workaround and the URL streams in the first place is because he wasn't able to listen to them anymore in Linux/BSD, or in any browser except IE. I've confirmed that EVEN WITH the Windows Media Player extension for Firefox installed, the stream can't be played (haven't booted into Linux to try that, I'll take his word for it though). Ironically however, the right-click capture doesn't even work in Firefox, so you can right-click on the (non-connecting) player, select properties, and view the stream URL to your heart's content (and yes, this is with the ability for javascript to catch right-click enabled... their scripting is just that bad, I guess).
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
I get your point, but he should have no need to be a sympathetic defendant. Next thing is that people who can't spell will have their rights revoked?
A proud member of the Onion-in-Hand alliance
What's this "right mouse button" you speak of?
Sincerely,
Mac user
My browser by default blocks all scrips unless I tell it to unblock one in particular. By default, this 'feature' would be disabled and I could right-click all I wanted to. Additionally, disabling the right click feature is as old as the internet and I've been able to work around it since I was 12 years old.
The ability to suppress a script is common knowledge and easy to do. I can view a page however I see fit, not only that, if I truly wanted a piece of content off that page, I wouldn't even need my right mouse button to save that content right to my computer. Once the page is loaded and content cached, it is part of my computer and I may do with it as I please, despite whatever copyright has been placed on it.
YOU also need to take this case in context. For many other cases, what you say makes sense. For this one, not so much. To start with, what he is "revealing" is already well known. So it could well be argued that the company is specifically targeting him just because he happens to like their music.
But the really big issue here is that so many companies are just so utterly clueless about several things. They are clueless about technology. They are clueless about security. They are clueless about the internet. They are clueless about making workable business models. And a substantial subset of them are clueless about law (including, possibly, this company, depending on the outcome of them consulting a clueful lawyer, if they are smart enough to seek out one).
Once information is out on the net, the genie is out of the bottle forever. There is no putting it back. It cannot be removed, regardless of whether it was right or wrong to have been released. Any subsequent re-releases of the same information are irrelevant, so asking someone to stop means nothing. And threatening a lawsuit, especially an international one, is just going to make the information spread faster, not slower. Any lawyer that doesn't understand that (and unfortunately there are still way too many of them) is in the clueless category.
Of course a lawsuit threat does need to be taken seriously no matter the situation. But, IMHO, any threat, as well as any actual suit even if out of jurisdiction, always deserves to be be published. The reason for this is that the world needs to always know about these things so they can decide of the threat/suit is justified, or if the legal system is being abused.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
When the commercials start: go to the bathroom, get a snack/drink, perform small errands, talk to other people in the room.
You're violating your contract, don'cha know?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I can make (and actually have made) proprietary Perl scripts. I simply tag them "Copyright 2007 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED." In order to run this code, you must have the source code. (Yeah I could obfuscate it, but let's say I didn't.) While you may have the source code, you are not allowed to redistrbute it, you are not allowed to make derivative works from it (i.e. hack it), and you can not copy portions of it into your own work (another kind of derivative work). Practically speaking, you could, but legally you are not allowed to. And if I found out that you did, I could bring a whole world of legal hurt down upon you.
What am I allowed to do with your perl code then? Where do you specify that?
Where is it specified what I'm allowed to do with a piece of JavaScript stored on a publicly accessible HTTP server? At what point am I in violation of any inferred license? When I tune about:config to make the script less obnoxious? Running NoScript?
I'll grant you the redistribution aspect, because Copyright protects that, but Copyright doesn't say I can't add words to my copy of Alice in Wonderland. It doesn't say I can't add an extra control knob to my toaster.
Clearly you can negotiate a separate license for all of those things, but I think you have to do that in order to acquire the protections you're assuming.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
...used to be a good radio station that played stuff that you didn't hear on mainstream radio. That said, I hate that stupid anti-right-click Javascript code, and think that its use is the last refuge of scoundrels. I often use the right click context menu to go back or forward, and the stupid Javascript code impedes efficient navigation of a website.
If someone wants to copy your photos, HTML source code, or whatever, that won't stop them.
Sent from my iPhone
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?
Your laws do not apply outside your borders.
You'll change your mind when our fully operational Death Star is orbiting over your crapass country. Lord Cheney will deal with you personally with his Light Shotgun.
It's as if thousands of people cried out all at once...but since they don't speak English we didn't understand a word they said. They're fereners anyway. It's the price of Democracy.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Atlanta Blue Skye's assets consist of the following:
There are no lawyers. People with lawyers let their lawyers write the letters so they don't sound so stupid.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Sure. Nice try. Next time don't be so gullible.
--frank[at]unternet.org