Leaks Prove MediaDefender's Deception

Who will defend the defenders? writes "Ars Technica has posted the first installment in their analysis of the leaked MediaDefender emails and found some very interesting things. Apparently, the New York Attorney General's office is working on a big anti-piracy sting and they were working on finding viable targets. It also discusses how some of the emails show MediaDefender trying to spy on their competitors, sanitize their own Wikipedia entry, deal with the hackers targeting their systems, and to quash the MiiVi story even while they were rebuilding it as Viide. Oh yes, they definitely read "techie, geek web sites where everybody already hates us" like Slashdot, too."

Comments

Re:Mixed feelings...

[packetmon]

You know, I hope people keep this incident in mind if they are considering going to work for a disreputable company What you consider disreputable others consider reputable. Most businesses are in the business of making money, bottom line. There was a show I was watching yesterday where hot chicks were baiting married men to see if those men would cheat on their wives. How disreputable! To think that women would stoop so low to entrap someone will to do something illegal just makes me so mad.

I think that an even worse fallout of all this is that companies are going to be even more anal about stuff like e-mail policies and such. At my company now, they content-block us from accessing Gmail. Boo hoo. Work is work not meant for personal stuff. Although some companies may allow it, you're there to do a job not worry about your Gmail account so grow up and get real.

I'll be that companies will start doing crap like blocking employees from even sending e-mail to Gmail now, the attack vector that allowed these e-mails to get leaked. Poor policies allowed the company information to get leaked. Why the hell procedures weren't in place to prevent corporate email from going out on something other than a corporate server is puzzling but again, you're throwing personal feelings into the mix. Which part of *your* work contract specified "Check your Gmail hourly for personal mail". I don't think there is any corporate policy which specifies that.

But still, even after having said all that, I love it when an evil company doing evil things gets their due like this. Evil things like what? What they were contracted to do. Personal feelings aside would a security engineer at your company be an asshole because he decided to block all and allow in specified hosts? Its his job is he an evil ass?

Re:Good Time . . .

[Dausha]

"Legally, the 'fruit of the poisonous tree' ..."

I never said anything about that doctrine, of which I am familiar. That involves illegal government action that yields criminal evidence. This involves non-government action that is itself criminal. This is the same comparison we have with apples and oranges: none. The person reporting the information is the criminal actor, in my assertion.

"Morally..."

Morally, we all deserve to be soundly beaten. I did not raise the moral character of the email account holder, but the legal behavior of those who acquired the email. I leave morality for another thread.