Remember the good old days when we complained about those nasty banner ads that would compile lists of what sites in their network you'd visit? When privacy meant not using your real name online? Such simple and naive times...
It sounds like you're trying to say "people are behaving responsibly to meet their goals with minimum damage" on a Slashdot article about a mix of environmentalism, technology, and politics... Your signature is wonderfully appropriate.
I see that, and on the rare moments that the intellect shines through, it's brilliant... The rest of the time it's just irritating. I get it, Peter can belch to a tune. The first three notes were worth a chuckle. The rest of the symphony is overkill that exhausts my patience for the joke, even if the symphony itself is a beautiful piece.
Personally, I don't really like his style of humor, and haven't been able to watch a full episode of Family Guy in a very long time. It's obvious, however, that he's a guy with a deep sense of personal morals and an appreciation for intellectual pursuits - even if his work doesn't often promote such things. This strikes me as just the sort of thing Seth MacFarlane would do. He has a particular ideological goal (that Sagan's works should be preserved and public), and will use any mechanism at his disposal to bring it to fruition.
Mr. MacFarlane, I find your characters disgusting, but your character impeccable. Well done.
Yes, in that the actual invention is documented and publicly available for future inventors to build on, archived using the best methods available to ensure that the knowledge is never lost.
Throughout history, vast amounts of research have been gained and lost as novel inventions failed to succeed in the market, or as the inventing culture or company was destroyed by invaders or competitors. The only traces we now have of such inventions are the non-functioning relics found in attics and archaeological sites. What knowledge do we possess today that may be of use tomorrow, and who would dare to know?
The management of money is always simpler in hindsight, when the inventor knows that nobody will buy his self-promoted product, and no big company will buy the invention, and a better solution to the problem came out a year later. In retrospect, it's far cheaper to have spent the money on a new car and a fancy suit, to get a better job to rebuild the wasted investment on the product. On the other hand, if the patent is vital to a new industry or is adopted by the whims of fashion, the effort to patent it and secure the credit as the original inventor may be well worth it in the long run. Few inventors have the luxury of knowing their future, however.
There are problems with patents. As I said, it is a tool that can be misused. Faults are no reason to abolish the system entirely, as it does have a useful and beneficial premise that was been well served for the past few hundred years. We should instead encourage reform to correct those faults to accommodate the modern market environment and the breakdown of separation between theory and application.
Sounds to me like you're only reading Slashdot's patent stories.
Many (if not most) patents are indeed practically useless, because they cover specific areas of practically uncontested fields, and will never be challenged, so they serve only to document a technology that may or may not ever be needed in the future. How many companies really care about the arrangement of lenses in a particular theatrical spotlight? Less than a dozen, and they all have their own preferred designs that the company's brand is based on, so they mostly leave each others' technology alone. Each new improvement gets duplicated in other ways, though, so the state of the art keeps progressing.
I'd bet you have no idea how many patents apply to theatrical lighting. Those patents aren't often brought up in court, and don't make the news. There are even software patents, for the various packages to let designers model a stage under various lighting effects with ever-improving accuracy, by employing new techniques to model lights' effects on surfaces as well as volumetric effects of fog and haze. Some of those modeling packages have even influenced research in other fields, but that's outside the scope of the well-written patent, so that won't make the news, either.
Then of course there's the vast numbers of design patents handled daily, which effectively say "my thing looks like this" and really don't effect the state of the technology at all. Those serve the same purpose as a trademark, establishing a unique appearance for the sake of recognition, and all of of course completely obvious to anyone of moderate skill in design.
If those companies spent half on research what they spend on patent lawyers, they'd have the same quality of products, because they could make a little more progress on their own, but they'd have to wait until their competitors release a final product with the latest improvements before they could get one, tear it apart, and find out that the slight addition of chromium drastically alters the metallurgical properties (and therefore the cooling rate) of the spotlight shell.
Patents are a tool for innovation, and like any tool, can be misused to cause harm.
No, I presented one that's closer to the subject of this story. The attackers didn't call the company and ask if they could have access to records. They just did what they wanted, and you're arguing that it's legitimate because nothing successfully stopped them.
The records were retrieved using a tool that is incapable of conferring any legal authority, and in this case not even capable of validating the client's authority. Knives don't magically dull when you try to stab someone, guns don't check their target for a pulse before firing, and web servers don't deny requests that they aren't told are special.
The webserver can only do what a company representative told it to do. So the intended level of authorizations needs to match the programmed level of authorizations.
So by not configuring your stomach to block a knife blade, you have clearly demonstrated your intent to allow me to stab you? I think you have this premise backwards. Ideally, the webserver would be programmed to match the intent of the company, but mistakes and misunderstandings happen, and the dominant legal philosophy for the past few millenia is that mistakes should have as little impact on the situation as possible. Accidentally burn down a few city blocks while cooking dinner? You'll pay some heavy fines for damages,but the punitive sentence will be tiny.
You have a food cart. It is staffed by an incompetent employee. Customer walks up and asks if there are hamburgers available. Employee responds yes. Customer asks if just anyone can have it (more accurately the employee never asks who the customer is). Employee responds that it is for everyone. Customer asks for 10 hamburgers. Employee hands over 10 hamburgers.
And the law would look on this situation, and have to consider all the facts. Did the hamburger cart have posted prices? Does the employee have other signs of mental defect or deficiency that would lead a reasonable person to think that the burgers really weren't free, despite what was said? Do other food carts often give away free burgers?
All those factors would go into the final decision of who was at fault for the misunderstanding, and from that the recourse will stem.
It's an important distinction for me because I don't like legislating the protection of the stupid, and don't want corporations to get off lightly. It's a really bad precedent in which logic and reason get thrown out the window to protect the rich and powerful.
That's just the issue, though... the law considers mistakes and even a base level of stupidity to be reasonable. Taking advantage of that stupidity to cause harm is criminal. Assuming all of the facts of this case are as presented in this story (innocent until proven guilty and all that), the hackers are guilty of extortion and wire fraud, because they took data from a system they didn't have authorization to, and threatened its release for money. Period. That's the end of this case.
The next case on the docket is (or should be) a class-action lawsuit brought about by the people whose private financial information was released, because the company had a legal duty to protect that information to the maximum reasonable extent. They're probably guilty of negligence, breach of contract, and a few other more specific charges, but that's not what this case is about. There is no "they screwed up first" defense in modern law.
There is, however, partial liability. I expect that a court in this case would find that the company is partially responsible for the release, because they botched the administration of the server. Similarly, if you put a fresh cup of coffee in your lap in a moving vehicle, you're 20% at fault. The hackers, who saw the mistake as an opportunity to cause harm, took that opportunity, then used it as a tool in another crime, I expect to be found mostly at fault, just as a company would be if they intentionally served coffee so hot as to instantly scald, and so fast as to damage the container's lid.
"Exceeded authorization" would be an interesting argument because computers always do what you tell them to do, not what you meant for them to do. So while this company may not have intended to give authorization, they did in fact, give authorization to download the file.
One of the core principles of American law is that the intent matters. You can kill someone in a horrifically gruesome manner, but if it was purely accidental, you'll get a much smaller punishment, if any. Here, if the system administrators made any effort to restrict access to the data (such as explicitly blocking it from search engines, for example) they can make the case that it was their intent to keep the information hidden, so any attempt to access it is unauthorized.
Authorization does not stem from what you can do, but what you have been explicitly given the authority to do. Putting a thin veneer of technology over "might makes right" doesn't change the underlying principle.
Here's another appropriate analogy. A moron executive is walking around with a briefcase full of business data, and some random person comes up, grabs the briefcase, and runs off. The thief wasn't given permission to take it, so it's theft, regardless of the executive's inability to stop it, and regardless of the fact that the briefcase was visible to the world.
My understanding (though I'm not involved with hardware manufacture) is that batches of chips that pass quality control perfectly are labeled as the highest level, and chips with a few minor defects get labeled as inferior, so their driver never tries using that damaged part of the chip. Anybody else looking at the chipsees they're the same, and since it's done in batches it's common for perfect chips to be marketed lower than what they can actually do.
I say this only as passing on what I've heard. Perhaps someone more in-the-know can confirm or deny?
If you... don't like the concept of people being able to own what they paid for, then I can see why you would dislike this story.
PRC paid for the research into the speech technology. They own it now. Apparently you don't like that, so I guess you dislike this story.
What I dislike about this story is the notion that a child using something means it's a noble cause that's above the law. If you'll excuse me for a minute, I'm going to go rob a bank, but I'll be sure to also take the bowl of suckers and hand them out to kids later, so it's okay.
So it's best to just stay out of the pool entirely, and handle your own legal battles.Then when you're big enough, you can sue a weak member of the pool, and hope some allies don't come to its rescue.
This is the opposite of the mutually-assured-destruction game we have now. Rather than everyone in one group being able to destroy each other, the group members are the only ones they can't attack, and if they're attacked by an outside threat (including patent trolls, who have no vulnerability to being attacked themselves), they're dependent on the good will of others. This is mediocre for companies already dependent on good will (startups) and those who want to show themselves as being full of good will (Google), but a pretty crappy deal for any other big players.
I'll repeat one of my favorite phrases: You do not actually have a legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
If what you want to do is "use Apple's market penetration to host my application and distribute it to customers even though it is currently involved in a lawsuit and may eventually bring a legal shitstorm down upon Apple regardless of Apple's concern for their own well-being", you do not have a right to it. In fact, it's quite the opposite: any business (even Apple) has a legal right to refuse to do business with anyone, for any reason (except those prohibited by laws, but those are pretty narrow). Here they've refused to do business with someone because of a pending lawsuit.
It sounds great but ultimately useless. A pledge not to sue is nice and all, but what happens if/when one company breaks that pledge? Does their contract terminate rights to the other patents in the pool? Good luck getting that past the corporate lawyers. Is there some financial benefit to playing nice? Is it more than the profit to be made by backstabbing your competitors?
While the thought of "in this sandbox we're playing nicely together" is joyously innocent, I can't see it working too well in practice. Good luck, guys.
So the app was written by a toddler, right? No, it was two speech pathologists, Heidi LoStracco and Renee Collender. So it was funded by the four-year-old? No again. So it's the only way she speaks, at least? Nope, just the one she likes the best.
This headline, most of the summary, and the majority of TFA are an appeal to emotion to cloud what's ultimately a bog-standard legal issue. The app's future sale and distribution has been blocked, just like Galaxy tablets, XBoxes, iPads, and many other products that are banned from sale until patent issues are worked out. The point of the story (I guess) is to point out that patent litigation affects innocent bystanders, but this is nothing new, and I personally find the intense spin disgusting. Somehow, the fact that a four-year-old uses this app supposedly makes it okay to copy someone else's research and development? What about the researcher at Prentke Romich whose income depends on the company's speech hardware, who has a toddler at home to feed? What about the toddler whose lawyer parents are working on this case?
Won't somebody please stop thinking of the children?
This here be lawyerin', sonny boy... there ain't no logic 'round these parts.
Sad as it may be, this is the twisted logic behind such warranty refusals and as far as law's concerned, it's legitimate. To satisfy the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act requirements, the vendor just has to have Windows included for free with the purchase (as it often is), which gives them the ability to say it's a component necessary for proper functioning.
All other limits that I know of on warranties are based on the jurisdiction, so to the best of my knowledge (though IANAL) for this instance, it's legal. It sucks and the law should be updated to account for modern technology, but it's the way it is for now.
As an aside, I find open source drivers as a rule to be far better quality than manufacturer-supplied drivers.
Well, yeah. Many eyes and all that. I think I've had to choose vendor drivers once in the past decade, because there was a bug in the FOSS video card driver that affected my particular system. I'm comfortable running without a warranty... Hell, FOSS is the reason my computers are useful past their warranty's life anyway.
They found me. They found the address I lived at for a few months, but not the one I've been at for a few years. My sister's name is right, but she's apparently 40 years older than she really is, and exists in five different places at once. My father's name is "Father", and my mother's name is "Mother". They're male and female, respectively.
I'm unimpressed.
Several years ago, I told a friend on IRC that I could track him down in real life. He didn't believe me. I went through our chat logs, found his first and last real names, and the city he lived in. I then used a plain old phone book (you know, like grandma has) to call his potential family members. I eventually got hold of his mother's catering company, and she passed on a greeting for me. My information, discovered through plain old communication, was more accurate than what this thing has.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember the good old days when we complained about those nasty banner ads that would compile lists of what sites in their network you'd visit? When privacy meant not using your real name online? Such simple and naive times...
It sounds like you're trying to say "people are behaving responsibly to meet their goals with minimum damage" on a Slashdot article about a mix of environmentalism, technology, and politics... Your signature is wonderfully appropriate.
I see that, and on the rare moments that the intellect shines through, it's brilliant... The rest of the time it's just irritating. I get it, Peter can belch to a tune. The first three notes were worth a chuckle. The rest of the symphony is overkill that exhausts my patience for the joke, even if the symphony itself is a beautiful piece.
Personally, I don't really like his style of humor, and haven't been able to watch a full episode of Family Guy in a very long time. It's obvious, however, that he's a guy with a deep sense of personal morals and an appreciation for intellectual pursuits - even if his work doesn't often promote such things. This strikes me as just the sort of thing Seth MacFarlane would do. He has a particular ideological goal (that Sagan's works should be preserved and public), and will use any mechanism at his disposal to bring it to fruition.
Mr. MacFarlane, I find your characters disgusting, but your character impeccable. Well done.
This is a legal matter, not a moral one.
Here's what entrapment is, as explained by a lawyer, in an appropriately visual format to appease the attention span of most Slashdotters.
Yes, in that the actual invention is documented and publicly available for future inventors to build on, archived using the best methods available to ensure that the knowledge is never lost.
Throughout history, vast amounts of research have been gained and lost as novel inventions failed to succeed in the market, or as the inventing culture or company was destroyed by invaders or competitors. The only traces we now have of such inventions are the non-functioning relics found in attics and archaeological sites. What knowledge do we possess today that may be of use tomorrow, and who would dare to know?
The management of money is always simpler in hindsight, when the inventor knows that nobody will buy his self-promoted product, and no big company will buy the invention, and a better solution to the problem came out a year later. In retrospect, it's far cheaper to have spent the money on a new car and a fancy suit, to get a better job to rebuild the wasted investment on the product. On the other hand, if the patent is vital to a new industry or is adopted by the whims of fashion, the effort to patent it and secure the credit as the original inventor may be well worth it in the long run. Few inventors have the luxury of knowing their future, however.
There are problems with patents. As I said, it is a tool that can be misused. Faults are no reason to abolish the system entirely, as it does have a useful and beneficial premise that was been well served for the past few hundred years. We should instead encourage reform to correct those faults to accommodate the modern market environment and the breakdown of separation between theory and application.
Sounds to me like you're only reading Slashdot's patent stories.
Many (if not most) patents are indeed practically useless, because they cover specific areas of practically uncontested fields, and will never be challenged, so they serve only to document a technology that may or may not ever be needed in the future. How many companies really care about the arrangement of lenses in a particular theatrical spotlight? Less than a dozen, and they all have their own preferred designs that the company's brand is based on, so they mostly leave each others' technology alone. Each new improvement gets duplicated in other ways, though, so the state of the art keeps progressing.
I'd bet you have no idea how many patents apply to theatrical lighting. Those patents aren't often brought up in court, and don't make the news. There are even software patents, for the various packages to let designers model a stage under various lighting effects with ever-improving accuracy, by employing new techniques to model lights' effects on surfaces as well as volumetric effects of fog and haze. Some of those modeling packages have even influenced research in other fields, but that's outside the scope of the well-written patent, so that won't make the news, either.
Then of course there's the vast numbers of design patents handled daily, which effectively say "my thing looks like this" and really don't effect the state of the technology at all. Those serve the same purpose as a trademark, establishing a unique appearance for the sake of recognition, and all of of course completely obvious to anyone of moderate skill in design.
If those companies spent half on research what they spend on patent lawyers, they'd have the same quality of products, because they could make a little more progress on their own, but they'd have to wait until their competitors release a final product with the latest improvements before they could get one, tear it apart, and find out that the slight addition of chromium drastically alters the metallurgical properties (and therefore the cooling rate) of the spotlight shell.
Patents are a tool for innovation, and like any tool, can be misused to cause harm.
May a curse be upon you if my boss ever sees that. I suspect he already believes it.
You got the briefcase analogy wrong.
No, I presented one that's closer to the subject of this story. The attackers didn't call the company and ask if they could have access to records. They just did what they wanted, and you're arguing that it's legitimate because nothing successfully stopped them.
The records were retrieved using a tool that is incapable of conferring any legal authority, and in this case not even capable of validating the client's authority. Knives don't magically dull when you try to stab someone, guns don't check their target for a pulse before firing, and web servers don't deny requests that they aren't told are special.
The webserver can only do what a company representative told it to do. So the intended level of authorizations needs to match the programmed level of authorizations.
So by not configuring your stomach to block a knife blade, you have clearly demonstrated your intent to allow me to stab you? I think you have this premise backwards. Ideally, the webserver would be programmed to match the intent of the company, but mistakes and misunderstandings happen, and the dominant legal philosophy for the past few millenia is that mistakes should have as little impact on the situation as possible. Accidentally burn down a few city blocks while cooking dinner? You'll pay some heavy fines for damages,but the punitive sentence will be tiny.
You have a food cart. It is staffed by an incompetent employee. Customer walks up and asks if there are hamburgers available. Employee responds yes. Customer asks if just anyone can have it (more accurately the employee never asks who the customer is). Employee responds that it is for everyone. Customer asks for 10 hamburgers. Employee hands over 10 hamburgers.
And the law would look on this situation, and have to consider all the facts. Did the hamburger cart have posted prices? Does the employee have other signs of mental defect or deficiency that would lead a reasonable person to think that the burgers really weren't free, despite what was said? Do other food carts often give away free burgers?
All those factors would go into the final decision of who was at fault for the misunderstanding, and from that the recourse will stem.
It's an important distinction for me because I don't like legislating the protection of the stupid, and don't want corporations to get off lightly. It's a really bad precedent in which logic and reason get thrown out the window to protect the rich and powerful.
That's just the issue, though... the law considers mistakes and even a base level of stupidity to be reasonable. Taking advantage of that stupidity to cause harm is criminal. Assuming all of the facts of this case are as presented in this story (innocent until proven guilty and all that), the hackers are guilty of extortion and wire fraud, because they took data from a system they didn't have authorization to, and threatened its release for money. Period. That's the end of this case.
The next case on the docket is (or should be) a class-action lawsuit brought about by the people whose private financial information was released, because the company had a legal duty to protect that information to the maximum reasonable extent. They're probably guilty of negligence, breach of contract, and a few other more specific charges, but that's not what this case is about. There is no "they screwed up first" defense in modern law.
There is, however, partial liability. I expect that a court in this case would find that the company is partially responsible for the release, because they botched the administration of the server. Similarly, if you put a fresh cup of coffee in your lap in a moving vehicle, you're 20% at fault. The hackers, who saw the mistake as an opportunity to cause harm, took that opportunity, then used it as a tool in another crime, I expect to be found mostly at fault, just as a company would be if they intentionally served coffee so hot as to instantly scald, and so fast as to damage the container's lid.
"Exceeded authorization" would be an interesting argument because computers always do what you tell them to do, not what you meant for them to do. So while this company may not have intended to give authorization, they did in fact, give authorization to download the file.
One of the core principles of American law is that the intent matters. You can kill someone in a horrifically gruesome manner, but if it was purely accidental, you'll get a much smaller punishment, if any. Here, if the system administrators made any effort to restrict access to the data (such as explicitly blocking it from search engines, for example) they can make the case that it was their intent to keep the information hidden, so any attempt to access it is unauthorized.
Authorization does not stem from what you can do, but what you have been explicitly given the authority to do. Putting a thin veneer of technology over "might makes right" doesn't change the underlying principle.
Here's another appropriate analogy. A moron executive is walking around with a briefcase full of business data, and some random person comes up, grabs the briefcase, and runs off. The thief wasn't given permission to take it, so it's theft, regardless of the executive's inability to stop it, and regardless of the fact that the briefcase was visible to the world.
My understanding (though I'm not involved with hardware manufacture) is that batches of chips that pass quality control perfectly are labeled as the highest level, and chips with a few minor defects get labeled as inferior, so their driver never tries using that damaged part of the chip. Anybody else looking at the chipsees they're the same, and since it's done in batches it's common for perfect chips to be marketed lower than what they can actually do.
I say this only as passing on what I've heard. Perhaps someone more in-the-know can confirm or deny?
That's the newsworthy part. They created a mechanism that takes snide comments from the Internet, and converts them to mechanical storage!
And that sucks, yes, but it's entirely within Apple's right to use their control as they see fit.
If you ... don't like the concept of people being able to own what they paid for, then I can see why you would dislike this story.
PRC paid for the research into the speech technology. They own it now. Apparently you don't like that, so I guess you dislike this story.
What I dislike about this story is the notion that a child using something means it's a noble cause that's above the law. If you'll excuse me for a minute, I'm going to go rob a bank, but I'll be sure to also take the bowl of suckers and hand them out to kids later, so it's okay.
So it's best to just stay out of the pool entirely, and handle your own legal battles.Then when you're big enough, you can sue a weak member of the pool, and hope some allies don't come to its rescue.
This is the opposite of the mutually-assured-destruction game we have now. Rather than everyone in one group being able to destroy each other, the group members are the only ones they can't attack, and if they're attacked by an outside threat (including patent trolls, who have no vulnerability to being attacked themselves), they're dependent on the good will of others. This is mediocre for companies already dependent on good will (startups) and those who want to show themselves as being full of good will (Google), but a pretty crappy deal for any other big players.
Yeah, that would be nice, but they didn't. That sucks. Maybe they're working on their own app, or maybe not.
I'll repeat one of my favorite phrases: You do not actually have a legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
If what you want to do is "use Apple's market penetration to host my application and distribute it to customers even though it is currently involved in a lawsuit and may eventually bring a legal shitstorm down upon Apple regardless of Apple's concern for their own well-being", you do not have a right to it. In fact, it's quite the opposite: any business (even Apple) has a legal right to refuse to do business with anyone, for any reason (except those prohibited by laws, but those are pretty narrow). Here they've refused to do business with someone because of a pending lawsuit.
It sounds great but ultimately useless. A pledge not to sue is nice and all, but what happens if/when one company breaks that pledge? Does their contract terminate rights to the other patents in the pool? Good luck getting that past the corporate lawyers. Is there some financial benefit to playing nice? Is it more than the profit to be made by backstabbing your competitors?
While the thought of "in this sandbox we're playing nicely together" is joyously innocent, I can't see it working too well in practice. Good luck, guys.
Do you have any idea what their plans for next week are, or next year?
...So?
So the app was written by a toddler, right? No, it was two speech pathologists, Heidi LoStracco and Renee Collender. So it was funded by the four-year-old? No again. So it's the only way she speaks, at least? Nope, just the one she likes the best.
This headline, most of the summary, and the majority of TFA are an appeal to emotion to cloud what's ultimately a bog-standard legal issue. The app's future sale and distribution has been blocked, just like Galaxy tablets, XBoxes, iPads, and many other products that are banned from sale until patent issues are worked out. The point of the story (I guess) is to point out that patent litigation affects innocent bystanders, but this is nothing new, and I personally find the intense spin disgusting. Somehow, the fact that a four-year-old uses this app supposedly makes it okay to copy someone else's research and development? What about the researcher at Prentke Romich whose income depends on the company's speech hardware, who has a toddler at home to feed? What about the toddler whose lawyer parents are working on this case?
Won't somebody please stop thinking of the children?
Oh that is priceless...
Most. Twisted. Logic. Ever.
This here be lawyerin', sonny boy... there ain't no logic 'round these parts.
Sad as it may be, this is the twisted logic behind such warranty refusals and as far as law's concerned, it's legitimate. To satisfy the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act requirements, the vendor just has to have Windows included for free with the purchase (as it often is), which gives them the ability to say it's a component necessary for proper functioning.
All other limits that I know of on warranties are based on the jurisdiction, so to the best of my knowledge (though IANAL) for this instance, it's legal. It sucks and the law should be updated to account for modern technology, but it's the way it is for now.
As an aside, I find open source drivers as a rule to be far better quality than manufacturer-supplied drivers.
Well, yeah. Many eyes and all that. I think I've had to choose vendor drivers once in the past decade, because there was a bug in the FOSS video card driver that affected my particular system. I'm comfortable running without a warranty... Hell, FOSS is the reason my computers are useful past their warranty's life anyway.
They found me. They found the address I lived at for a few months, but not the one I've been at for a few years. My sister's name is right, but she's apparently 40 years older than she really is, and exists in five different places at once. My father's name is "Father", and my mother's name is "Mother". They're male and female, respectively.
I'm unimpressed.
Several years ago, I told a friend on IRC that I could track him down in real life. He didn't believe me. I went through our chat logs, found his first and last real names, and the city he lived in. I then used a plain old phone book (you know, like grandma has) to call his potential family members. I eventually got hold of his mother's catering company, and she passed on a greeting for me. My information, discovered through plain old communication, was more accurate than what this thing has.