they shut down a scottish-owned muffin stand named 'MacMuffins' and have harassed many similarly titled businesses out onto the street. if you have Mc or Mac in your business name, they'll come after you..
I saw a report about it on 60 minutes a year or two ago. There actually is a Lord McDonald in Britain, who is *the* McDonald by way of a 500 year old royal charter (mebbe he's a thane or duke or other goofy title, besides the point). He heard about this type of stuff, and decided to open a high-class restaurant in his castle, named "McDonalds". He basically sat there daring them to take action. Of course they didnt, but it'd have been funny to see Mickey D's have to change THEIR name after picking the wrong battle.
A couple days ago, when having to have slashdot remind my tired mind what my password was, I had it emailed, to the hotmail account I signed up with.
It took a full half an hour to sort through the spam that had collected in there, until I realized there was nothing that wasnt spam. After deleting it all, and realizing my password would not have been sent because my account had grown too full, I had good old slashdot send it again. This was about 2 or 3 hours later.
When I went to retrieve the password the second time, I already had 75 or so brand new spams, in the timeframe of a couple hours.
I've never "opted in" to anything, I've never seen anything but a choice to "opt out", and have done so, only to continue recieving emails from the same domains, with a character or two different in the user portion. I suppose this counts as a different list. I guess every time they type 'cp spamlist newspamlist' that constitutes another list.
I've only used the address when signing up for various forums on the web, its served no other purpose.
So whats new? nothing. But its a problem that has grown past annoyance, past nuisance, and is clearly criminal. Its about time the law did something. The 'opt in' honor system shore the hell doesn't work. Who do I sue? I want in.
Ok, so the security professional finds a big flaming hole - yet can't come up with the code to prove his hypothesis..
He calls up software company A, if he's lucky he manages to wade through the phone system and find a human. "blah blah thank you for your interest in our products we here at Co. A take our customers satisfaction very seriously we'll take that issue under advisement.."
So he calls up some magical government agency (department of computer experts?).. Hell - he calls the FDA, for all the good its going to do. "Thank you for calling the FDA we care deeply about your concerns blah blah dont smoke winners dont use drugs"
So he's fed up, and wants the problem fixed; perhaps NEEDS the problem fixed, because he's got script kiddies driving herds of elephants through that hole in his system.
So he goes public - without writing an exploit, and posts "Software Co. A is knowingly selling unsecure software" on the web somewhere or in some industry mag.
Now, without proof to backup his claims, he's on the recieving end of a libel lawsuit. After all, a security expert talking down Software Co. A costs them a gazillion dollars a word in a lawyers eyes.
So he proves it with an exploit - or even worse - a workaround/patch of his own, violating the DMCA, and spends the next 5 years doing all his port-sniffing in a prison shower.
His response to the Felton case is that a Uni. comp sci professor isn't an 'expert'? A cryptogropher like Dmitri isn't either? Is he? Cause if he ain't, how dare he suggest any software has bugs in the first place.
Where do I go to enroll in Security Expert school? Sounds even better than Bovine University.
Slashdot Mirror
they shut down a scottish-owned muffin stand named 'MacMuffins' and have harassed many similarly titled businesses out onto the street. if you have Mc or Mac in your business name, they'll come after you..
I saw a report about it on 60 minutes a year or two ago. There actually is a Lord McDonald in Britain, who is *the* McDonald by way of a 500 year old royal charter (mebbe he's a thane or duke or other goofy title, besides the point). He heard about this type of stuff, and decided to open a high-class restaurant in his castle, named "McDonalds". He basically sat there daring them to take action. Of course they didnt, but it'd have been funny to see Mickey D's have to change THEIR name after picking the wrong battle.
A couple days ago, when having to have slashdot remind my tired mind what my password was, I had it emailed, to the hotmail account I signed up with.
It took a full half an hour to sort through the spam that had collected in there, until I realized there was nothing that wasnt spam. After deleting it all, and realizing my password would not have been sent because my account had grown too full, I had good old slashdot send it again. This was about 2 or 3 hours later.
When I went to retrieve the password the second time, I already had 75 or so brand new spams, in the timeframe of a couple hours.
I've never "opted in" to anything, I've never seen anything but a choice to "opt out", and have done so, only to continue recieving emails from the same domains, with a character or two different in the user portion. I suppose this counts as a different list. I guess every time they type 'cp spamlist newspamlist' that constitutes another list.
I've only used the address when signing up for various forums on the web, its served no other purpose.
So whats new? nothing. But its a problem that has grown past annoyance, past nuisance, and is clearly criminal. Its about time the law did something. The 'opt in' honor system shore the hell doesn't work. Who do I sue? I want in.
Ok, so the security professional finds a big flaming hole - yet can't come up with the code to prove his hypothesis.. He calls up software company A, if he's lucky he manages to wade through the phone system and find a human. "blah blah thank you for your interest in our products we here at Co. A take our customers satisfaction very seriously we'll take that issue under advisement .."
So he calls up some magical government agency (department of computer experts?).. Hell - he calls the FDA, for all the good its going to do. "Thank you for calling the FDA we care deeply about your concerns blah blah dont smoke winners dont use drugs"
So he's fed up, and wants the problem fixed; perhaps NEEDS the problem fixed, because he's got script kiddies driving herds of elephants through that hole in his system.
So he goes public - without writing an exploit, and posts "Software Co. A is knowingly selling unsecure software" on the web somewhere or in some industry mag.
Now, without proof to backup his claims, he's on the recieving end of a libel lawsuit. After all, a security expert talking down Software Co. A costs them a gazillion dollars a word in a lawyers eyes.
So he proves it with an exploit - or even worse - a workaround/patch of his own, violating the DMCA, and spends the next 5 years doing all his port-sniffing in a prison shower.
His response to the Felton case is that a Uni. comp sci professor isn't an 'expert'? A cryptogropher like Dmitri isn't either? Is he? Cause if he ain't, how dare he suggest any software has bugs in the first place.
Where do I go to enroll in Security Expert school? Sounds even better than Bovine University.