The real problem is that the "Change the vote to Republican if nobody's looking" feature was only tested in the US. It seems to get different results in Ireland....
There's nothing inherently illegal about spam - immoral and annoying, yes, but remember that the term "illegal" just means "something the politicians have made a law against". Until a few months ago, there was no way for someone sitting in the US to send illegal spam, though it was possible for them to commit fraud (or attempt to commit fraud) or violate securities regulations or violate laws against practicing medicine without government permission, and many of those things were illegal with or without anti-spam laws, though some of them weren't (for instance, sending some kinds of chain letter snail mail may violate US Postal Service regulations, but isn't illegal if you don't use the post office.)
It's now possible to send email that violates US laws because of the form of the email transaction, though those laws are badly thought out, ill-defined, and easily evaded (they didn't name it "CAN SPAM" for nothing.) Some of the methods for propagating spam still violate the law even if they use servers outside the US (whether hijacked or simply rented.) But it's also pretty easy to work around many of those laws, by carefully observing the letter of the law and not doing the specific things it bans.
One set of techniques for avoiding it is to be careful about jurisdiction - you probably can't hire a foreign corporation to send spam for your US products, but a foreign corporation might be able to hire you to ship products to its legitimate customers without you violating US laws, if you're careful to observe all the rules (After all, you don't know why those customers visited that company's web site - you found it on Google yourself when _you_ looked up "impotent loser job opportunities".) And it's certainly legal to buy a bunch of stock for a low price and sell it for a higher price, as long as you're not illegally exploiting inside information, and the mere fact that some foreign corporation decided to start promoting that stock in its email stock advice newsletter isn't *your* fault - why that might even be how you found out about this Great Opportunity! Setting up foreign corporations is pretty cheap, depending on the jurisdiction, and as long as they avoid violating local laws, the semi-worst case is that John Ashcroft sends them a nasty letter telling them to stop spamming, and the slightly worse case is that your foreign corporation gets burned and you need to start a new one for your next scam (that'll set you back about $500-1000, which is 10-20 bottles of Fake Herbal Male Nutritional Supplement Powder.)
And "breaking into computers in other countries" might be illegal, depending on the laws of the country where the computer is, but buying hosting service there usually doesn't violate their laws, and that country probably doesn't have an extradition treaty with the US that can get you hauled off to Korea in handcuffs by bounty hunters, and if you weren't planning to visit the place and don't have any assets there, you're probably pretty safe even if you do violate their laws.
So basically, if you don't mind doing your homework, you can annoy millions of people a day, waste lots of ISP bandwidth, endanger thousands of unsatisfied customers' health, and 4.PROFIT! without the sheriff showing up at your trailer park with a warrant. Because it's only "illegal" if it's strictly against the badly-written laws. Spammer Rule 2 says that "Spammers are stupid", but they don't have to be smarter than the average Slashdot reader, they just have to be smarter than the average politician, and it only takes a few spammers with too much time on their hands to find the holes in the law and the secrets will leak to the rest of them (or at least, to the rest of the ~200 who send 90% of the spam.)
Corporations are cheap. US corporations are especially cheap - typically $100 for your basic Delaware corporation, and at least one spammer I tracked down had an address that was in the same building as The Company Corporation, who've been the canonical people to set up Delaware corporations for you for the last 100+ years. Foreign corporations usually aren't too hard either, though they usually cost a bit more - no problem for a big spammer, though maybe too much for some anklebiters, but it's more an intelligence test than an actual cost.
You can structure things so that you the otherwise-obvious spammer aren't doing anything illegal - e.g. some foreign corporation is hiring you to mail out products to their customers, or whatever details it takes not to be guilty of that half of the business, and of course it's those nasty foreigner corporations who own (or usually rent) the foreign web hosting system that's sending all the spam. You can usually disassociate yourselves from most of the other parts of the business also. It does cost you a bit extra to use a hosting center instead of getting DSL run into your trailer park, but you can probably find a trailer park in Korea that'll outsource it for you cheap. If you're careful about structure, and your operation gets busted, you don't go to jail, you just get bounced off your ISP, and maybe your corporate charter gets revoked and you have to spend another $500-$1000 to rebuild the missing pieces for your next spam run. That's 10-20 bottles of Fake Herbal Viagra, or 25-50 How To Make Money By Annoying People books. If you can structure it correctly using US corporations, you're probably only out $100 (2 bottles / 4 books) and you may get to watch John Ashcroft burn your corporate charter at the stake at high noon but you still don't go to jail - might be a little more work to get the details right.
You missed his point, though perhaps he could have expressed it more clearly. Many applications are CPU-bound, some are memory-size-bound, some are memory-speed-bound.
CPU speed has been doubling pretty fast, every 1.5-2 years.
Memory size (or at least, size/price ratio) has been growing pretty fast.
Disk capacity has been booming faster than CPU speed, though disk seek times have been changing much more slowly.
Memory speed has been lagging - I forget the exact numbers, but some of the hashcash folks did some research and found the speed doubled every N years, maybe 3-4. Certainly not the same curve as CPU speed.
If the real constraint in GNFS is storing and retrieving data, not multiplication speed, then you could easily get an environment where memory speed increases are the gating factor for your Moore's Law growth, no CPU speed increases, so your K-bit key is good for 2-3 times as many years as you'd expect.
On the other hand, factoring is a problem where the increases in Algorithm Speed have been just as critical as increases in Computer Speed. So maybe GNFS has reached the point where it's computer-speed-bound, but next year's Super-Duper-Number-Field-Sieve may be several times more efficient than GNFS, just like GNFS was several times more efficient than NFS in the ranges that are now interesting. Sometimes this happens just because mathematicians keep doing new work, and sometimes it happens because computer capacity (e.g. memory size) grows enough from Moore's Law that algorithms which weren't practical in the past become practical. There were factoring tools that weren't useful when most computers had 128MB of RAM, but work fine now, and there may be tools that aren't practical when most computers have less than 4GB of RAM, but five years from now your SonyNintendo box will have enough RAM to run Sieve@Home.
Blocklists aren't very good at finding the real spammers - just the machines they communicate to Prospective Customers Like You with. The spammer may live in some trailer park in Florida, even though their web site is hosted on a machine in China that's happy to deal with them as long as the credit card's good.
So you'll still get your herbal fake Viagra substitute overnight by Fedex from Florida, or at least your credit card will get charged as if you were going to. The question is whether, if the pills arrive, you think they're safe enough to take, or dangerous junk leading to high blood pressure, kidney failure, and worse impotence - do you feel lucky, punk?
Most blacklists aren't something I'd trust completely - but my ISP uses them as SpamAssassin weight factors, along with the various pattern-matching things that look for common spammer phrases. Some of the lists get 1-2 points, which isn't enough to kill your message if one of the list-mongers gets overly self-righteous, but is enough to help push a message over the limit if it was borderline. (Of course, you still won't ever see email from John Gilmore's machines unless you whitelist them, because all of the lists gang up on him:-)
Korea was the first country to get massively blacklisted. It's probably the most wired country in the world, with a large number of cookie-cutter badly-administered machines (mainly in the school districts) that had open relays on them, language barriers that meant that if you did send mail to the bad administrators, they couldn't read them and you couldn't read their replies, and it has a relatively small set of industries that do Internet-related business with US locations - if you don't make chips or consumer electronics, and don't have friends over there, you're highly likely not to get many false positives by simply blocking the whole country and its huge spammer load. And if you _do_ have friends over there, you can still block any email that's not in Korean character sets:-)
China's another popular place to block, not because of badly administered machines, but because of policies of tolerance of spammers and scammers and lack of useful response to abuse complaints. I haven't gotten much spam in Chinese in a while, but I still get lots with either the email origin or the web site located in China. And China's Internet access is controlled by the government telecom monopoly, who obviously don't mind spammers if they pay their bills.
So blocking a whole country isn't a new thing. But this isn't a whole country, it's just one of the major providers there. Spain doesn't censor their users' internet service - if you're blocking their mail, they can get themselves a Hotmail or Yahoo account to reach you.
Congress is expert at telling stupid people that they're going to protect them from themselves, and pretty good at doing it without them catching on, but they're really not very good at actually protecting stupid people. Look at all the crime and violence and imprisonment caused by Drug Prohibition, and then look at the huge addiction and death rates from tobacco smoking compared to the near-zero amount of crime and violence it causes. Politicians try to take credit for doing (mostly incompetent) things about whatever problem is popular right now, and try to make sure there's always a perceived crisis so they can Do Something About It and get credit for it, but they're not actually very good at solving problems that aren't complicated, and they're much worse at solving problems that are complicated, and their solutions usually create even more problems.
It's kind of like saying "We've got the best Congress money can buy" - well no we don't! You should be able to buy much better Congresscritters than that!
Definitely, agreeing to a contract that lets them send you mail is a relationship. So don't sign EULAs like that, and don't give your real addresses to people you don't trust.
That doesn't mean that you acquire a relationship with anybody they sell your name to, but the law isn't called "CAN-SPAM" for nothing - it creates lots of conditions under which spammers can spam.
The bill criminalizes anyone who "makes available for download" spyware. That doesn't just criminalize the authors or sellers of spyware - that also criminalizes every ftp site manager, web download repository like TuCows, or (ummm) P2P user who has software that happens to be spyware, whether they understand the intents or effects of the software or the New York lawmaker or not.
Furthermore, you're required to indicate whether the software can have adverse effects on the downloader's computer or any software running on it. Well, DUH - sometimes you can predict that it will (if you're doing enough testing) and sometimes you can't (because users have all kinds of software on their machine, well-written or broken, and may have different revision levels of firmware, hardware, operating systems, drivers, etc. on it.) Sure, some software authors are EVIL and setting out to cause havoc, but many people are trying to do Good Things that happen to use lots of resources.
Yes, they're nice and portable and can be drop-in replacements. But this discussion grew out of the outrageous $1092 price tag for the 100GB 2.5" disk drive. The way you fix that is to use 3.5" drives, which have much more capacity for much less money, e.g. 200GB is about US$100-150. 3.5" drives are also usually faster, though if your laptop only has USB1.x that won't matter much.
Yes, the product's quite real, and has handled a number of large customers. It's been a year or two since I've worked with it, but it works pretty well. The architecture is a smaller number of larger servers, mainly located at the peering points. Sounds like your sales rep really knew much more about phones than content distribution networks...
Trusting your laptop's harddrive for data you care about is seriously clueless - you're going to get it fried, so you need off-machine backups. If you don't have a desktop, an external 3.5" disk with USB or Firewire interface will cost you about $100+disk, and you're much more likely to get your backups done than you are to constantly burn CD-ROMs. USB2 is obviously a lot nicer than USB1 for this, but even USB1 is a lot less hassle than burning CDs.
Or get yourself one of those little Shuttle barebones boxes - they're still pretty portable, and while they're more expensive than the external drive, you can do a lot more with them.
AT&T and Speedera are two of their main competitors. They've all got different tradeoffs for how many servers, how big, and where to put them, and have branched off from the original big-caching models to a variety of other applications like streaming media which scale a bit differently.
Back during the Internet boom, there were also some companies that did satellite multicast to ~600 servers around North America, which competed with some of the kinds of things Akamai is used for. (But that was the boom, and those guys are gone now.)
Quantum crypto is an entertaining concept for securing data on locations connected by a single dedicated piece of fiber, but from a cryptographical standpoint, it's not really very useful - you can already do uncrackable crypto at much lower costs, and quantum crypto still needs you to run reliable communication protocols. It's kind of like using an armored car service to carry your credit card receipt from the front of the restaurant to the office in the back next to the unlocked door - you get a really secure feeling about how strongly you've protected the strongest link in the chain, but it doesn't do anything to help the weakest link.
So it's really about social-engineering potential customers.
Realistically, the US government is much more scared of Google than they are of Palestinians or other Israelis. As long as people in the Middle East keep fighting each other, there's a justification for a Military-Industrial Complex to tell us that they're protecting us from EEEVILLLL terrorists who might attack our Saudi oil.
But Google means that if anybody puts information out on the net, anybody else can find it, and collect it, and analyze it, and publish it. The Government wants to be able to find out everything about _us_, but they don't want us finding out everything about them, or about the people they're telling us not to like, or about the people they're telling us we should like.
Sergei or Larry said that 1GB costs them $2, and that sounds about right - the cost of disk drives is approaching $0.50 / GB, and you need some duplication for reliability and some computers to drive the disks, and amortize some operations cost, so you could probably do $2 in quantity. That's not $2/month, it's just $2.
And that's if you fill the space - while some people can do that overnight (:-), it'll take a while before their average user receives enough email to get close to that much, and the cost of disk capacity is still on a deep dive, so by the time the average user fills their 1GB, it'll cost $1 or $0.50 instead of $2.
It's only kosher if the turkeys are killed in a rabinically correct manner and the kitchens and canning factory are all kept clean under the inspection of a kosher-certifying rabbi. It's unlikely that the kill them kosherly, and it's highly unlikely that a company that's canning pork products would set up a separate factory just for kashrut.
Back in the early 90s, New Jersey passed a law doing some tax thing to soak the rich, and if you were single, the definition of "rich" was about $30K/year. One of my friends, nicknamed "Al the Communist", was really annoyed at this - he was about 60, divorced, working for the State government making $35K/year in a unionized job, and like all good socialists, believed that soaking the rich was a good thing, and that "the rich" were "somebody else" and "enemies of the working class". So not only did he have to pay the extra taxes, he had to put up with the state calling him "rich" and telling him that he was one of his own enemies.
Ignorance - I got some unsolicited bulk email from some company claiming to represent the interests of the Microsoft rebate class and saying that you could get a rebate from Bill Gates by filling in a form with lots of personal information and sending it to _them_. Yeah, right. Assuming that they *are* the correct company, they haven't given me a reason to trust them with that information, and they're encouraging other people to get in the habit of responding to other usually-fraudulent phishing spam.
Reality - I've got most of that information - Microsoft Windows constantly dies in ways that require reinstalling, so for anything CD-based on my computers I've kept the disks, though my wife has some laptops that came with Windows pre-loaded and didn't have the install disk.
Laziness - yes, I had good intentions of complaining to the company's ISP about them spamming, and have been too lazy to bother:-) The main reason to do this was if they _are_ the real settlement people, they shouldn't be rude like that.
Furthermore, these ambulance chasers are claiming to represent *me*, because I'm supposedly part of a class of people hurt by MS's greedy business products. WRONG - while I've been hurt by MS's software being unstable and unreliable and unfriendly, I knew enough about it before I bought it to know what quality to expect (well, except for 98SE, which I bought specifically for one feature that didn't work - but I've reinstalled my copy of 98SE on a variety of machines over the years, so we're mostly even.) The assertion that the PCs I've bought for Linux have been more expensive because I've been forced to get Windows with them isn't correct - I've bought them barebones and assembled them, and if I wanted Windows that was an extra-price option. The assertion that Microsoft was ripping me off by including Internet Explorer for free was bogus from the start, and the main people who were ranting about this in court were Netscape, who made their money by giving away their browser for free, so it's really hypocritical for them to complain when MS did the same in self-defense.
Yes, but at least one of the court cases (I think the CA Supreme court one, but it's been a while since I read them) said that Cohen and Verisign were jointly liable, so if Kremen couldn't collect from Cohen (who took the money and ran), they could collect it from Verisign and leave Verisign stuck trying to catch Cohen and any of his assets.
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It's a really important issue, and A.C. makes a good point here.
The real problem is that the "Change the vote to Republican if nobody's looking" feature was only tested in the US. It seems to get different results in Ireland....
It's now possible to send email that violates US laws because of the form of the email transaction, though those laws are badly thought out, ill-defined, and easily evaded (they didn't name it "CAN SPAM" for nothing.) Some of the methods for propagating spam still violate the law even if they use servers outside the US (whether hijacked or simply rented.) But it's also pretty easy to work around many of those laws, by carefully observing the letter of the law and not doing the specific things it bans.
One set of techniques for avoiding it is to be careful about jurisdiction - you probably can't hire a foreign corporation to send spam for your US products, but a foreign corporation might be able to hire you to ship products to its legitimate customers without you violating US laws, if you're careful to observe all the rules (After all, you don't know why those customers visited that company's web site - you found it on Google yourself when _you_ looked up "impotent loser job opportunities".) And it's certainly legal to buy a bunch of stock for a low price and sell it for a higher price, as long as you're not illegally exploiting inside information, and the mere fact that some foreign corporation decided to start promoting that stock in its email stock advice newsletter isn't *your* fault - why that might even be how you found out about this Great Opportunity! Setting up foreign corporations is pretty cheap, depending on the jurisdiction, and as long as they avoid violating local laws, the semi-worst case is that John Ashcroft sends them a nasty letter telling them to stop spamming, and the slightly worse case is that your foreign corporation gets burned and you need to start a new one for your next scam (that'll set you back about $500-1000, which is 10-20 bottles of Fake Herbal Male Nutritional Supplement Powder.)
And "breaking into computers in other countries" might be illegal, depending on the laws of the country where the computer is, but buying hosting service there usually doesn't violate their laws, and that country probably doesn't have an extradition treaty with the US that can get you hauled off to Korea in handcuffs by bounty hunters, and if you weren't planning to visit the place and don't have any assets there, you're probably pretty safe even if you do violate their laws.
So basically, if you don't mind doing your homework, you can annoy millions of people a day, waste lots of ISP bandwidth, endanger thousands of unsatisfied customers' health, and 4.PROFIT! without the sheriff showing up at your trailer park with a warrant. Because it's only "illegal" if it's strictly against the badly-written laws. Spammer Rule 2 says that "Spammers are stupid", but they don't have to be smarter than the average Slashdot reader, they just have to be smarter than the average politician, and it only takes a few spammers with too much time on their hands to find the holes in the law and the secrets will leak to the rest of them (or at least, to the rest of the ~200 who send 90% of the spam.)
You can structure things so that you the otherwise-obvious spammer aren't doing anything illegal - e.g. some foreign corporation is hiring you to mail out products to their customers, or whatever details it takes not to be guilty of that half of the business, and of course it's those nasty foreigner corporations who own (or usually rent) the foreign web hosting system that's sending all the spam. You can usually disassociate yourselves from most of the other parts of the business also. It does cost you a bit extra to use a hosting center instead of getting DSL run into your trailer park, but you can probably find a trailer park in Korea that'll outsource it for you cheap. If you're careful about structure, and your operation gets busted, you don't go to jail, you just get bounced off your ISP, and maybe your corporate charter gets revoked and you have to spend another $500-$1000 to rebuild the missing pieces for your next spam run. That's 10-20 bottles of Fake Herbal Viagra, or 25-50 How To Make Money By Annoying People books. If you can structure it correctly using US corporations, you're probably only out $100 (2 bottles / 4 books) and you may get to watch John Ashcroft burn your corporate charter at the stake at high noon but you still don't go to jail - might be a little more work to get the details right.
- CPU speed has been doubling pretty fast, every 1.5-2 years.
- Memory size (or at least, size/price ratio) has been growing pretty fast.
- Disk capacity has been booming faster than CPU speed, though disk seek times have been changing much more slowly.
- Memory speed has been lagging - I forget the exact numbers, but some of the hashcash folks did some research and found the speed doubled every N years, maybe 3-4. Certainly not the same curve as CPU speed.
If the real constraint in GNFS is storing and retrieving data, not multiplication speed, then you could easily get an environment where memory speed increases are the gating factor for your Moore's Law growth, no CPU speed increases, so your K-bit key is good for 2-3 times as many years as you'd expect.On the other hand, factoring is a problem where the increases in Algorithm Speed have been just as critical as increases in Computer Speed. So maybe GNFS has reached the point where it's computer-speed-bound, but next year's Super-Duper-Number-Field-Sieve may be several times more efficient than GNFS, just like GNFS was several times more efficient than NFS in the ranges that are now interesting. Sometimes this happens just because mathematicians keep doing new work, and sometimes it happens because computer capacity (e.g. memory size) grows enough from Moore's Law that algorithms which weren't practical in the past become practical. There were factoring tools that weren't useful when most computers had 128MB of RAM, but work fine now, and there may be tools that aren't practical when most computers have less than 4GB of RAM, but five years from now your SonyNintendo box will have enough RAM to run Sieve@Home.
It adds skins, and the scrollbar accelerator feature is really cool!
So you'll still get your herbal fake Viagra substitute overnight by Fedex from Florida, or at least your credit card will get charged as if you were going to. The question is whether, if the pills arrive, you think they're safe enough to take, or dangerous junk leading to high blood pressure, kidney failure, and worse impotence - do you feel lucky, punk?
Most blacklists aren't something I'd trust completely - but my ISP uses them as SpamAssassin weight factors, along with the various pattern-matching things that look for common spammer phrases. Some of the lists get 1-2 points, which isn't enough to kill your message if one of the list-mongers gets overly self-righteous, but is enough to help push a message over the limit if it was borderline. (Of course, you still won't ever see email from John Gilmore's machines unless you whitelist them, because all of the lists gang up on him :-)
China's another popular place to block, not because of badly administered machines, but because of policies of tolerance of spammers and scammers and lack of useful response to abuse complaints. I haven't gotten much spam in Chinese in a while, but I still get lots with either the email origin or the web site located in China. And China's Internet access is controlled by the government telecom monopoly, who obviously don't mind spammers if they pay their bills.
So blocking a whole country isn't a new thing. But this isn't a whole country, it's just one of the major providers there. Spain doesn't censor their users' internet service - if you're blocking their mail, they can get themselves a Hotmail or Yahoo account to reach you.
It's kind of like saying "We've got the best Congress money can buy" - well no we don't! You should be able to buy much better Congresscritters than that!
That doesn't mean that you acquire a relationship with anybody they sell your name to, but the law isn't called "CAN-SPAM" for nothing - it creates lots of conditions under which spammers can spam.
Furthermore, you're required to indicate whether the software can have adverse effects on the downloader's computer or any software running on it. Well, DUH - sometimes you can predict that it will (if you're doing enough testing) and sometimes you can't (because users have all kinds of software on their machine, well-written or broken, and may have different revision levels of firmware, hardware, operating systems, drivers, etc. on it.) Sure, some software authors are EVIL and setting out to cause havoc, but many people are trying to do Good Things that happen to use lots of resources.
Yes, they're nice and portable and can be drop-in replacements. But this discussion grew out of the outrageous $1092 price tag for the 100GB 2.5" disk drive. The way you fix that is to use 3.5" drives, which have much more capacity for much less money, e.g. 200GB is about US$100-150. 3.5" drives are also usually faster, though if your laptop only has USB1.x that won't matter much.
Yes, the product's quite real, and has handled a number of large customers. It's been a year or two since I've worked with it, but it works pretty well. The architecture is a smaller number of larger servers, mainly located at the peering points. Sounds like your sales rep really knew much more about phones than content distribution networks...
Or get yourself one of those little Shuttle barebones boxes - they're still pretty portable, and while they're more expensive than the external drive, you can do a lot more with them.
Dropping the power consumption by 20% sounds like a win.
Back during the Internet boom, there were also some companies that did satellite multicast to ~600 servers around North America, which competed with some of the kinds of things Akamai is used for. (But that was the boom, and those guys are gone now.)
So it's really about social-engineering potential customers.
But Google means that if anybody puts information out on the net, anybody else can find it, and collect it, and analyze it, and publish it. The Government wants to be able to find out everything about _us_, but they don't want us finding out everything about them, or about the people they're telling us not to like, or about the people they're telling us we should like.
And that's if you fill the space - while some people can do that overnight (:-), it'll take a while before their average user receives enough email to get close to that much, and the cost of disk capacity is still on a deep dive, so by the time the average user fills their 1GB, it'll cost $1 or $0.50 instead of $2.
And it'd still be Spam...
Back in the early 90s, New Jersey passed a law doing some tax thing to soak the rich, and if you were single, the definition of "rich" was about $30K/year. One of my friends, nicknamed "Al the Communist", was really annoyed at this - he was about 60, divorced, working for the State government making $35K/year in a unionized job, and like all good socialists, believed that soaking the rich was a good thing, and that "the rich" were "somebody else" and "enemies of the working class". So not only did he have to pay the extra taxes, he had to put up with the state calling him "rich" and telling him that he was one of his own enemies.
Furthermore, these ambulance chasers are claiming to represent *me*, because I'm supposedly part of a class of people hurt by MS's greedy business products. WRONG - while I've been hurt by MS's software being unstable and unreliable and unfriendly, I knew enough about it before I bought it to know what quality to expect (well, except for 98SE, which I bought specifically for one feature that didn't work - but I've reinstalled my copy of 98SE on a variety of machines over the years, so we're mostly even.) The assertion that the PCs I've bought for Linux have been more expensive because I've been forced to get Windows with them isn't correct - I've bought them barebones and assembled them, and if I wanted Windows that was an extra-price option. The assertion that Microsoft was ripping me off by including Internet Explorer for free was bogus from the start, and the main people who were ranting about this in court were Netscape, who made their money by giving away their browser for free, so it's really hypocritical for them to complain when MS did the same in self-defense.
I've seen chain-mail-like costumes made of AOL CD coasters before, so I guess this is the next step...
Yes, but at least one of the court cases (I think the CA Supreme court one, but it's been a while since I read them) said that Cohen and Verisign were jointly liable, so if Kremen couldn't collect from Cohen (who took the money and ran), they could collect it from Verisign and leave Verisign stuck trying to catch Cohen and any of his assets.