US law has protections like truth being an absolute defense to libel
IANAL, but I was facing a libel threat, so I know a bit about this. Truth is not an absolute defense in the US, but it is an affirmative defense. This means that if the defendant can show that their statements are truthful then the burden of proof (about malicious intent) shifts to the plaintiff. In general, it's very difficult to win a libel case against someone whose statements are public fact and political opinion.
but it really is cheaper if you buy it here [amazon.com].
And it's even cheaper if you buy it here, plus the advantages of not supporting companies that abuse the patent system, and not giving a commission to users who post self-serving adverts on slashdot.
even sites like Yahoo! felt like they were made by a bunch of fanatical semi-professionals, as opposed to some big corporation
That's because Yahoo was made by a bunch of fanatical amateurs. It was originally just a grad student experiment that outgrew the lab.
I'm sure I'm not the only one here who remembers where they were the day they clicked their Yahoo bookmark and saw it redirect to an evil.com address. That's the exact moment when dotcom mania began.
I really love the acronym of that last site (Intellectual Property Management & Protection). The obvious pronunciation is "iPimp. The digital pimp for your digital lifestyle."(tm) Yes, Apple has avoided DRM so far, but it's coming.
AAC support in iPod and iTunes is absolutely essential for any Apple music download service, since MP4 has the necessary DRM capabilities that MP3 doesn't.
The only reason I hold any hope of Apple adding Ogg support to iPod is that it's free (as in both). There's 32MB of EPROM (or Flash?) on every iPod specifically intended for firmware updates. Plenty of room for AAC, Ogg, and the next dozen codecs to come.
Will that include the fabled MP4 Speech codec, that's been disabled in my QT6 dialog box ever since I bought it? I'm planning to encode and upload 2 hours of discussion soon, hopefully at 8Kbps or lower.
None of the relevant URLs are linked any more, but Mighty Google knows that NPR is still streaming in QuickTime.
IMO, all audio-only non-commercial sites should ditch proprietary formats and switch to AAC (MP4), since "there are no royalties or usage fees for content distribution in AAC format, either in electronic form or in packaged media".
Member-Referred Defendant #2: George Moore, Maryland Internet Marketing of Maryland, and 14 of their advertising affiliates. Spam Content: software products (www.getnortonhere.net).
M.I.M. is the advertiser, and his "affiliates" are the spammers. Weird though -- getnortonhere.net is registered to WebXtasy in Canada. I wonder how they determined it was George.
George Moore aka "Dr. Fatburn". Who is also being dragged into court by Symantec
Poor George. Sued by large corporations twice on the same day. At least he's got some experience with losing in court. And it's tax day -- the trifecta would be if he gets audited by the IRS for not reporting his spam profits.
I get a lot of ICQ spam that follows:
Hi, I'm (insert female name here)! Please check out my webcam. It's at (url).
So... what's your point? It's unsolicited (unless you were on #iwantsex or some such channel), it's an advert for a commercial web site, and it's certainly sent in bulk. What, did you think there was a live human (of any gender) typing that specifically for you? It was a bot.
transfer the bookmarks from the bookmark bar in Camino to Safari.
I was about to post my usual mention of Safari Enhancer when I realized what you were saying. Safari recognizes URL drags into the bookmarks bar from pretty much any source, including.webloc files and text selections. Definitely cool. Makes me wonder why other browsers don't do the same.
I really hope Wm James (owner of Spamreaper) isn't too upset about getting Slashdotted. Anyways, here's my story:
I arrived at the District Court in Glen Burnie a bit before 9am. My lawyer was there already. ( <plug> Jonathan Biedron, great guy, highly recommended if you need any family law or such in central Maryland </plug> ) We compared notes, made sure we had all our printouts, and went to Courtroom #4.
District Court is the first level of the civil judicial system, no serious crimes here. All the other cases on the docket were either family disputes or tenant evictions. Upon entering the room, George saw me and sent his lawyer (Cheryl Asensio, from Glen Burnie) to talk to Jon. George was kindly willing to drop the case if I took down my pages. Jon declined. When the judge got to ours he asked if we had settled; he saw that it was going to be long and bizarre, and was hoping to avoid it. No such luck, so he sent us back to wait and asked the judge next door to take our case while he finished up the usual pile of landlords.
[drat, gotta go to IT staff meeting. time passes.]
At 9:30 we were sent to Courtroom #3, Judge Robert Wilcox presiding. The plaintiff always goes first. We started out informally, and George narrated his side of the case. By 10:00 Judge Wilcox said that he hadn't heard anything to prove I was responsible for the harrassment. Jon and I are about to pack our bags when Asensio decides to go the whole nine yards with formal witness testimony. Groan.
Citizens have a constitutional right to a proper day in court (except for "material witnesses" and "unlawful combatants" but let's not go there), and that's what George wanted. Asensio examines Fatburn first, and introduces pages from Google Groups into evidence. She cited someone's signature file quoting Dave Barry advocating castration of spammers as an indication of the kind of horrible people that inhabit NANAE. (during cross examination George testified that he had never heard of Dave Barry).
Then she questioned me, apparently hoping that I would crack under pressure and confess to secretly organizing a cabal of Anti-Fatburn Terrorists. We got sidetracked for about 5 minutes in a discussion of how I contacted a guy who foolishly hired a spammer to advertise his hydraulic valves. Eventually she ran out of ways to try asking me "yes or no, are you going to stop harrassing my client?" and rested her case at 11:30.
District cases usually take between 30 seconds and 5 minutes, so everyone else in the room sighed with relief. The judge was still unconvinced and promptly ruled in my favor. I feel bad for the poor tree that I killed printing up my un-needed defense. Ah well, hopefully it will remain that way; any District ruling can be appealed to Circuit "de novo", meaning we start all over from scratch.
George tried to send me a message, and wanted to make an example of me. Instead I had a message for him: every time you try to mess with me, I will post it on the net, and more people will learn about you. I don't encourage harrassment against you, and I don't need to. The facts speak quite loudly enough. Your best option is to crawl back under a rock and suck it up, or move to some state other than the one I live in.
Nothing will prevent bored, spoiled sons of rich Saudis to kill innocent people. Reflection might help if you suffer from terrorist acts committed by people you actually harm.
Know your enemies in order to defeat them. A few corrections:
While Osama was certainly spoiled by most standards (he lived in a palace and received millions), he was actually treated quite badly by his half-siblings and stepmothers. As the only child of a low-ranking wife, he didn't get nearly as much good stuff as the other Bin Laden (now Binladin) kids.
And he certainly wasn't bored. He studied fundamentalist interpretations of the Koran, and later CIA insurgency (aka terrorism) techniques, quite hard.
In the 1980s we sent Osama to attack the Russian puppet government in Afghanistan. He was on our side. It was only when we moved a bunch of troops into Saudi that he got pissed at us. Infidels in the holy land, added to our Israel policy which he was already unhappy about, amount to serious harm to all "true" Muslims from his point of view.
Speculation: if Prime Minister Rabin had not been assassinated, and his peace plans had continued, the WTC would probably be standing today.
Agreed. He recently responded to my post about being hounded by Dr Fatburn. It was just a show of support rather than anything helpful, but to be fair I have a local problem (in Maryland) and Suresh is 20000km away.
Slashdot Mirror
Quote from CAUCE: There is no "Double" Opt-In. There is Confirmed Opt-In and there is net-abuse.
No. You just described confirmed opt-in. That's the technical and proper term used by reputable mailing lists.
Whereas, double opt-in is a spammer weasel phrase that actually means "I bought two email harvester CDs and they both had your address on it".
IANAL, but I was facing a libel threat, so I know a bit about this. Truth is not an absolute defense in the US, but it is an affirmative defense. This means that if the defendant can show that their statements are truthful then the burden of proof (about malicious intent) shifts to the plaintiff. In general, it's very difficult to win a libel case against someone whose statements are public fact and political opinion.
And it's even cheaper if you buy it here, plus the advantages of not supporting companies that abuse the patent system, and not giving a commission to users who post self-serving adverts on slashdot.
- [BLOCK] Eddy Marin
- Hilarious Lawsuit
- Cartooney in full
Definitely a fun read if you have some spare time.Interesting. I figured it was just a private mailbox, but it's actually an office building. A few of their neighbors:
- Boca Technologies
- Lloyd Realty
- Hamilton, Lehrer & Dargan, PA
-
Ron Davis & Assoc, PA
Google makes all computing simple.That's because Yahoo was made by a bunch of fanatical amateurs. It was originally just a grad student experiment that outgrew the lab.
I'm sure I'm not the only one here who remembers where they were the day they clicked their Yahoo bookmark and saw it redirect to an evil .com address. That's the exact moment when dotcom mania began.
- The MPEG-4 Standard supports the possibility of DRM
- but it hasn't been implemented yet
- but they're working on it
I really love the acronym of that last site (Intellectual Property Management & Protection). The obvious pronunciation is "iPimp. The digital pimp for your digital lifestyle."(tm) Yes, Apple has avoided DRM so far, but it's coming.The only reason I hold any hope of Apple adding Ogg support to iPod is that it's free (as in both). There's 32MB of EPROM (or Flash?) on every iPod specifically intended for firmware updates. Plenty of room for AAC, Ogg, and the next dozen codecs to come.
The spam might have an AOL address in the From: header, but that has absolutely nothing to do with the actual sender.
Will that include the fabled MP4 Speech codec, that's been disabled in my QT6 dialog box ever since I bought it? I'm planning to encode and upload 2 hours of discussion soon, hopefully at 8Kbps or lower.
None of the relevant URLs are linked any more, but Mighty Google knows that NPR is still streaming in QuickTime.
IMO, all audio-only non-commercial sites should ditch proprietary formats and switch to AAC (MP4), since "there are no royalties or usage fees for content distribution in AAC format, either in electronic form or in packaged media".Weird. None of the relevant URLs are linked any more, but Mighty Google knows that NPR is still streaming in QuickTime.
They filed their own suit, on the same day by coincidence. Not a good day in the life of George Moore. Poor poor spammer.
They are. Quoting from AOL's full press release:
M.I.M. is the advertiser, and his "affiliates" are the spammers. Weird though -- getnortonhere.net is registered to WebXtasy in Canada. I wonder how they determined it was George.
Poor George. Sued by large corporations twice on the same day. At least he's got some experience with losing in court. And it's tax day -- the trifecta would be if he gets audited by the IRS for not reporting his spam profits.
Hi, I'm (insert female name here)! Please check out my webcam. It's at (url).
So... what's your point? It's unsolicited (unless you were on #iwantsex or some such channel), it's an advert for a commercial web site, and it's certainly sent in bulk. What, did you think there was a live human (of any gender) typing that specifically for you? It was a bot.
I was about to post my usual mention of Safari Enhancer when I realized what you were saying. Safari recognizes URL drags into the bookmarks bar from pretty much any source, including .webloc files and text selections. Definitely cool. Makes me wonder why other browsers don't do the same.
Please mod parent up.I arrived at the District Court in Glen Burnie a bit before 9am. My lawyer was there already. ( <plug> Jonathan Biedron, great guy, highly recommended if you need any family law or such in central Maryland </plug> ) We compared notes, made sure we had all our printouts, and went to Courtroom #4.
District Court is the first level of the civil judicial system, no serious crimes here. All the other cases on the docket were either family disputes or tenant evictions. Upon entering the room, George saw me and sent his lawyer (Cheryl Asensio, from Glen Burnie) to talk to Jon. George was kindly willing to drop the case if I took down my pages. Jon declined. When the judge got to ours he asked if we had settled; he saw that it was going to be long and bizarre, and was hoping to avoid it. No such luck, so he sent us back to wait and asked the judge next door to take our case while he finished up the usual pile of landlords.
[drat, gotta go to IT staff meeting. time passes.]At 9:30 we were sent to Courtroom #3, Judge Robert Wilcox presiding. The plaintiff always goes first. We started out informally, and George narrated his side of the case. By 10:00 Judge Wilcox said that he hadn't heard anything to prove I was responsible for the harrassment. Jon and I are about to pack our bags when Asensio decides to go the whole nine yards with formal witness testimony. Groan.
Citizens have a constitutional right to a proper day in court (except for "material witnesses" and "unlawful combatants" but let's not go there), and that's what George wanted. Asensio examines Fatburn first, and introduces pages from Google Groups into evidence. She cited someone's signature file quoting Dave Barry advocating castration of spammers as an indication of the kind of horrible people that inhabit NANAE. (during cross examination George testified that he had never heard of Dave Barry).
Then she questioned me, apparently hoping that I would crack under pressure and confess to secretly organizing a cabal of Anti-Fatburn Terrorists. We got sidetracked for about 5 minutes in a discussion of how I contacted a guy who foolishly hired a spammer to advertise his hydraulic valves. Eventually she ran out of ways to try asking me "yes or no, are you going to stop harrassing my client?" and rested her case at 11:30.
District cases usually take between 30 seconds and 5 minutes, so everyone else in the room sighed with relief. The judge was still unconvinced and promptly ruled in my favor. I feel bad for the poor tree that I killed printing up my un-needed defense. Ah well, hopefully it will remain that way; any District ruling can be appealed to Circuit "de novo", meaning we start all over from scratch.
George tried to send me a message, and wanted to make an example of me. Instead I had a message for him: every time you try to mess with me, I will post it on the net, and more people will learn about you. I don't encourage harrassment against you, and I don't need to. The facts speak quite loudly enough. Your best option is to crawl back under a rock and suck it up, or move to some state other than the one I live in.
Know your enemies in order to defeat them. A few corrections:
Speculation: if Prime Minister Rabin had not been assassinated, and his peace plans had continued, the WTC would probably be standing today.
This must be why Slashdot is so badly Slashdotted today. I had to try a dozen times before it would even serve up the page. But it was worth it!
Agreed. He recently responded to my post about being hounded by Dr Fatburn. It was just a show of support rather than anything helpful, but to be fair I have a local problem (in Maryland) and Suresh is 20000km away.