Jack of All Blogs favourite Michael Arrington has been at it once more. A supposedly French hacker forwarded several stolen/found Twitter documents to the Techcrunch staff and other online publications. They were obtained by guessing or recovering the password of both a Twitter employee and Twitter’s co-founder Evan Williams’s wife. Twitter uses Google Apps for domains and apparently Google has a simple password recovery method.

Although I missed the memo, it is an acceptable journalistic strategy to blame ‘Do no evil Google’ and get away with any moral issues. Moral issues about posting stolen documents and company secrets. Moral issues about posting these documents and at the same time knowing everyone who works at Twitter.

It’s not our fault that Google has a ridiculously easy way to get access to accounts via their password recovery question. It’s not our fault that Twitter stored all of these documents and sensitive information in the cloud and had easy-to-guess passwords and recovery questions.

Although Arrington a ruthless, self-centric, machine is, he does not seem to have enough of gut to blame people for being dumb and use simple passwords in the first place.

“Yes, madam, I am drunk. But in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly.”

“To alcohol, the nights that you’ll never remember, with the friends you’ll never forget.”

“If alcohol is a crutch, then Jack Daniels is the wheelchair.”

“Alcoholism is the only disease that you can get yelled at for having.”

“To alcohol! The cause of … and solution to all of life’s problems!”

“I feel sorry for people who don’t drink, because when they wake up in the morning, that’s the best they’re gonna feel all day.”

“Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.”

“Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.”

“Your not really drunk if you are laying on the floor without holding on.”

[tags]famous jacks,jack daniels, whiskey,alcohol,alocoholism,drunk,churchill[/tags]

As promised, I’m following up my previous post on the DMCA- trying to make sense out of the madness, as I perceive it. So I asked Jonathan Bailey of Plagiarism Today a question regarding my main concern-:

Are 3rd parties like this allowed to write to a host and request such drastic action without going through some sort of formal procedures? Otherwise anyone can just do this as an act of sabotage?

Here is his answer to this-:

“The honest answer to your question is yes, no and maybe.

The DMCA itself only allows two groups of people to file a notice. The copyright holder or a “designated agent” to act on their behalf. That agent is usually an attorney that has a legally signed document declaring them to be an agent on file.

So yes, it is possible for a third party to file a notice- but only with a valid contract to do so. Being a designated copyright agent is a fairly big deal and not something you can assume you have.

The exception to the rule is if your site happens to be in the EU. The EU has a similar notice and takedown provision to the U.S. but there is no specific requirement as to who can file the notice. Theoretically at least, anyone, even a perfect stranger, can file the
notice.

That, potentially, makes situations like this dangerous in the EU. You and I can reach a pact to allow reuse of some of my work, someone else notice the infringement and then file a complaint with your host, getting the work removed. This hurts both of us.

The only way I know to guard against that is add a tag line saying that it is “used with permission from” and then give the site name.

Still, even that is no guarantee.

This is something that the EU is going to have to work out.”

For those of you with sites in the EU that this may concern, I followed up with another question to Jonathan-:

When you say “in the EU”- would that mean where the site is hosted or the location of the domain registrant? And doesn’t this get confused with hosting resellers being located outside the US, while the main server is in the United States?

To which he responded-:

“EU deals with the host. The domain registrant has nothing to do with it.

Ponder a scenario here. If a Russian plagiarizes an Australian author but uses a U.S. Web host, the Australian man would use a DMCA notice to get the work removed. Similarly, if the Russian chose a host located in the EU, the Australian would go through those procedures.

It’s a matter of where the data is stored physical and which country “owns” the server. It is interesting when you get to matters of collocation, which can put a single site across many different countries, but in those cases you focus on the main one.

ThePirateBay has used that rub to keep their site alive, despite multiple copyright threats.”

This answer from Jonathan far from put my mind at rest!!

The laws in the US need reviewing now and the EU has to attend to their chaotic interpretations even more urgently.

Watch this space.

Reading Dread Pirate Yarr‘s articles here always makes me think about Pirates of the Carribean. I loved that movie and its sequel. I dig the great action scenes, the story twists and of course that charming Keira Knightley girl (who doesn’t?). There’s something about Pirates that the entertainment industry has romanticized. And to some extent, there is something about being a pirate of that kind appealing. Even one of my favorite literary characters, the Count of Monte Cristo, had dealings with pirates in his time.

But there’s another kind of piracy today that can be considered a real pain in the ass. And that’s piracy of software and piracy of content (a.k.a. copyright infringement).

Software companies are taking a hardline stance against piracy. But try as they may, pirates still get to find ways to work around copyright protection schemes. Microsoft, for example, has tried time and again to enforce restrictions on Windows, but each attempt has been foiled by patches that can be applied in 30 seconds and serial-numbers that are easily obtained from the Web. Music labels have been campaigning against music sharing, to the extent of suing everyone and his uncle for downloading “free” music online, and locking down their digital music such that people can only play them on a limited set of devices.

I hear Windows Vista will be so protected that the moment Microsoft detects you’re using a pirated copy, you’ll lose your OS’s functionality a bit at a time (like being automatically logged off after 60 minutes, or losing the ability to print a document, and the like).

The losers here in the end are the users.

Software makers keep prices high to compensate for losses, and this leads to users turning to bootlegged versions to save. Music sits put in too much copy restriction, and users will just find the “free” versions online so they can use it in more than one MP3 player or computer.

I think the best way to fight piracy of this kind is to look for alternative business models, like how some companies offer their products or services for free but ad-supported, or like how websites offer applications for free online, but with some ads. Therefore, even if a piece of software or content is distributed and redistributed, the author does not lose anything. In fact, the author (and the advertiser) gain with the advertising getting better mileage.

It’s not pretty, but I think it’s a good way to go.