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CPHack Blog |
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November 18th, 2000 |
12:18pm EST |
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October 31st, 2000 |
11:53am EST |
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October 30th, 2000 |
12:56pm EST
4:50pm EST |
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June 30th, 2000 |
12:58am EST I wonder who hired Only for this? I suspect JSB, the new owners of Cyber Patrol, as I have no idea why Mattel would spend any time or money on a lame-duck product.
6:09pm EST |
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June 27th, 2000 |
11:35am EST Our oral argument before the Court of Appeals is scheduled for Wednesday, August 2nd. Also, Charles R. Nesson, Lawrence Lessig, Jonathan L. Zittrain and Diane Cabbell, affiliated with Harvard's Berkman center, and joined by the ACM Committee on Law and Computing Technology, has filed an amicus brief (sorry, it's only available as a PDF) in support of our case. Looks like Lawrence Lessig made this happen. Thanks, Lawrence. :)
9:21pm EST |
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June 7th, 2000 |
1:42pm EST |
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June 1st, 2000 |
11:37pm EST |
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May 27th, 2000 |
3:16pm EST Figuratively speaking. Wired is reporting on the great stunt that he pulled. Bennett took anti-gay speech from the websites of Dr. Laura Schlessinger, Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council, and Concerned Women for America and put them on free websites at Tripod, Geocities, Angelfire and TheGlobe. None of the source websites were blocked by any major filters. He then, under a pseudonym, submitted his own sites to the filtering companies (SurfWatch, Cyber Patrol, Net Nanny, Bess, WebSENSE and SmartFilter), most of whom proceeded to block the sites for containing hate speech. When these companies were contacted by the press and asked about their conflicting standards, none of them had a respone beyond stammering. Mattel wouldn't even talk to Wired's Declan McCullagh. The ever-thorough Bennett has archived all of his communications with the filtering companies. I wonder how Mattel & company will deal with this little gaffe. I'm guessing a lawsuit. |
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May 17th, 2000 |
1:04pm EST Also, everybody's favourite lawyer, Irwin B. Schwartz, has an article in the "Public Forum" of the Boston Globe called "Keep copyrights safe on the Net". It's pretty predictable. A personal high point for me is where he says that people like us cost US businesses $10,000,000,000. I assume that he's lumping us "Merry Men" in with crackers, script kiddies and warez distributors. It's funny, where Schwartz sees losses to businesses because of us, I see losses to consumers because of Mattel's crappy program. I guess it's all a matter of who signs your paycheque. |
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May 12th, 2000 |
11:55am EST |
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April 27th, 2000 |
11:27am EST |
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April 24th, 2000 |
5:50pm EST |
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April 20th, 2000 |
9:01pm EST The post office advised me today that Schwartz/Nystrom sent me another certified letter, addressed to "wyvern.org" and my po box #. As requested, the Post Office refuses any certified mail not addressed to me or names on my box (i used to get certified mail for the now-bankrupt business that held my box), so they returned it because wyvern.org is neither a valid company name on my box, nor mine. |
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April 14th, 2000 |
11:08am EST
12:45am EST Well, the post office finally found all my back mail (I hadn't checked my PO Box in about a week), and in there was a certified letter from Schwartz/Nystrom. I refused it. Why? There was $0.27 postage due. HAH! The postal carrier said "you can pay the $0.27, or refuse it." I said to bounce the letter. My theory is, if they can't make sure they got the amount right, I'm not gonna do their accounting for them. :) You know, I'm feeling better and better about this case... |
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April 13th, 2000 |
10:51am EST So, first Judge Harrington says that the restraining order applies to mirror sites. Then, when we file for a stay, it doesn't apply. What gives? |
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April 12th, 2000 |
4:35pm EST I like Irwin Schwartz's signature. I almost signed the certified-mail card "Richard Nixon," but decided against it. On the copy of the permanent injunction, there's a stamp that says that this is certified accurate by Tony Anastas, who signs his name "Paul Gallagher." Maybe I should have signed my card like that, since it seems to fly for Mattel. |
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April 10th, 2000 |
12:53pm EST It seems plain to me that we're in the right, and that we'll win; it's not like we'll back down. I wonder how long it will be until Mattel realises this and goes away? Hey, Mattel: You make a shoddy product. Deal with it. Legally, we can keep saying that until UCITA goes into effect. |
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April 5th, 2000 |
11:00am EST Also, I picked up my subpoena yesterday. Drove all the way across town in a borrowed Volvo to wait in line at the post office to get a subpoena. I wish I could have waited to get it on a silver platter, but I needed it in order to proceed with the case. It was just a printout of the e-mail. As an extra-special bonus, I got part of somebody else's subpoena in an unrelated case. It was printed upside-down on the back of on of my photocopied sheets of the legal filings. Yup, I can tell that we're up against some real professionals here.
1:30pm EST
6:54pm EST
7:15pm EST |
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April 4th, 2000 |
1:48pm EST |
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April 3rd, 2000 |
12:43pm EST Also, some folks have started mirroring not just the CPHack code, but also the actual list of blocked sites. This certainly puts an interesting twist on things, doesn't it? Give the list a read. Finally, Computerworld has a piece on the reverse-engineering issues raised by the case. Except for mistaking Lindsay Haisley's site for that of The Anomymizer, it's a pretty straightforward article.
1:01pm EST |
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March 31st, 2000 |
12:38pm EST larryk.microsys.com - - [31/Mar/2000:09:50:28 -0500] "GET /censorship/ HTTP/1.1" 302 226 "http://www.peacefire.org/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 98; DigExt)"Do you consider this to be offensive? I sure do. And the real irony is that good old Larry K. will probably use this as a reason to block my site. On account of the foul language. Looks to me like Mattel is running scared. |
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March 30th, 2000 |
3:49pm EST
3:32pm EST BTW, I'm still not mirroring the source, as you can tell. As soon as I get the all-clear from the ACLU, it's going back up.
8:20pm EST |
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March 29th, 2000 |
10:34am EST Patricia Jacobus, who has been covering this case for C|Net, has a story related to the most recent events. After reading the story, I'm left wondering if she's not writing about a wholly different case. I didn't see anything in the ruling that described the mirror sites as working with Jansson or Skala, did you? The AP has a considerably more accurate piece. Also, check out the Slashdot thread. |
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March 28th, 2000 |
10:13am EST Jansson and Skala are my new heroes. :)
10:19am EST
11:47am EST To quote Nelson, from The Simpsons: "Ha-ha!"
12:48pm EST
1:10pm EST
4:41pm EST
5:58pm EST
6:57pm EST Though it's from yesterday, I want to toss up a link to boston.com's article from yesterday, entitled "Microsystems reaches agreement with hackers of Cyber Patrol." |
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March 27th, 2000 |
11:12am EST So, I've been looking at some of the sites that Cyber Patrol blocks. (Bear in mind that they have a human-created list -- nothing automated. All of these sites are checked by employees and authorised by employees.) My favourites from last night's log-reading session? Well, I liked rita.com. It's blocked for "Violence / Profanity, Partial Nudity, Full Nudity, Sexual Acts / Text, Gross Depictions / Text, Questionable / Illegal & Gambling." When I saw that list of offenses, I knew that I just had to see the page. Turns out that it's Rita M. Starceski's website. Rita is a single mother that lives in Pittsburgh, PA. Most of her website is her account of what it's like to be a single mother, with links to support resources for single mothers and lots of photos of Nicholas, her 1-year-old baby. (Who is very cute, I might add.) No violence, no profanity. There is what might pass for partial nudity. (But if that's all it takes, why isn't Coppertone's site blocked?) My other favourite blocked sites are st10.yahoo.com and st15.yahoo.com. These are, as best I can tell, simply additional servers to handle the store.yahoo.com load. They're blocked for containing "Partial Nudity." (Hey, if I'm wrong about this store.yahoo.com mirror thing, could somebody e-mail me?) Anyhow, there are lots of other wrongly-blocked sites, but these are my favourites right now.
11:45am EST
12:30pm EST
4:20pm EST Of all possible outcomes of today's hearing, this was not one that I had considered. Consequently, I'm just not sure of what to make of it. CNN has a pretty straightforward story. (They even link to all of our sites.) I'm amazed at how well my server has stood up. It's been Slashdotted six ways from Sunday without blinking. Yay, Linux.
7:05pm EST
6:52pm EST
Cyber Patrol Hack v0.1.0 Once a program is GPLed, that's that. The authors surrendered all rights to their program. So can they, legally, transfer those rights to Mattel? That's up to the lawyers to fight out, I guess.
9:05pm EST
11:51pm EST Time for bed. Just one more chapter of Barron's "French The Easy Way"...and I should really finish chapter 12 of Steve Ouallin's "Practical C Programming". And I wonder why I'm so tired in the morning. :) |
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March 26th, 2000 |
2:59pm EST I'd like to remind everybody that the court hearing is Monday at 2:00pm in the Federal Court in Boston, Judge Harrington's courtroom. It's open to the public. Please consider going if you're in the area, and please be extremely nice. Shock 'em: dress up. :)
8:43pm EST I know that tomorrow is The Big Day, but it doesn't feel like it. I guess because I don't actually have to be up on Boston. I don't feel so nervous anymore. I had butterflies in my stomach all last week, and couldn't quite settle down. I actually managed to relax a bit this afternoon and not think about the case. All thanks to the ACLU covering my butt. I'd like to think that, for the most part, tomorrow will be business as usual. I know that my clients would appreciate that. :) |
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March 24th, 2000 |
3:08pm EST The AP is running a story that says that Judge Harrington has permitted these subpoenas to be delivered via e-mail. If the AP knows something that the rest of us don't, then I wish that they'd share it with the rest of the class. Hey, here's a thought: Maybe we should try and become known as, say, "The Peacefire Six Hundred And Forty Two". It wouldn't be accurate, but it sure sounds a lot bigger and tougher, doesn't it? And ya' know what? I actually slept pretty well last night.
4:14pm EST
6:04pm EST spampoena: an overbroad subpoena of dubious validity "served" by email to unnamed recipients throughout cyberspace. The first spampoena was just sent out in the Cyber Patrol / CPhack case, and we may dearly desire that, quashed forthrightly, it will be the last ever served. A judge in Boston, in a hearing at which no defense attorney was present, granted a subpoena requiring that a Canadian and a Swede remove certain content from their Web sites. The lawyer for Cyber Patrol's parent company requested and reportedly received permission to serve copies of the subpoena by email to hundreds of unknown others in all parts of the world. Several hundred of the spampoenas have been mailed (and fewer received).
6:27pm EST
9:03pm EST |
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March 23rd, 2000 |
5:42pm EST
9:28pm EST |
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March 22nd, 2000 |
12:35pm EST
5:10pm EST |
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March 21st, 2000 |
7:35pm EST I really feel like a crash test dummy in all of this. I strapped myself in and slammed myself into a wall, screaming "free speech!" in lieu of wearing a seatbelt. Not surprisingly, my head popped off. |
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March 20th, 2000 |
12:38pm EST For a copy of the program, see the mirrors list. If you are interested in doing so, you can grab the source code and the programs from one of the mirrored sites and put up your own mirror. Be sure to e-mail Open PGP to let them know where your mirror is so that they can link to it.
2:18pm EST
2:52pm EST
6:05pm EST |
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