Why weren’t the Prenda porn trolls stopped years ago?

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Of course, lawyers and litigants use the court system every day as a way to make money; entire business models like patent trolling remain legal, and the lawyers involved aren’t so much as sanctioned. But with Prenda, the difference in Wright’s mind was apparently the target—not companies but individuals, many without much money or court experience. Prenda’s plan, Wright said, was nothing less than a scheme “to plunder the citizenry.”

via Why weren’t the Prenda porn trolls stopped years ago? | Ars Technica.

As for the porn trolling business model, well, it’s not dead yet. But at least it can’t be done this way.

This case has been terribly confusing for me to follow.  The following comment from the comment section sums up the issue with Prenda nicely.

One issue is that lawyers aren’t supposed to misrepresent who their clients are. In this case the lawyers *are* the clients, via numerous shell corporations and offshore trusts designed to obscure that fact. The Prenda attorneys allegedly bought the IP of little-known porn movies for very little money and then set up various bogus organizations to obscure the fact that the attorneys were also the plaintiffs who would benefit from favorable judgments. IANAL but apparently that behavior is frowned upon by law-talking guys.

Last mention of it here was last March.  A lot of work from sites like DieTrollDie and FightCopyrightTrolls went into helping the victims of this extortion.  Here’s a snippet from the latter:

We have been waiting for this moment for a long time. Congratulations to everyone involved, especially Morgan and Nick.

CSS Zen Garden: The Beauty in CSS Design

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There is a continuing need to show the power of CSS. The Zen Garden aims to excite, inspire, and encourage participation. To begin, view some of the existing designs in the list. Clicking on any one will load the style sheet into this very page. The HTML remains the same, the only thing that has changed is the external CSS file. Yes, really.

via CSS Zen Garden: The Beauty in CSS Design.

From: 10 Years

Wow. It’s finally happened. The CSS Zen Garden is 10 years old today.

BT Retail Tests Controversial Carrier Grade NAT IP Address Sharing

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The technique has been criticised because it imposes certain limits on users by virtue of the fact that their broadband connection no longer has the use of a fixed unique IP address, but is rather sharing an address with other users – in BT’s trial, up to nine other users. This means, for instance, that users can’t serve content to the wider Internet from servers on their home network; and BT admits that it can also affect activities such as online gaming and dynamic DNS services.

via BT Retail Tests Controversial Carrier Grade NAT IP Address Sharing.

Government Lab Reveals It Has Operated Quantum Internet For Over Two Years

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The basic idea here is that the act of measuring a quantum object, such as a photon, always changes it. So any attempt to eavesdrop on a quantum message cannot fail to leave telltale signs of snooping that the receiver can detect. That allows anybody to send a “one-time pad” over a quantum network which can then be used for secure communication using conventional classical communication.

via Government Lab Reveals It Has Operated Quantum Internet For Over Two Years | MIT Technology Review.

That may sound limiting but it still allows each node to send a one-time pad to the hub which it then uses to communicate securely over a classical link. The hub can then route this message to another node using another one time pad that it has set up with this second node. So the entire network is secure, provided that the central hub is also secure.

Why Your Startup Should Be Open Source

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Rather than staying limited to a small team perhaps even a single developer, fostering an open source community will open the doors to potentially unlimited contributions from other developers, especially ones who happen to use your software; this type of feedback is thus a great indicator of major pain points your users have with your product. Even among your users who aren’t programmers, the GitHub issues system is an incredibly useful tool for tracking bug reports and feature requests.

via Why Your Startup Should Be Open Source – by Peer.fm formerly Napster.fm | citizentekk.

Reasons to believe

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It’s time to assume the mantle of Defender of the Faith. I’m going to give you ten arguments for believing P!=NP: arguments that are pretty much obvious to those who have thought seriously about the question, but that (with few exceptions) seem never to be laid out explicitly for those who haven’t. You’re welcome to believe P=NP if you choose. My job is to make you understand the conceptual price you have to pay for that belief.

via Shtetl-Optimized » Blog Archive » Reasons to believe.

After Sandy’s destruction, Verizon switches to all-wireless service in Mantoloking

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How does it work? A Verizon technician installs a small box with an antenna in your home. It plugs into an electrical socket and a telephone jack, which powers all the telephone jacks in the house. The device also accepts AA batteries or has a rechargeable battery pack if there is a power outage. Three AA batteries provide 36 hours of standby time.

via After Sandy’s destruction, Verizon switches to all-wireless service in Mantoloking | The Asbury Park Press NJ | app.com.

Dutch police may get right to hack in cyber crime fight

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Under a new bill, investigators would be able to hack into computers, install spyware, read emails and destroy files.

They could also break into servers located abroad, if they were being used to block services.

via BBC News – Dutch police may get right to hack in cyber crime fight.

This is no threat to a properly secured system.  AV software is not a panacea for securing a system.

Internet Census 2012

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Abstract While playing around with the Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE) we discovered an amazing number of open embedded devices on the Internet. Many of them are based on Linux and allow login to standard BusyBox with empty or default credentials. We used these devices to build a distributed port scanner to scan all IPv4 addresses. These scans include service probes for the most common ports, ICMP ping, reverse DNS and SYN scans. We analyzed some of the data to get an estimation of the IP address usage.

All data gathered during our research is released into the public domain for further study.

via Internet Census 2012.