beforeyoukillyourcomputer.com Saving computers one at a time from their owners

SANTA ANA, California (Reuters) - A computer hacker testified on Wednesday that a News Corp unit hired him to develop pirating software, but denied using it to penetrate the security system of a rival satellite television service.

Christopher Tarnovsky — who said his first payment was $20,000 in cash hidden in electronic devices mailed from Canada — testified in a corporate-spying lawsuit brought against News Corp’s NDS Group by DISH Network Corp.

The trial could result in hundreds of millions of dollars in damage awards.

NDS, which provides security technology to a global satellite network that includes satellite TV service DirecTV, denies the claims, saying it was only engaged in reverse engineering — looking at a technology product to determine how it works, a standard in the electronics industry.

After an introduction by plaintiff’s attorney Chad Hagan as one of the “two best hackers in the world,” Tarnovsky told the court that he was paid on a regular basis by Harper Collins, a publishing arm of News Corp, for 10 years.

Tarnovsky said one of his first projects was to develop a pirating program to make DirectTV more secure.

But lawyers for DISH Network claim Tarnovsky’s mission was to hack into DISH’s satellite network, steal the security code, then flood the market with pirated smart cards costing DISH $900 million in lost revenue and system-repair costs.

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It looks like torrents isn’t the only business the Pirate Bay is concerning itself with. First there was image hosting and now there’s blogging. BayWords is the site’s foray into the world of blogging services, aiming to provide a service that does not want to restrict “uncomfortable thoughts and ideas” and let people say and link to what they want (as long as it complies with Swedish law).

Apparently one of the Pirate Bay captains, Brokep, had a friend who’s blog was shut down by linking to copyrighted material. This inspired him to offer this alternative, which runs on a customized version of a multi user install of Wordpress. The site plans to continue adding features, updates, and themes, and encourages users to “blog your heart out.”

If you’ve been looking for a place to take your blog, BayWords might offer a nice home, as long as you don’t mind having “myname.baywords.com” as your address. Or maybe you just want to be able to tell people that your blog is hosted by Swedish pirates. Or something like that. Unfortunately, it does look like ads will be implemented eventually to cover expenses, but information on bandwidth or other stats are not available at this point.

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Ignorance of the law is no excuse but here is a different spin on that commonly used phrase:

In January, a jury found Amero guilty of four felony charges of risking injury to a minor or impairing the morals of a child, following a 2004 incident where her classroom PC became infected with pop-up ads that displayed thumbnails of pornographic imagery. The prosecution maintained that the pop-up ads were caused by Amero’s activity on the PC and the testimony of a forensic expert that would have refuted the charges was curtailed by courtroom rules…

“The primary reason that I got involved was to get Julie out of this train wreck, but it was also to bring awareness to the problem of malware and forensic analysis — it is a big problem,” he said.

In the latest case, one of the school’s teacher logged into the classroom computer, because Amero did not have credentials. The substitute teacher was told not to log out or turn off the computer. What happened after that has become the main point of contention.

A detective on the case using off-the-shelf recovery software argued that Amero clicked on pornographic Web links and caused the computer to display pornographic pop-up advertisements. However, the defense’s forensic expert, Herbert Horner, stated that a more complete analysis showed that a harmless hairstyling Web site had actually redirected the PC’s browser to pornographic sites, setting off the deluge of offensive ads.

The forensic analysis produced by Eckelberry and other independent security researchers found a large number of inconsistencies between what was said during Amero’s trial and what really happened, according to the analysis of the computer’s hard drive.

Customers were deceived into subscribing to MSN Internet access

When James Odom purchased a PC from Best Buy, he assumed that he knew what he was buying. Odom was offered an Internet access “trial” CD with his computer, but refused to accept the disc on the premise that he already had his own Internet access. Despite his refusal, Odom later found that Microsoft charged him on a monthly basis for MSN Internet access.

Odom never provided his credit card information to Microsoft.

In 2002, Odom filed the suit against Best Buy and Microsoft over customer deception under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). Odom alledged that Best Buy provided Microsoft his credit card information as part of a joint marketing agreement. Thousands of similar accusations were rolled into the Odom case soon after.

The suit was dismissed initially, but a panel of minority judges have sent the case back to trial.

“If the customer was paying by debit or credit card the Best Buy employee would scan the trial CD. If asked why the trial CD had been scanned, the Best Buy employee would claim it was for ‘inventory control’ or otherwise misrepresent the purpose of scanning,” stated the appeal. The case insinuates that the Best Buy employee would then sign the customer up for MSN Internet using the credit card and trial CD without the customer consent.

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A federal judge has denied the RIAA’s motion for reconsideration of his attorneys’ fees award in Capitol v. Foster. Calling the RIAA’s motion for reconsideration one of “very limited appropriateness,” Judge Lee R. West found fault with just about every one of the RIAA’s arguments.

Capitol v. Foster involves an Oklahoma woman targeted as part of the record industry’s driftnet of file-sharing legislation. Last July, Foster won, when the case was dismissed with prejudice. Her victory opened up the door for her to recover attorneys’ fees from the RIAA, and Judge West granted her motion for an award of fees in February, citing in part the RIAA’s attempt to paint her as guilty of “secondary copyright infringement” in his decision.

As one might expect, the award was not greeted with much enthusiasm by the record industry, in no small part due to the ramifications it could have for other file-sharing litigation. A couple of weeks after the judge’s ruling, the RIAA asked him to reconsider his decision, citing among other things the “premature end of discovery,” being denied the chance to prove their claims of secondary infringement, and its belief that an attorneys’ fees award rewarded the defendant for deciding to litigate long after the court battle should have been settled.

In his ruling, Judge West disagreed strongly with the RIAA’s interpretation of events. With regard to the secondary infringement claims, Judge West found that “Based on the limited record and the fact that the plaintiffs could not point to a single case finding secondary liability for copyright infringement under similar circumstances, the Court concluded the plaintiffs’ secondary copyright terms appeared to be marginal and indisputably untested.”

A U.S. judge refused to dismiss a lawsuit against Google that charges the Web search leader’s AdWords program abuses trademarks.

In making his decision to allow the case to move forward, U.S. District Court Judge Jeremy Fogel ruled Wednesday that the public has an interest in whether AdWords, the company’s popular pay-per-click advertising system, violates U.S. trademark law.

American Blind & Wallpaper Factory, the top U.S. reseller of window blinds, charged in its lawsuit that Google abuses trademarks by allowing rivals of a company to buy ads that appear when consumers search the Web for information on that business.

Google has prevailed in two prior trademark suits filed against its pay-per-click ads. Auto insurer GEICO lost a federal case in Virginia, and computer repair site Rescue.com lost a similar federal case, but is appealing.

The latest ruling granted some claims while rejecting others in Google’s motion for summary judgment, which asked the judge to dismiss American Blind’s trademark infringement claims against Google’s AdWords ad-selling program.

Students who connect their computers to a university network can expect a certain degree of privacy regarding their data, according to a ruling made by the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The ruling came as part of a decision regarding a warrantless search that had been conducted on a University of Wisconsin-Madison student’s computer in 1999. While the appeals court ultimately ruled against the student and in favor of the warrantless search in that particular case, the judges made it clear that students in general are entitled reasonable expectations of privacy when connecting their personal computers to university networks. But the caveats are indeed important.

The case itself came about when wireless communications company Qualcomm notified the university that a user from the network had gained unauthorized access to the company’s network. A network administrator, Jeffrey Savoy, decided to look into the issue and found that a user from the university residences had not only accessed Qualcomm’s network, but the same user had also accessed one of the university’s main e-mail servers without authorization. Concerned that the 60,000+ e-mail accounts on the server could be compromised during finals week, Savoy matched up the IP addresses involved to a student who had regularly used the IP address for e-mail, and had accessed his e-mail from the same IP before and after the server breach.

This particular student had also been fired from his job at the university help desk for “similar unauthorized activity,” which Savoy was apparently aware of at the time of his investigation. He informed university housing officials of the matter, who told Savoy that they had intended to get a warrant to search the computer. Savoy was still concerned for the integrity of the e-mail system and found later that the same student had begun to use a different IP address on the network—an act against the university’s network guidelines. Savoy decided to take immediate action for fear that the student now knew that he was being investigated and could take down the e-mail server at any time. He remotely accessed the student’s computer—the ruling does not specify how this access was made—to have a look at temporary files in order to confirm that it was the same computer from the previous IP address. He did not delete or move any of the files.

A US District Court judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed against Google by a company that accused them of manipulating search results for political and religious reasons and skewing results in favor of companies that compensate Google financially. The lawsuit (discussed on Slashdot last year) was filed by KinderStart, a parenting information Web site that claims it was illegally blocked from Google search results. The judge not only dismissed the lawsuit but granted a motion by Google to sanction KinderStart and one of its lawyers. Google can now seek “reasonable compensation” for attorney fees because KinderStart’s lawyer filed claims that were factually baseless and did not perform an adequate investigation before filing the lawsuit.

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The Internet Archive is being sued by a Colorado woman for spidering her site. Suzanne Shell posted a notice on her site saying she wasn’t allowing it to be crawled. When it was, she sued for civil theft, breach of contract, and violations of the Racketeering Influence and Corrupt Organizations act and the Colorado Organized Crime Control Act. A court ruling last month granted the Internet Archive’s motion to dismiss the charges, except for the breach of contract claim. If Shell prevails on that count, sites like Google will have to get online publishers to ‘opt in’ before they can be crawled, radically changing the nature of Web search.

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Google Inc. is confident its popular video-sharing site YouTube and other Web services Google offers have strong legal protections under current copyright law, company attorneys said on Tuesday.

Media conglomerate Viacom Inc. ended six months of thinly veiled threats of legal action against YouTube earlier on Tuesday with a $1 billion lawsuit that accuses Google and YouTube of “massive intentional copyright infringement.”

But Google and YouTube lawyers said their actions are squarely within the protections offered by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998 and they were prepared to defend the company aggressively.

The DMCA has served as the legal standard defining U.S. copyright law in the digital age. It limits liability for firms that act quickly to block access to pirated materials once they are notified by copyright holders of specific infringement.

“Here there is a law which is specifically designed to give Web hosts such as us, or… bloggers or people that provide photo-album hosting online … the ’safe harbor’ we need in order to be able to do hosting online,” said Alexander Macgillivray, Google’s associate general counsel for products and intellectual property.