Several stories that prove the world is going crazy
First out of the gate:
Fedex sued a loyal customer for posting photos of furniture he made for himself out of Fedex boxes on the web. Get this, they used many…er…novel…legal arguments to try to scare him. Welcome to the doghouse FedEx. You’ve got great company, such as Cisco and Oracle.
Some highlights:
They tried to use the DMCA in their claims. But were complaining about trademark issues. Copyright law does not cover trademarks. Next!
They tried to make some claim that he was violating the terms of service of fedex.com in his use of the boxes.
They tried to claim that he was obviously posting the photos for personal financial gain. Get this–because he posted them to a .com website instead of a .net. Good thing I’m on a .net so they can’t sue me!
Also in the WTF files. A Doonesbury strip was recently pulled for using a real, albeit crude, nickname for Karl Rove. The papers claimed it was “in bad taste”.
Some pull ‘Doonesbury’ over Rove moniker
The strip itself:
https://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.html?uc_full_date=20050726
Next on the list. Jason Coombs had a great rant on Bugtraq about computer forensics professionals who are testifying against defendants who may well have a legitimate defense – the “the trojan ate my homework” defense. He takes issue with claims that a forensics investigation could reasonably ascertain whether a past action was performed by a human or a trojan horse or other malware:
The fact that malware authors aren’t cooperating with the computer forensics industry by making sure that it’s easy to distinguish between the actions of malware and the actions of a human computer user, combined with uninformed expert opinions like those shown below, is resulting in innocent people being put behind bars, and people like Marcus Lawson who think they know what they’re doing but clearly do not are helping to get innocent people convicted by spewing nonsense.
This undermines the ability of the criminal court system to convict those who are truly guilty, and keep them convicted on appeal.
And finally, How many laws do you have to break to get fired in the Department of Homeland Security? Since this ran, we now know that the DHS has now deleted the data that they illegally obtained from data miners. So now, americans have no way of knowing if the TSA had used data about them illegally. A group from Alaska is suing the government now.