Max Ray Butler, 36, faces up to 60 years in prison for the two felonies under law, but his actual sentence will be influenced by a number of factors, not least a plea agreement with federal prosecutors that was filed under seal Monday.

Wearing an ill-fitting orange jail uniform and round glasses, his hair cut short and neat, the six-foot-plus Butler towered over the burly deputy marshals that brought him into the court room. Once he settled into his seat, he spoke softly and evenly as he answered questions from the judge, frequently drawing admonishments to speak up for the benefit of the court reporter.

I actually did the actions that are relevant in the indictment, and I am guilty, Butler said, at one point.

Butler identified himself in court as Max Vision, the name he gave himself in the 1990s when he became a superstar in the computer security community. At that time Butler was billing himself out as a $100-an-hour computer security consultant, and he earned the respect of his peers for creating and curating an open source library of attack signatures used to detect computer intrusions.

But it turned out Butler was staging recreational hacks on the side, and in 2001 he was sent to federal prison for 18 months for launching a scripted attack that closed security holes on thousands on Pentagon systems, and left backdoors behind for his own use.

While in prison, Butler met more serious criminals, and he was befriended by a professional swindler named Jeffrey Norminton. After his release, Norminton introduced him to an Orange County, California entrepreneur and former bank robber named Chris Aragon.

Butler admitted Monday that he began hacking banks, merchants and other hackers to steal credit card numbers, then sold them to Aragon. Aragon, who's pending trial on related state charges in southern California, turned that stolen data into near-perfect counterfeit cards, complete with holograms, and recruited a crew of shoppers who used the cards to snap up designer merchandise for resale on eBay. Aragon earned at least $1 million in the business, police say.

Butler became a priority to federal law enforcement officials in 2006, when, under the handle Iceman, he staged a brazen takeover of the online carder forums where hackers and fraudsters buy and sell stolen data, fake IDs and specialized underground services.

He hacked into the forums, wiped out their databases, and absorbed their content and membership into his own site, called CardersMarket.

On one of the sites he hacked, called DarkMarket, Butler later discovered that an administrator named Master Splyntr was logging in from an FBI office in Pittsburgh. Butler partnered with a Canadian hacker to try and expose Master Splyntr as a fed, but his claim was largely dismissed in the underground as inter-forum rivalry. DarkMarket went on to become a full-blown undercover FBI operation, and the FBI and Secret Service began an investigation into Iceman.

(I wrote about Butler in the January issue of Wired. I'm now working on a book about him and the carder forums for Crown publishing).

Using informants and some genuine electronic gumshoe work, the feds identified Iceman as Butler about a year later, and arrested him in September 2007 at a corporate apartment he used as a hacking safe house.

When the feds seized Butler's hard drive, they found five terabytes of encrypted data on his harddrive, the government said Monday. They later cracked Butler's crypto, and discovered 1.8 million stolen credit card numbers belonging to 1,000 different banks. The banks tallied the fraudulent charges on the cards at $86.4 million.

But Butler's defense attorney told U.S. District Judge Maurice B. Cohill Jr. Monday that Butler and his associates weren't' responsible for all of the fraudulent charges.

Butler, noted federal public defender, Michael Novara, frequently cracked the computers of other members of the underground, and stole their stuff. Some of the credit card numbers found on Butler's hard drive had been in the hands of cyber thieves before Butler began his hacking spree.

Max is kind of a hacker's hacker, said Novara. There was a lot of stuff on his computer that he was not responsible for, and did not intend to use.

I don't think I ever heard the expression, a hacker's hacker' before, said Judge Cohill, with a smile.

Sources say Butler's plea deal will also wrap up a separate federal case in Virginia, in which Butler is charged with staging the first documented spear phishing attack against employees of a financial institution, gaining access to the corporate network of Capitol One bank.

Butler was calm and attentive at Monday's proceeding, which opened with federal prosecutor Luke Dembosky crossing to the defense table to shake hands with the hacker, who smiled and nodded.

Through his attorney, Butler released a two-paragraph statement following his plea.

Max Vision, known in this case as Max Butler, pled guilty today as a first step toward getting this sad chapter of his life behind him. It is unfortunate that his life circumstances in 2005 led him to participate in this criminal conduct, and he very much regrets doing so, he wrote.

Max has always preferred using his extraordinary computer skills his computer vision for the good of society and the cyber world, and he hopes that he will be given the opportunity in the future to once again don the white hat.

Asked afterward what kind of sentence the government expects for Butler, Dembosky was vague with reporters. Suffice to say, it won't be probation.

See Also:

• Notorious Crime Forum DarkMarket Goes Dark
• Cybercrime Supersite DarkMarket' Was FBI Sting, Documents Confirm
• 56 Arrested in DarkMarket Sting, Says FBI
• One Hacker's Audacious Plan to Rule the Black Market in Stolen Credit Cards
• A White Hat' Goes to Jail

Moore is part of the amateur Puckett Observatory Supernova Search Team. According to Deer Pond Observatory:

It all came about at diner with Tim Puckett & Mike Peoples after the Friday's opening of NEAIC 2008. Tim was telling us about the search team and the fact that the team had the youngest person to discover a SN. Her name was Jennifer and she was 16 ( it turns out she was 18 but Caroline did not know that until after her find ) Hearing that a 16 year old had found a supernova, she pronounced " I could beat her". Timmy said it would take a lot of work, but if you think you're up to it I'll sign you up. So at the ripe old age of 13 Caroline started her hunt

That was the beginning of a long eight months. First she had to get a new computer and install all the software then work with Mike Peoples to learn how to get the data and what to do with it.

On November 6,2008 Caroline spotted something odd in one of the data files of distant galaxy UGC 12682, located in the constellation Pegasus. The image of the object was very faint but she noticed some pixels off to one side of the galaxy that made her suspicious, Caroline did all the checks and ran it through all the data basis. "I'm going to send it in. I think it's something," she told her Dad. It took couple nights until the team could get a confirmation image and it looked like her suspicions were confirmed.

Her discovery did indeed turn out to be a supernova, but it goes against all the rules we thought we knew. For example, it's in a galaxy that's in the process of "eating itself," UGC 12682, where supernovas don't usually occur. It's also one of the least luminous supernovas ever detected, and scientists haven't found any evidence of hydrogen, which usually turns up around dimmer supernovas. Now scientists are theorizing that the lack of hydrogen may stem from the fact that this was a massive star that lost mass. Perhaps its core collapsed into a black hole without transferring any energy to the outer layers of the star. Says Stefano Valenti with Queens University Belfast:

The implications are quite important. If this is a massive star explosion, then it is the first one that might fit the theoretical models of massive stars that lose their outer layers through their huge luminosity pressure and then, perhaps, collapse to black holes with a whimper

It's pretty cool that an amateur teenager can discover something that keeps the experts guessing.

Oh, and I would warn you that there'll be spoilers in this review except that, really, since I still have no idea what actually happened in this movie, I'm not sure how much I can spoil it.

Since the days of Un Chien Andalou and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, filmmakers have reached beyond meaning. But with this summer's biggest, loudest movie, Michael Bay takes us all the way inside Caligari's cabinet. And once you enter, you can never emerge again. I saw this movie two days ago, and I'm still living inside it. Things are exploding wherever I look, household appliances are trying to kill me, and bizarre racial stereotypes are shouting at me.

Transformers: ROTF has mostly gotten pretty hideous reviews, but that's because people don't understand that this isn't a movie, in the conventional sense. It's an assault on the senses, a barrage of crazy imagery. Imagine that you went back in time to the late 1960s and found Terry Gilliam, fresh from doing his weird low-fi collage/animations for Monty Python. You proceeded to inject Gilliam with so many steroids his penis shrank to the size of a hair follicle, and you smushed a dozen tabs of LSD under his tongue. And then you gave him the GDP of a few sub-Saharan countries. Gilliam might have made a movie not unlike this one.

And the true genius of Transformers: ROTF is that Bay has put all of this excess of imagery and random ideas at the service of the most pandering movie genre there is: the summer movie. ROTF is like twenty summer movies, with unrelated storylines, smushed together into one crazy whole. You try in vain to understand how the pieces fit, you stare into the cracks between the narrative strands, until the cracks become chasms and the chasms become an abyss into which you stare until it looks deep into your own soul, and then you go insane. You. Do. Not. Leave. The Cabinet.

Michael Bay understands that summer movies are about two things: male anxiety, and pure id. That's why he casts Shia LaBoeuf, that supreme avatar of pure male inadequacy, in the lead role. LaBoeuf projects a pathetic, wall-eyed dorkhood, when he's not babbling like a tumor removed from Woody Allen's prostate that somehow achieved sentience. I imagine the DVD of ROTF will include a whole disk of outtakes where they had to stop filming because LaBoeuf was drooling on camera. As it is, the film includes several extreme closeups of LaBoeuf's dazed stare.

Where was I? Oh yes. So LaBoeuf, who's actually a fine actor, is the stand-in for the male viewers' greatest fears about themselves. No matter how great a loser they might be, they can't be as losery a loser as Sam Witwicky. And yet, Sam has awesome giant robots stomping around telling him he's the most important awesome person ever. And he has the hottest girlfriend in the universe, Megan Fox, for whom banality is a huge aphrodisiac. The more pathetic Sam gets, the more Fox's lips pout and her nipples point, like little Irish setters.

To make matters more awesome for the insecure males in the audience, Sam actually tosses aside his giant robot fanclub and his walking-pinup girlfriend, so he can have a normal life. Of course, this only leads to other robots and hawt chicks (who turn out to be robots too) throwing themselves at him and telling him how important he is. In the end, everybody learns to appreciate Sam just a bit more than they already did, and a booming voice tells him he's earned the "matrix of leadership" through his courage and stuff.

And then there's the "id" part, which is the part where stuff blows up real good, and huge machines smash each other up. And every single performance is so ridiculous that it looks down on "over the top" as if from a great height. It's the part of your brain that thinks it would be awesome to see robots with giant dangling testicles, or hot chicks turning into robot tentacle monsters, or "ghetto" robots that talk in inept hip-hop slang and smash each other playfully, or funny Jewish men who talk about their "schmear" and randomly strip to their G-strings. Is that going too far? Then let's go 100 times farther than that and see what happens!

Transformers: ROTF is so long, you'll need to wear adult diapers to it. But the movie's pure celebration of the primal urge, and unfiltered living, will make you rejoice in your adult diapers. You'll relieve yourself in your seat with a savage joy, your barbaric yawp blending in with the crowd's screams of excitement.

And yet and here's the part where I really think ROTF approaches "art movie" status the movie's id overload reaches such crazy levels that the fabric of reality itself starts to break down. Michael Bay has boasted about how every single shot in the movie has so much stuff going on in it, it would take your PC since the dawn of time to render one frame. After a few hours of this assault, you feel the chair melt and the floor of the movie theater becomes an angry mirror into your soul. Nothing is solid, nothing is real, everything Transforms.

The closest thing I can think of to this movie is the Wachowskis' Speed Racer, which had a similar kind of CG image overload, although it was only five hours long as opposed to ROTF's nine.

And around hour six of ROTF, something curious happens: the two components male enhancement and pure id start to clash, badly. Usually, in a summer movie, the two aspects go together like tits and ass: Jason Statham plays someone who faces the same insecurities as regular dudes, but he overcomes them, and in the process he blows up everything in the world. But creating that kind of fusion requires enslaving the id to the male enhancement, and that in turn means only going way over the top instead of crazy, stratospheric over the top. Michael Bay is not willing to settle for going way over the top, like other directors.

So you have a movie that tries to reassure men that they can actually be masters of their reality but then turns around and says that actually, reality is not real. There's no such thing as the "real world," and the only thing that's left for men to dominate is a nebulous domain of blurred shapes, which occasionally blurt nonsensical swear-words and slang from ethnic groups that have never existed. If you're drowning in an Olympic swimming pool full of hot chewing gum fondue, do you still care if Megan Fox likes you?

So yes, ROTF approaches the sublime, and then just keeps rocketing. Next stop: total anarchy. In a sense, it's the first war movie ever to convey a real sense of the fog of war, the confusion that comes with battle. Somewhere around hour nine, you will understand why friendly fire happens in wartime.

So I've gotten almost all the way through this review, and I still haven't summarized the movie's plot. Here goes. It's a couple years after the first movie, and Sam is going off to college, leaving his transforming car and his hot girlfriend, whom he still hasn't told he loves her. And meanwhile, the soldiers from the first movie are running around with a bunch of late-model GM cars and trucks, which turn into robots and fight other robots sometimes. Sam sees weird symbols which make no sense (and they still make no sense at the end of the movie) and they turn out to be the key to the location of a thing that can control another thing, that will enable the bad guys to destroy the sun. Sam has to embrace the heroic destiny he's rejected, so he can save us all from solarcide.

But that bare plot summary doesn't include the twenty or thirty other storylines that could also claim to be the movie's plot. There's the whole thing where someone from Washington D.C. wonders why the U.S. military is running around the globe with a bunch of late-model GM cars from outer space, and tries to put the kibosh on the military-Autobot complex. There's the teenager who's got a conspiracy website, that competes with another conpsiracy website which turns out to be the work of a secret agent who's decided that the best way to keep things secret is to put them on a website. (It works. I post secret stuff on io9 all the time.) Various robots die and then come back to life, and there's a whole strand about whether Decepticons (the bad ones) can become Autobots (the good ones). And there's the Fallen, who's sort of the movie's villain even though he barely shows up. And people from 17,000 BC who had weird teeth and fought robots. And the ancient Egyptians did stuff. And Sam's parents go to France except that they meet a robot and then they're in Egypt.

Really, I could go on and on. This movie starts out with a coherent storyline, for the first half hour or so, and then it just starts to spin faster and faster until the centrifuge of random events slams you into the walls. It doesn't help that there are 500 robots in the movie and they all look kind of the same.

Oh, but that's the other thing about ROTF. It's actually quite funny, a lot of the time. Some of the jokes fall flat, like the "twin" robots with the ghetto speak, and a lot of the stuff with John Turturro. But the movie's relentless silliness is mostly pretty hilarious, in a Saturday morning cartoon kind of way, and almost nothing in the movie seems intended to be taken seriously.

So, to sum up: Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen is one of the greatest achievements in the history of cinema, if not the greatest. You could easily argue that cinema, as an artform, has all been leading up to this. It will destabilize your limbic system, probably forever, and make you doubt the solidity of your surroundings. Generations of auteurs have struggled, in vain, to create a cinematic experience as overwhelming, and as liberating, as ROTF.

Women as well as men, everyone watching this film will feel the dissolution of all their certainties, all their illusory grasp on the world... but after you fall into a brazen despair that the walls of reality have become toxic ice cream of a million flavors, you will gasp with a greater realization: that once the world is reduced, forever, to a kaleidoscope of whirling shapes, you are totally free. Nothing matters, effect precedes cause, fish spawn in mid-air, and you can do whatever you want. Let yourself go in your adult diaper, Michael Bay invites you. Feel the music of total excess stir inside your deepest core. It is your Allspark, your cube. And you are a Transformer.

Because news spreads faster we're supposed to give newspapers a monopoly on the news? That's crazy.

Jarvis makes a compelling point which lawyers advising newspapers ought to think about when counseling newspaper clients.

Schultz and the Marbergers complain about what they call the free-riding' of aggregators, et al. But they simply don't understand the economics of the internet. It's the newspapers that are free-riding, getting the benefit of links.
The framers of our Constitution, including the First Amendment, intended it to endure and cope with the effects of the anticipated changes of our nation.

Things have changed - changed quickly. But let's be careful when thinking of following lawyers and Judges who may not understand the nature of the change.

I understand his view, although I am not sure it is the best decision from a policy stand point. It is important not to lose site of the fact that copyright holders with content on the internet still have significant protection. Direct copying of the stories is already protected by copyright law, especially if a paper registers its copyrights and can get statutory damages. Of course, as I pointed out Friday, it is hard to police the use of facts from news stories. So, it will be difficult to make an infringement case when someone truly summarizes a news story. But I can see the value in incentivizing traditional news media to continue spending on reporters and reporting. For example, a system of paying newspapers, and other content providers that would choose to opt into the system, a nominal fee for click-throughs on links from your site to a current news story. To me that seems like a reasonable compromise which would not cost most websites much, but could provide real economic benefit to news websites, thereby maintaining reporting staffs. Of course, newspapers could accomplish something similar and maybe even economically better by shifting to subscription-based sites, which has been received with mixed reactions and effects previously.

But more important than which position is correct, is the discussion. While the Constitution does give Congress the power to protect copyrights, it says little about how to protect them. That is left to Congress, which enacts copyright laws based upon the technology available when the law is drafted and some limited vision of technology to come. As a result, it is difficult to effectively apply the Copyright Act of 1976, even with more recent amendments and additions, to every aspect of the internet world. So, in light of the fast pace of technological change over the last ten to twenty years, an open dialogue about how to make the copyright laws adequately protect authors and the public is very important. And as O'Keefe and Jarvis point out, it is a dialogue that requires more than just lawyers, who understand the legal issues, but artists, newspapers, media consumers and many other copyright stakeholders.

1. View this page in FeedDemon, then click here to install the Bing search definition
2. Click the Subscribe button, then type the keyword you wish to search for and click Next
3. Select "Bing" from the list of search engines and click Next
4. Select the folder you want to place this feed in, then click Next
5. Click Finish

After installing this search definition, you'll also be able to search Bing directly from FeedDemon's address bar. Before you can do this, though, you'll first need to select Bing as your search provider from the search button at the right of FeedDemon's address bar, like this:

Note that FeedDemon's address bar supports all of Bing's advanced search keywords, including the feed: keyword which enables finding RSS feeds about a specific topic (ex: type feed:fitness to find fitness-related feeds).

Update: FeedDemon's automatic error reporting shows that there's a bug in older versions of FeedDemon which may cause a file access error downloading the above file when not logged into Windows as an admin. This bug was fixed in FeedDemon 3.0 RC2.

Julien and I are pretty excited that Trust Agents is getting closer to being released. The date for publication is August 24th, but you can pre-order Trust Agents even now, if you want. As this is our first book, the experience has been pretty crazy.

We wrote the book together on Google Docs, talking over IM. It was very collaborative, sometimes with us both working on the same page at the same time. Often times, we'd send people tweets or comment on their blogs to reach out to them about parts of the books. Each time, we were excited that the very way we wrote the book related to what we talk about in the book.

In the coming months, we'll surely encourage you to buy a copy or thirty of the book. I'll try not to advertise it relentlessly, but I will do my best to share the experiences, and/or I will encourage some of you to pick it up, as it might relate to what you're coming to the blog to absorb.

Julien has also set up TrustAgent.com, which we'll use for some other experiences.

In the mean time, take a look at the nifty cover!

Photo credit Matthew Dimakos

Check out what the High Court said as reported in the article:

"In the first case dealing with the privacy of internet bloggers, the judge ruled that Mr Horton had no reasonable expectation to anonymity because blogging is essentially a public rather than a private activity.

Coming down in favour of freedom of expression, the judge also said that even if the blogger could have claimed he had a right to anonymity, the judge would have ruled against him on public interest grounds"

This case will send a shockwave through the legal community. What effect will it have on Internet Defamation Law in the United States?

So far, American legislators have done everything possible to protect freedom of speech; and really, to do the EXACT opposite of everything the UK has been doing in terms of online defamation law.

This is HUGE.

Thanks to @Vbalasubramani for giving me the heads-up on this!

Realizing that the phone is now a computer, or possibly that ubiquitous wireless networks mean that computers can go anywhere, IBM said today it would spend $100 million on research over the next five years to improve mobile communications for businesses and consumers worldwide. This is a piddling amount for IBM (it spent $1 billion on its green effort), but Big Blue does have the street cred among enterprise customers to push mobile platforms for corporate computing in a big way if it so chooses. Currently mobile innovation is primarily benefiting consumers, who can use mobile devices to read books, find out the name of songs, shop and even track their fitness goals. Enterprise adoption of novel applications and phones, meanwhile, is still lagging over concerns about corporate security. IBM could help change that.

IBM's four areas of focus will be analytics; security; privacy and user interface; and navigation. I think its areas of focus should be around virtualized desktops for mobile phones; authentication and security when it comes to using mobiles to access programs in the cloud; and device security, notably how to protect sensitive information kept on mobile devices. As for user interface research, IBM sold off many of its speech recognition patents to Nuance Communications, which is where I think IBM had the potential to make the biggest impact.

So IBM's research will add $100 million to wireless efforts over the next five years $4 million less than venture firms invested in the wireless industry for the entire month of May, according to research by Rutberg & Co. Such an investment is unlikely to change the industry, but it could lead to IBM buying up some startups if its research convinces it that there's a high-value software or services play that allows Big Blue to make money in mobile, that is.

He sees reality biting the MySQL community as a feeding frenzy in the software acquisition food chain from both Sun Microsystems' gobbling up of MySQL last year, and now Oracle's likely snapping up of Sun. When MySQL got acquired by Sun, a lot of that community got fractured, Boyajian told BriefingsDirect. That fracturing started with Sun and continues with Oracle so I think that will have an impact on adoption patterns.

He says potential MySQL customers, wary of getting sucked into Oracle's sales machine, are looking at EnterpriseDB's Postgres Plus Advanced Server, the company's relational database management system (RDBMS) product, which is based on the PostgreSQL open source database.

Competing with Oracle is nothing new for EnterpriseDB, which has been playing David to Oracle's Goliath in the database market for years. Although this David has its own Goliath watching its back as IBM is an investor in and has a partnership with the Westford, Mass. company, which was founded in 2004

The latest version of Postgres Plus, being released today is touted by EnterpriseDB as the fifth-generation of Oracle compatibility technology, which allows Oracle customers to move applications to the EnterpriseDB database.

This version of Postgres Plus is designed to require minimal migration effort for Oracle customers looking for a low-cost, open source-based RDBMS as an alternative to giant vendor's proprietary database products.

Oracle buying Sun and acquiring MySQL does have a positive side, Boyajian says.

One of the selling points for Postgres Plus is that it runs on commodity hardware and now it is being deployed in virtual and cloud environments.

When Oracle acquires Sun and gets a great asset like MySQL it's a great endorsement for open source software, he said.

His company maintains a close relationship with the Postgres community, Boyajian said. Several EnterpriseDB employees are key core members of Postgres, he said.

One of the selling points for Postgres Plus is that it runs on commodity hardware and now it is being deployed in virtual and cloud environments.

There are some customers that are using blade servers, Jim Mlodgenski, EnterpriseDB's chief architect told BriefingsDirect. For the cache servers [used heavily in social networking apps] you don't need much horsepower as far as the CPU goes,

Social networking sites have greater requirements for maintaining a data cache in memory rather than for CPU power, he explained. Postgres Plus offers a feature called Infinite Cache to support those requirements.

Some customers take advantage of the commodity prices for one CPU and a lot of RAM, Mlodgenski said. Using commodity hardware at the caching layer you're able to leverage low cost commodity hardware to cache everything, get the performance benefits of running everything in memory without investing a lot in a high-end SAN [storage area network] boxes, the architect explained.

The cloud is also on the horizon for Postgres Plus users. We have other people who are deploying in more virtualized environments, cloud environments, Mlodgenski said.

He said when the product was designed several years ago it wasn't focused on the cloud but because of its flexible architecture Postgres Plus users were able to move into cloud environments such as Amazon EC2.

BriefingsDirect contributor Rich Seeley provided research and editorial assistance on this post. He can be reached at RichSeeley@aol.com.

In last week's launch announcement, Bing was being bandied about as Microsoft's latest attempt to steal market share away from Google. In particular, according to Microsoft, Bing will focus on four verticals: making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition, and finding a local business. We took the new search engine for a test run tonight.

Sponsor

A note about the branding. Microsoft isn't known for its clever (or even coherent) branding, but we truly wonder about the decision to place images of hot air balloons on the bing.com homepage. What is that trying to tell us - that Bing is powered by hot air?

In any case, a search for our current topic de jour, "web 3.0", brought up fairly similar results for Google and Bing. Although frankly we found that Google's Universal Search, which mixes different types of results together in one page (such as video in the below example) gave us a better search experience here. In Bing, you have to click 'Videos' to get multimedia about Web 3.0.

Bing - "web 3.0"

Google - "web 3.0"

How about one of the four areas in which Bing is supposed to be focusing on? Let's pick 'searching for a health condition'. My favorite search is for "diabetes type 1", so I keyed that into both search engines:

Bing - "diabetes type 1"

Google - "diabetes type 1"

The main difference between the two search engines is that Bing offers more options on the left, including special sections for symptons, medication, children, etc. It also offers 'related searches', which with health-related searches is typically helpful.

As usual Google offers a straight list of results, but again with Universal Search (in this case news and video results inline with normal webpage results). With Google you can get more options too, but you have to click "Show Options..." - which we're not sure how many users do. To be honest, I haven't once clicked it in my daily Google searches since it went live a couple of weeks ago.

So Microsoft's Bing does hold promise in this type of search. Maybe it's not all hot air after all...

Computer Sciences Corp., the IT service organization, today laid out its strategy for the cloud. Unsurprisingly, CSC's cloud products will focus on being reliable and secure enough for enterprises and the federal government. CSC will continue providing its managed hosting business, but later this year will launch an infrastructure-as-a-service product that will provide secure cloud computing and storage that takes into account geographical location and differing regulatory environments. It will also build out a platform and offer software that will help companies connect other clouds to their secure CSC clouds or to the CSC platform. Pricing and further services built on top of CSC's clouds and other clouds will be announced in the next few months.

Most interesting to me was that Brian Boruff, vice president of CSC's Cloud Computing business, said the company was leaning toward building its cloud infrastructure with Cisco's new unified computing system. Given the competition CSC has with the IT services offered by HP and IBM, it is also evaluating Dell hardware. However, CSC did participate in the launch of Cisco's new unified computing systems, and Boruff said, We're talking to Dell, but right now the most advanced discussions are with Cisco.

CSC's cloud computing offerings would compete with those from Rackspace and Amazon at the infrastructure-as-a-service level. Because of the high levels of reliability and customer service emphasized by CSC, I imagine it will draw business from folks who are considering Rackspace's CloudServer product. Those folks may need a better service level agreement or exact knowledge about where their data is being stored than what Amazon currently offers. The announcement also leaves me wondering when IBM and HP are going to announce their own big cloud computing plays, rather than webinars and research projects. I think this summer, we're going to see some big players launch real products to take on various layers of the cloud.

The backrest and headrest are screwed together by a pair of aluminum supports. This unit is suspended on the seat via two connection points in the armrests. The armrests are screwed to shock mounts on the interior of the backrest shell, allowing the backrest and headrest to flex when the chair is in use. This is part of the chair's unusual design, as well as one of its biggest flaws. The rubber washers are solidly glued to the plywood shells, but have been known to tear free when excessive weight is applied, or when the rubber becomes old and brittle.

Other creative uses of materials include the seat cushions - which eschew standard stapled or nailed upholstery. Instead the cushions are sewn with a zipper around the outer edge that connects them to a stiff plastic backing. The backing affixes to the plywood shells with a series of hidden clips and rings. This design, along with the hidden shock mounts in the armrest allow the outside veneer of the chair to be unmarred by screws or bolts. The chair has a low seat which is permanently fixed at a recline. The seat of the chair swivels on a cast aluminum base, with glides that are threaded so that the chair may remain level.

...When it was first made Ray Eames remarked in a letter to Charles that the chair looked "comfortable and un-designy" (sic). Charles's vision was for a chair with "the warm, receptive look of a well-used first baseman's mitt.

FIRST FLOOR

KITCHEN

FAMILY ROOM

DINING ROOM

LIVING ROOM

BATHROOM

ENTRY

SECOND FLOOR

BASEMENT

VERIZON Palm Treo 650 PDA Camera Cell Phone+MP3+EXTRAS Current bid: $59.00 on eBay Mint UNLOCKED PALM TREO 650 CINGULAR/T-MOBILE GSM PHONE Current bid: $70.99 on eBay See all 19,269 treo items on eBay.

To do this, one sets up a little code for the form On Load event that puts the Accounts web site URL into the IFRAME's URL. It's actually pretty simple. Here is the code (assumes you already know how to set up an IFRAME). IFRAME_WebSite is the name of the IFRAME and .src references the URL it uses.

// Load web site URL
{
var AccountURL = crmForm.all.websiteurl.DataValue;
if (AccountURL != null)
{
crmForm.all.IFRAME_WebSite.src = AccountURL;
}
}

Having done this, I thought it would be neat to add a tab to display a map of the Account's location. I used the same process except I stuffed address fields into the IFRAME URL instead of the web site. The code I used is:

// Load Map URL
{
var AccountStreet = crmForm.all.address1_line1.DataValue;
var AccountCity = crmForm.all.address1_city.DataValue;
var AccountState = crmForm.all.address1_stateorprovince.DataValue;
var AccountZip = crmForm.all.address1_postalcode.DataValue;

var MapURL = "http://maps.msn.com/home.aspx?strt1=" + AccountStreet + "&city1="+ AccountCity+"&stnm1=" + AccountState + "&zipc1=" + AccountZip + "&cnty1=0";

if (MapURL != null)
{
crmForm.all.IFRAME_Map.src = MapURL;
}
}

The code is really pretty simple as you can see. But the results are pretty neat.

And the Live Search Maps give you different views such as Bird's Eye which I love:

There are lots of things you can do with IFRAMEs. Hopefully this will get your imagination going.

Cheers,

Larry Lentz

Brilliant move by a local BMW dealer in responding to a national Audi ad. Audi's 2009 A4 ad on the left side of the street says Your move, BMW. Santa Monica BMW comes back with an M3 ad across the street that says Checkmate. Now that's advertising.

What do you do if you're Audi?

• Built-in cameras. The kids have had a ton of fun snapping pictures with the built-in cameras (there's both a user-facing camera as well as a camera that faces away from the user) and using the DSi's image editor to distort the pictures. (Nothing quite like a 7 year-old's face stretched to three times its normal width.)
  
• Wireless gameplay. There's actually three different ways for the DS to play wirelessly. Having seen it in operation with two kids, it's great.
• Certain games - like Brain Age, Mario Kart DS, both of which we have - give multiple players with a DS the ability to wirelessly download a companion version of the game and play together. (On the game boxes, this is called wireless multi-player download, details here.) This requires you to only own one game card, but multiple players can play.
• Other games support multi-card wireless play mean that if every player owns a copy of the game, they can connect to each other to play head-to-head. We haven't bought them the same game yet, so we haven't played with this version yet... now it's up to the boys to decide if they want to spend their gift cards and chore money on copies of the same game. :)
• Nintendo WiFi Connection. Yet other games can play head-to-head over the Internet. My nieces both have DS Lites; with copies of the same game (say, Mario Kart) the cousins can all play together over the net from 3,000 miles away. That's pretty darned cool.
• DSi Shop. If you connect the DSi to a broadband connection before October 5, you get free points to spend on free games from the DSi shop. The boys picked different games, and the quality isn't bad for free games. There's not much to pick from right now, but I'm sure there's more coming.

Courtesy the credit crisis and big bailout packages, the figure trillion has suddenly become part of our everyday conversations. One trillion dollars, or 1 followed by 12 zeros, is lots of money but have you ever tried visualizing how big that number actually is?

For people who can visualize one million dollars, the comparison made on CNN should give you an idea about a trillion - if you start spending a million dollars every single day since Jesus was born, you still wouldn't have spend a trillion dollars.

Another mathematician puts it like this: 1 million seconds is about 11.5 days, 1 billion seconds is about 32 years while a trillion seconds is equal to 32,000 years.

Now if the above comparisons weren't really helpful, check another illustration that compares the built of an average human being against a stack of $100 currency notes bundles.

A bundle of $100 notes is equivalent to $10,000 and that can easily fit in your pocket. 1 million dollars will probably fit inside a standard shopping bag while a billion dollars would occupy a small room of your house.

With this background in mind, 1 trillion (1,000,000,000,000) is 1000 times bigger than 1 billion and would therefore take up an entire football field - the man is still standing in the bottom-left corner.

Related: Visualize Units of Measurement

Visualizing a Trillion: Just How Big That Number Is? (Published at Digital Inspiration)

Tonight, my dream came true.

I noticed (on Twitter, or FriendFeed, I don't remember) someone wondering how page turning should work on the iPhone Kindle app. Is that out? I asked myself. A quick Twitter search for iPhone and Kindle revealed that yes, in fact, it was available in the App Store. After one super excited tweet, I was off to download it.

I've taken screenshots of most of the interface, and tested logging in and downloading at least one of my books. Here are the screenshots, with descriptions. I'm sure I'll post more thoughts after I've used it for a while, but so far, it works perfectly, just like I hoped and thought it would. Major kudos and thanks to everyone at Amazon and Apple who made this happen! You've made me one happy bibliovoracious geek!
Kindle in the App Store:

Kindle App Splash Screen:

Archived Items, things in your Kindle account but not downloaded to your iPhone:

Downloaded books show on the home screen:

Reading a book - the main interface. Haven't used this much yet, but I was super impressed that it knew exactly what page I left off reading this book on my Kindle, and too me right there:

How to Get Books. Basically, you have to browse and buy on a Mac or PC (or a Kindle, of course), though that link will take you to

The desktop version of the Kindle Store web page in Mobile Safari. This works, but is obviously not optimized for the iPhone. Last time I tried, you couldn't browse or buy Kindle books in the iPhone version of Amazon.com, or using the Amazon iPhone app. Maybe that will change.

The Options Screen. Pretty basic, only real option is to deauthorize your iPhone from your Kindle account (important to remember, since you have a 5 device limit).

In conclusion? This is awesome, long awaited news, and I can't wait to play with it some more. Am I going to read less on my Kindle and more on my iPhone? Maybe, maybe not. I'll likely end up reading more in general, now that I can access my Kindle books (and my saved place!) on my iPhone, and I can't wait.

One interesting thing this opens up: now, people can download this free iPhone app, and spend money buying Kindle books from Amazon, without ever buying an actual Kindle.

What you do think about this news? Do you have a Kindle and an iPhone? Or no Kindle at all, but willing to try Kindle books on your iPhone? Post a comment and let me know!

A link to the conference agenda and details can be found here.

For those of you who plan to be here, should you have time apart from scheduled events and dinners, Restaurant Week in Chicago has been extended.

For those of you who cannot make it, plan on coming here next year, roughly this same time (we'll let you know more when the date is available). And oh, of course, we here at the EQ will share some of this year's highlights with you so you won't feel too left out!

In this case, following the court's decision that all documents were to be produced electronically in TIFF format with Optical Character Recognition (OCR), defendant asserted that the cost of processing the documents should be shifted to the plaintiff. In support of its assertion, defendant claimed that the cost of conversion to OCR would likely exceed $200,000 and that it does not itself seek to use the OCR process, and any extra expense would be incurred on it behalf solely for Plaintiff's convenience. Defendant offered no evidence in support of its estimate, however, and the court's own research indicated the estimated cost appeared to be somewhat inflated. Nor did defendant deny that the OCR process would make the documents easier to examine, thus reducing costs for attorney time.

In making its determination, the court indicated its intent to rely on the multi-factor test adopted in Zubulake v. USB Warburg, LLC, despite its slightly different context. 217 F.R.D. 309 (S.D.N.Y. 2003). Those factors were:

(1) the extent to which the request was specifically tailored to discover relevant information; (2) the availability of such information from other sources; (3) the total cost of production, when compared to the amount in controversy; (4) the total cost of production, when compared to the resources available to each party; (5) the relative ability of each party to control costs and the incentive to do so; (6) the importance of the issues at stake in the litigation; and (7) the relative benefits to the parties of obtaining the information.

Analysis of the seven factors did not favor cost-shifting. Adhering to Zubulake's instruction that the factors should not be equally weighted but rather considered in ascending order, the court first noted defendant's failure (beyond a statement that the request was overbroad) to contend that the information requested was not relevant or likely to lead to the discovery of admissible information. Finding that the remaining factors also do not favor cost shifting, the court specifically addressed the lack of any showing that the documents requested were obtainable from other sources.

Accordingly, the court concluded:

OCR, while perhaps not absolutely necessary to litigation, is a tool that greatly decreases the time and effort counsel must invest in searching and examining documents. Presumably, each party would perform the OCR process in a cost-effective manner to minimize their costs. Requiring the parties to incur this cost, when the OCR process is likely to streamline the discovery process and reduce the chance that either side will employ tactics designed to hide relevant information in a mountain of difficult-to-search documents is neither unreasonable nor burdensome. Therefore, after review of the Zubulake factors, the court concludes that cost shifting is not appropriate in this case.

A copy of the full opinion is available here.

So today Microsoft officially flipped the switch on the buzz machine for their Origami Project an atypical viral marketing manuveur for a company whose products are usually known about years ahead of time. Scoble says its a device, the Internet's lighting up with rumors is it the Xbox portable? Well, we dunno, but as usual got our hands on some pictures. And as usual we can't guarantee they're the real deal, though we are pretty confident in their source. So, let's go over it: these were sent to us detailing it as a Microsoft portable media player, which wouldn't be too far off from what Jobs and BusinessWeek both prophesied Microsoft doing (despite being pretty broadly denied from within).

Techmeme only just picked it up but it when Kevin Tofel of JKOnTheRun spotted a video link in the Engadget comments (credit Monk') and blogged it at 3:40pm, all hell broke lose. By later that evening, many people had re-blogged the news. Here's a snapshot of one of the Techmeme pages from the next day, 26th Feb 2006. After another two weeks of teasers, Origamiproject.com finally went live after the CeBIT launch of what was effectively a small, low-end tablet PC which didn't quite take off as hoped.

There are some interesting blog posts by the Origami team on the Origamiproject site. This one, explains how the teaser site went viral because of the video (shown below) and picked up a couple of million views in just a few weeks. This article by Otto Berkes, the man behind the concept, explains how Microsoft backed away from a 4 device because of usability feedback about XP being bad on such small devices. Ironically, one of the most interesting UMPCs of late and one that sold-out in 15 minutes on it's Korean debut yesterday is a 4.8 Windows XP Tablet PC with almost the same specifications as Origami devices of 2006. Only the size is different.

You'll also see my first comment there which asks why we don't see a keyboard on a device that is perfect for emails, real-time IM and blogging? That question received the following answer: Ultra-Mobile PCs can be used with USB or Bluetooth keyboards, and I expect keyboard peripherals to be a very popular accessory.

Look at the Haiku' concept that was at the center of the Origami project vision. They wanted to produce slick, tablet-style mobile Internet-connected devices at low prices. The problem was simply that the technology wasn't there, the technology was expensive and the OS wasn't optimised. There wasn't enough early-adopter demand to carry the concept through the first few iterations while technology, pricing and operating systems caught up with the vision. Today, a Haiku' might be possible but with an unstable economy and the successful existence of netbooks that were built on the exact same technology used for Origami devices, it would take something special to succeed in pushing through to mass market acceptance. As smartphones become MIDs with dedicated operating systems and high-powered processors, there's also pressure from below.

Origamiportal.com, the website that migrated into the website you're reading now, was up and running just 24 hours after the initial Origami buzz with it's first ever article highlighting the viral video that really seeded all the activity around the Origami name. I notice that it didn't credit the original source of the video. [Apologies to 'Monk' and Kevin Tofel on behalf of Roy and Terry, the owners back then.] A few weeks later, Origamiportal managed to pick up the first ever pic of an Origami device was heavily re-blogged, hit the top of Techmeme and got 577 Diggs! It became quite the popular website and forum after that!

Carrypad, the blog I started, was also on the scene. It, coincidentally, started just three days earlier. Carrypad bought Origamiportal in early 2007 which migrated into UMPCPortal in March 2007. I left my job and went full time as a pro' blogger very soon after that. Despite the death of Origami, the market continues to grow with netbooks, MIDs, smartphones and UMPCs all offering something unique in the ultra mobile computing market. The mobile personal computer is already here and that's what i think Origami was really all about.

Life goes on now and as the mobile computing market continues, UMPCPortal will stay with it. We have an intelligent, active, focused community and a steady readership of around 250,000 readers per month which should allow us (that's myself as owner/editor, Ben as contributor and Kornel, Mikey and countless helpers and tipsters) to continue into the future. An Origami 'success story' one might say!

Thanks to Microsoft, Otto and his team for providing an early leg-up' that the ultra mobile computing market has truly benefited from. Through Origami and the mobile computing ecosystem that built up around it, we've all learned a lot and I'm sure we'll continue to see those Origami visions in future mobile products.

People often say that Kobe Bryant has no weaknesses to his game, but that's not really true. Before the game, Battier was given his special package of information. He's the only player we give it to, Morey says. We can give him this fire hose of data and let him sift. Most players are like golfers. You don't want them swinging while they're thinking.

If [Kobe] has 40 points on 40 shots, I can live with that, Battier says. My job is not to keep him from scoring points but to make him as inefficient as possible. The court doesn't have little squares all over it to tell him what percentage Bryant is likely to shoot from any given spot, but it might as well.The reason the Rockets insist that Battier guard Bryant is his gift for encouraging him into his zones of lowest efficiency. The effect of doing this is astonishing: Bryant doesn't merely help his team less when Battier guards him than when someone else does. When Bryant is in the game and Battier is on him, the Lakers' offense is worse than if the N.B.A.'s best player had taken the night off. [emphasis mine]

Previously, when a user left, all their information, including pictures, videos and writing, would evaporate. This is no longer the case; it's too valuable, and perhaps this is the only way Facebook will ultimately make money: leeching off your personal information. It can use, sell or lease your data to anyone.

From the ToS:

You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof. You represent and warrant that you have all rights and permissions to grant the foregoing licenses.

Here's what was removed:

You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

And what exactly will they keep? From the Termination and Changes to the Facebook Service section:

The following sections will survive any termination of your use of the Facebook Service: Prohibited Conduct, User Content, Your Privacy Practices, Gift Credits, Ownership; Proprietary Rights, Licenses, Submissions, User Disputes; Complaints, Indemnity, General Disclaimers, Limitation on Liability, Termination and Changes to the Facebook Service, Arbitration, Governing Law; Venue and Jurisdiction and Other.

This could certainly be terrible for any individual foolish enough to post anything of a sensitive nature on Facebook (such as those pictures that got people fired from their jobs). But what is unclear is the impact on companies and other organizations that have accounts. If a company provides videos or any marketing material on its page, I don't see a way Facebook can claim such broad legal rights to it.

If for example a company posted a piece of marketing literature with an embarrassing mistake or actionable inaccuracy on its Facebook page, they'd have every right to pull it.

Or would they? Would it be eternally archived in some nondescript building in Boston reminiscent of a scene from Fringe? Eternally searchable over and over again, never leaving the Internet's consciousness, forever echoing embarrassment or legal liability?

ShareThis

I used a darker gray on the focal wall and a lighter gray on the 3 additional walls. I tried Harmony (no-voc) by Sherwin Williams on the lighter walls and Duration (low-voc) by Sherwin Williams on the dark wall.

Both paint options are eco-friendly, but the Duration is made to be more durable, scrubable and I thought it covered well.

The Charles and Ray Eames Blicks wall decals added some fun to the walls and add a tone on tone contrast. I made 4 paper canvases from Paper Source for color and to create a focal point.

A quick update, but it's given me a place to call our own.

A man walks into a bar, and orders a drink.

A few minutes later, he says to no one in particular, All lawyers are assholes.

The fellow next to him lit into him. How dare you just stereotypically categorize all lawyers as assholes? How have you missed that it's just not okay to cast aspersions on an entire group of people? You just try saying something like that about any other group of people and you'd get slugged. And you should! If you weren't such a jerk, I'd pour my drink all over you, but you're not worth the cost of my drink.

The fellow was properly abashed, and apologized. Look, I'm really sorry, I didn't mean to offend you, he says, By the way, what kind of lawyer are you?

Lawyer? I'm no lawyer, you idiot. I'm an asshole!

When ConnectU lawyers at Quinn Emmanuel secured a confidential $65 million settlement against Facebook (estimated based on a presumed mix of cash and Facebook shares), the folks in the marketing department at Quinn apparently were not in on the whole confidential thing. Crowing their success, Quinn Emmanuel published a brochure highlighting the confidential Facebook settlement amount in the firm's monthly business litigation newsletter.

The disclosure was apparently inadvertent. Quinn Emmanuel was fired by ConnectU, and a fee dispute between the two is headed to arbitration in New York. Predictably, no one is commenting further at this point.

The gaffe looms in the face of threatened malpractice litigation by ConnectU against Quinn Emmanuel, which presumably relates to unknown issues arising out of the litigation itself. But is there an EQ angle in the brochure leak of the settlement value?

California's legal ethics rules follow neither the Model Rules nor the ABA Code (California and Maine are the only states left like this). But what may be analogous to a Rule 1.6 issue in other states pops up in California's Rule 3-100 on keeping client confidences:

Rule 3-100. Confidential Information of a Client

(A) A member shall not reveal information protected from disclosure by Business and Professions Code section 6068, subdivision (e)(1) without the informed consent of the client, or as provided in paragraph (B) of this rule.

6068 basically instructs to keep confidences quiet, among other things.

EQ lesson: When a confidential settlement takes place, EVERYONE on the team needs to keep on message and make sure the confidential information stays that way. That includes the marketing department!

Bridal Expo produces the Bridal Extravaganza Show in Houston, one of the largest bridal shows in the US. Hundreds of exhibitors and thousands of prospective brides attend; the show has been in business for 25 years and keeps databases of attendees and potential clients. Defendant Wedding Showcase scheduled the Houston Wedding Showcase for Feb. 2009, a few weeks after the Bridal Extravaganza at the same location. The individual defendants van Florestein and Moore, were key to creating the Wedding Showcase and are former Bridal Expo employeesshow manager and assistant. They left Bridal Expo in July 2008, but not before Moore downloaded Bridal Expo's databases and other information.

Defendants used Bridal Expo's database to mail ads to vendors for Wedding Showcase's November 2008 seminar. They used Google to advertise the Wedding Showcase as Houston's #1 Bridal Show, and mailed a brochure to vendors using quotations attributed to our vendors and our brides that actually came from other bridal shows on the East Coast, produced by another company.

In an earlier state court suit, Bridal Expo brought claims for trade secret misappropriation, unfair competition, and related torts. The judge denied a TRO and after a hearing also denied a temporary injunction. Bridal Expo nonsuited the state case and sued in federal court, using the same claims along with a Lanham Act false advertising claim and a Computer Fraud and Abuse Act claim.

On the state claims, the district court refused to disturb the state court's ruling on the temporary injunction. All the elements of collateral estoppel were present, though this of course only affected the availability of temporary relief, not a final adjudication on the merits. Given that only a month had passed since the state court denial, and that plaintiffs had held a successful bridal show in the interim (thus suggesting lack of harm), the court found no reason to revisit the state court's decision.

On the false advertising claim, plaintiffs argued that Houston's #1 Bridal Show was literally false, since Bridal Extravaganza is, in fact, the largest bridal show in Houston by any number of measures, and that the statement wasn't puffery because it was unambiguous and needed no additional context to give it meaning. Also, they argued that the brochures were literally false because defendants have yet to produce a bridal show in Houston.

Defendants called the Google ads puffery, and argued that the use of our in the brochures referred to the principals of Wedding Showcase, who have produced many shows. Moreover, the brochures mentioned several times that the Houston Wedding Showcase is a new show.

The court held, based on Pizza Hut, that the Google ads were too ambiguous to be actionable, and were the kind of bald assertion or general statement of superiority on which no reasonable consumer would rely. See also In re Century 21-RE/MAX Real Estate Advertising Claims Litigation, 882 F .Supp. 915, 923 (C.D.Cal.1994) (holding that # 1 was too vague to be actionable and declared ... # 1 in the United States and the World" was puffery, because it was opinion and made no reference to what was #1). Anyway, defendants stopped running the ad.

As for the brochure, plaintiffs argued that the our statements were literally false, and also that the brochure made literally false claims that van Florestein and another defenant had a combined 25 years of experience. Moreover, they argued that, by scheduling their show shortly after Bridal Extravaganza at the same location, defendants were trying to confuse customers into thinking their show was the Bridal Extravaganza.

On this record, the court found no literal falsity. Our could readily, in context, refer to the show's owners, one of whom ran the shows on the East Coast from which the our statements came. The brochure explained that the Houston Wedding Showcase would be a new show with a long history. Likewise, more than 25 years of combined experience could refer to the sum of the two principals' individual experience, not 25 years each. The court concluded that it was unlikely that a sophisticated vendor audience, familiar with the Houston wedding market, would be misled into thinking that the quoted brides and vendors were from Houston.

The evidence of confusion between the shows was that one of plaintiff's employees heard from one vendor at the Bridal Extravaganza that he was confused about who was running the Wedding Showcase, but there was no evidence of any connection to the brochure, and this was insufficient to claim confusion overall, though this might be an issue for a jury.

The CFAA claim was based on 18 U.S.C. 1030(a)(4), creating liability for a person who knowingly and with intent to defraud, accesses a protected computer without authorization, or exceeds authorized access, and by means of such conduct furthers the intended fraud and obtains anything of value . For a civil claim, there are extra requirements; here, the key was loss to 1 or more persons during any 1-year period ... aggregating at least $5,000 in value. Loss includes costs of responding to an offense and conducting a damage assessment. Here, the claimed loss was the confidential trade secrets.

Defendants argued that their access wasn't without authorization and didn't exceed their authorization. Van Florestein and Moore accessed their work computers and took files to which they were allowed access as employees. They argued that there's a difference between access to computers and use or disclosure of information obtained through that access.

There's a split over the meaning of authorization. Some courts say that using files to harm the employer violates the CFAA even if the employee technically has authorization to access the files in the scope of her duties. Contrary to that, other courts have noted that, when Congress wanted to prohibit things like communication and delivery, it listed them. If Congress wanted to reach all wrongdoers who access information they then use to the detriment of their employers, it could have omitted the statute's words of limitation altogether. Despite the conclusions of other courts, the district court determined that, given those statutory construction arguments and the rule of lenity (since the CFAA is also a criminal statute), authorization is not exceeded just because the employee breaches her duty of loyalty to an employer.

Here, the files were copied/downloaded on the defendants' last day of employment. They hadn't signed a confidentiality agreement or any other agreement restricting access to the files they'd been working on at Bridal Expo. It was within the nature of their relationship to use their computers and access the files at issue. Indeed, a key Bridal Expo employee saw them using the computer on their final day and didn't complain, even though it was after they'd turned in their keys.

Thus, the court found plaintiffs were unlikely to succeed on the merits. Moreover, even had there been a likelihood of success, a preliminary injunction would have been unwarranted, based on the Fifth Circuit's hesitance to grant injunctive relief against the use of information obtained through a past violation of the CFAA, where there was no potential for ongoing access.

The court stated, somewhat confusingly, that it would be willing to revisit the issue if defendants were continuing to use the vendor email list to advertiseeven if there's no likelihood of success on the merits? And then the court said that even if it had found likely success on the merits, it wouldn't have entered an injunction, because plaintiffs hadn't shown irreparable harmthat successful show they'd conducted since defendants entered the marketand defendants would suffer great harm if they couldn't produce their show: they'd have to cancel contracts, unwind arrangements on short notice, and pay cancellation fees. About that email list: It's unusual in a written opinion for a court to signal so overtly that, though it thinks there's no legal basis for some behavior, it nonetheless expects a party to engage in that behavior, but that seems to be what happened here.

Redirects being abused by spammers

• Scripts that redirect users to a file on the serversuch as a PDF documentcan sometimes be vulnerable. If you use a content management system (CMS) that allows you to upload files, you might want to make sure the links go straight to the file, rather than going through a redirect. This includes any redirects you might have in the downloads section of your site. Watch out for links like this:
  

example.com/go.php?url=
example.com/ie/ie40/download/?

• Internal site search result pages sometimes have automatic redirect options that could be vulnerable. Look for patterns like this, where users are automatically sent to any page after the "url=" parameter:
  

example.com/search?q=user+search+keywords&url=

• Systems to track clicks for affiliate programs, ad programs, or site statistics might be open as well. Some example URLs include:
  

example.com/coupon.jsp?code=ABCDEF&url=
example.com/cs.html?url=

• Proxy sites, though not always technically redirects, are designed to send users through to other sites and therefore can be vulnerable to this abuse. This includes those used by schools and libraries. For example:
  

proxy.example.com/?url=

• In some cases, login pages will redirect users back to the page they were trying to access. Look out for URL parameters like this:
  

example.com/login?url=

• Scripts that put up an interstitial page when users leave a site can be abused. Lots of educational, government, and large corporate web sites do this to let users know that information found on outgoing links isn't under their control. Look for URLs following patterns like this:

example.com/redirect/
example.com/out?
example.com/cgi-bin/redirect.cgi?

Is my site being abused?

• Check if abused URLs are showing up in Google. Try a site: search on your site to see if anything unfamiliar shows up in Google's results for your site. You can add words to the query that are unlikely to appear in your content, such as commercial terms or adult language. If the query [site:example.com viagra] isn't supposed to return any pages on your site and it does, that could be a problem. You can even automate these searches with Google Alerts.
  

• You can also watch out for strange queries showing up in the Top search queries section of Webmaster Tools. If you have a site dedicated to the genealogy of the landed gentry, a large number of queries for porn, pills, or casinos might be a red flag. On the other hand, if you have a drug info site, you might not expect to see celebrities in your top queries. Keep an eye on the Message Center in Webmaster Tools for any messages from Google.
  

• Check your server logs or web analytics package for unfamiliar URL parameters (like "=http:" or "=//") or spikes in traffic to redirect URLs on your site. You can also check the pages with external links in Webmaster Tools.
  

• Watch out for user complaints about content or malware that you know for sure can not be found on your site. Your users may have seen your domain in the URL before being redirected and assumed they were still on your site.
  

What you can do

• Change the redirect code to check the referer, since in most cases everyone coming to your redirect script legitimately should come from your site, not a search engine or elsewhere. You may need to be permissive, since some users' browsers may not report a referer, but if you know a user is coming from an external site you can stop or warn them.
  

• If your script should only ever send users to an internal page or file (for example, on a page with file downloads), you should specifically disallow off-site redirects.
  

• Consider using a whitelist of safe destinations. In this case your code would keep a record of all outgoing links, and then check to make sure the redirect is a legitimate destination before forwarding the user on.
  

• Consider signing your redirects. If your website does have a genuine need to provide URL redirects, you can properly hash the destination URL and then include that cryptographic signature as another parameter when doing the redirect. That allows your own site to do URL redirection without opening your URL redirector to the general public.
  

• If your site is really not using it, just disable or remove the redirect. We have noticed a large number of sites where the only use of the redirect is by spammersit's probably just a feature left turned on by default.
  

• Use robots.txt to exclude search engines from the redirect scripts on your site. This won't solve the problem completely, as attackers could still use your domain in email spam. Your site will be less attractive to attackers, though, and users won't get tricked via web search results. If your redirect scripts reside in a subfolder with other scripts that don't need to appear in search results, excluding the entire subfolder may even make it harder for spammers to find redirect scripts in the first place.
  

• You can also use Webmaster Tools to remove URLs. Chances are that the spammers have also hacked and abused other sites to generate links to the spammed section of your site. If you see suspicious sites or spammed forums linking in, feel free to report those to us, preferably with the verified spam report form in Webmaster Tools.
  

Louis Vuitton Malletier, S.A. v. Akanoc Solutions, Inc., C 07-03952 JW (N.D. Cal. Dec. 23, 2008)

This is one of countless anti-counterfeiting actions by luxury brands against allegedly infringing websitesbut the twist is that the brand owner is going after the sites' web host. In Tiffany v. eBay, the big brand got very little traction against eBay based on eBay hosting auctions for allegedly infringing goods. This case doesn't turn out as well for the web host. The court, without citing Tiffany, leaves open the possibility that the web host could be liable for its customers' infringing activities. Why the difference?

Contributory Copyright Infringement

The court starts with contributory copyright infringement. The court doesn't clearly specify the direct copyright infringement taking place. It discusses evidence that the defendant's customers are selling counterfeit goods, but it doesn't connect the dots to show that the counterfeit goods are actually protected by copyright law. (It's not automatic that counterfeit goods infringe copyright).

Also, the DMCA online safe harbors are not mentioned, which makes sense if the copyright-infringing behavior is the actual sale of the counterfeit goods instead of publishing information about those goods. However, as we saw in the Tiffany case, the web host cannot determine if the goods being sold are actually counterfeit. Nevertheless, the court says a jury could find the web host had actual knowledge of the infringement due to a series of defendant emails and demands from the plaintiff. From my review, it appeared that the referenced emails involve the web host relaying the plaintiff's takedown notices to the hosted customers, so I'm not sure how these emails could evidence knowledge of the counterfeiting.

With respect to material contribution, the court references the confusing language from Perfect 10 v. Amazon and the archaic Napster precedent to say that failure to take simple measures to stop infringement can qualify as a material contribution (a standard referenced in Amazon)