LOS ANGELES A federal judge on Thursday overturned guilty verdicts against Lori Drew, and issued a directed acquittal on the three misdemeanor charges.

U.S. District Judge George Wu granted a defense motion to overturn the jury verdict in the case after reviewing transcripts from last year's trial, in which 50-year-old Drew was convicted of three misdemeanor charges of unauthorized computer access.

Drew had faced a maximum sentence of three years and a $300,000 fine. Although prosecutors sought the maximum, probation authorities, in a pre-sentencing report sent to the court, had recommended probation and a $5,000 fine.

Drew was accused of participating in a cyberbullying scheme against a 13-year-old girl who later committed suicide. The case against Drew hinged on the government's novel argument that violating MySpace's terms of service for the purpose of harming another was the legal equivalent of computer hacking.

In September 2006, prosecutors said, Drew conspired to create a fake MySpace account for Josh Evans with her then 13-year-old daughter, Sarah, and a then-18-year-old employee and family friend named Ashley Grills.

Prosecutors alleged that Drew and the two others used the profile to lure Megan Meier, a 13-year-old neighbor, into an online relationship with Josh to find out what Megan was saying about Drew's daughter online. But in October, one of the group, writing as Josh, turned against Megan, and told her that the world would be a better place without her. Shortly afterward, Megan hanged herself in her bedroom.

MySpace's user agreement requires registrants, among other things, to provide factual information about themselves and to refrain from soliciting personal information from minors or using information obtained from MySpace services to harass or harm other people. By allegedly violating that click-to-agree contract, Drew committed the same crime as any hacker, prosecutors claimed.

But testimony in the case offered by prosecution witness Ashley Grills under a grant of immunity showed that nobody involved in the hoax actually read the terms of service. Grills also said that the hoax was her idea, not Drew's, and that it was Grills who created the Josh Evans profile, and later sent the cruel message that tipped the emotionally vulnerable 13-year-old girl into her final, tragic act.

Drew was cleared of the felony computer-hacking charges by a jury, but convicted of three misdemeanors for unauthorized computer access. The jury deadlocked on the felony charge of conspiracy.

More details to come.

Photo: AP

See also:

• Judge Postpones Lori Drew Sentencing; Weighs Dismissal
• Can Lori Drew Verdict Survive the 9th Circuit Court?
• Prosecutors Seek 3 Years in Prison for Lori Drew
• Lori Drew Not Guilty of Felonies in Landmark Cyberbullying Trial
• Prosecution: Lori Drew Schemed to Humiliate Teen Girl
• Government's Star Witness Stumbles: MySpace Hoax Was Her Idea, Not Drew's
• Experts Say MySpace Suicide Indictment Sets Scary' Legal Precedent
• Blog Readers Out Anonymous Adults that Newspaper Refused to Identify

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

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. Has anyone noticed that its impossible to trust a single word uttered about coaching changes, the draft, trades and even celebration parties these days ?

Bloggers, sports websites and even the print media have gotten so desperate they seem to have come to the conclusion that fabricated stories, passed off as rumors, are a better way to drive traffic and create awareness of a website or blog than actual reporting.

Unfortunately, ESPN and local newspapers, radio and TV media have become the patsies of bloggers. If some random blogger reports that he has heard that a trade of Joe for John is being discussed, then the traditional media, as they have told me many times is requested by their editor to run it down and see if its real. Its almost like a sad joke. How do you make an ESPN reporter jump ? Make up something and put it on your blog. Somewhere a bunch of sports bloggers are playing a drinking game. Chug if the other guys made up trade rumor makes the ESPN crawl.

How to stop it ? ESPN.com puts up a page of blacklisted blogs and websites who's posts they wont comment on or report on in any way. It will create a short term surge of traffic for those sites, but then they will go away as the proprietors of the sites realize that being discredited is not a good thing.

2. I did a quick and dirty interview with The Motley Fool. They asked me about Buy and Hold for Stocks. My answer was simple.

Buy and hold is long dead. It has always been a sucker's bet. Proponents point to charts of index performance over the long term; unfortunately, things like house repairs, kids, and college tuition don't follow the same chart.

Buy and hold is a great marketing slogan for funds that want to take your money. Nothing more or less.

Then they had John Bogle ,founder of Vanguard and creator of the Vanguard 500 comment on what I had to say. I'm glad to say that Mr Bogle made my point. In what should have been a simple answer for him, was not. Plus he managed to take a few shots at me. Hey, if you can't counter a point, slam the messenger ! Here is what he had to say. Notice all the qualifiers.

Cuban embargo is what we need after those silly statements.

Of course buy and hold is a sucker's bet where individual stocks are concerned (just ask the guys that bought and held Mark's own company!)
And while buy and hold for all of American business (a stock index fund) may produce long years of plenty interrupted by years of famine, putting equity capital to work in that way will be great so long as America is great.
And as a group, all investors, by definition, are buy and hold investors! Not complicated! And mathematically, those who themselves are buy and holders (without costs) will not might outperform those who trade back and forth with one another, who capture the same market return but let all those croupier costs destroy their returns.

Finally, if buy and hold refers not to stocks or the stock portfolio but to one's aggregate investment portfolio, reducing the stock commitment as age takes its toll, it is the most certain way to wealth that exists in our uncertain world.

He's right about the marketing slogan except when it is applied to the strategy described in the immediately preceding paragraph.

I stand by what I had to say. Buyer beware.

ShareThis

Media analyst Clay Shirky has some interesting thoughts on the steady stream of photos, Twitter posts and videos coming out of post-election Iran:

I'm always a little reticent to draw lessons from things still unfolding, but it seems pretty clear that this is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media

I've been thinking a lot about the Chicago demonstrations of 1968 where they chanted the whole world is watching.

Really, that wasn't true then. But this time it's true and people throughout the world are not only listening but responding. They're engaging with individual participants, they're passing on their messages to their friends, and they're even providing detailed instructions to enable web proxies allowing Internet access that the authorities can't immediately censor. That kind of participation is reallly extraordinary.

Shirky goes on to suggest that microblogging service Twitter has made the most impact on the events in Iran and their coverage:

One thing that Evan (Williams) and Biz (Stone) did absolutely right is that they made Twitter so simple and so open that it's easier to integrate and harder to control than any other tool. At the time, I'm sure it wasn't conceived as anything other than a smart engineering choice. But it's had global consequences.

Twitter is shareable and open and participatory in a way that Facebook's model prevents. So far, despite a massive effort, the authorities have found no way to shut it down, and now there are literally thousands of people aorund the world who've made it their business to help keep it open.

While Twitter has been huge in the last few days, YouTube videos, like the one embedded above, and the images coming through sites like Flickr are incredibly important, too, because they let you see the scale of what's happening.

Iran's military is warning online media of a crackdown over coverage of the country's election crisis. The country is trying to block access to social media sites, and said that Iranian Web sites and bloggers must remove any materials that create tension or face legal action.

At this point, though, it looks like the only way to cut off the flow of citizen media in and out of Iran is to eliminate access to the Internet itself.

See Shirky's full comments at the TED site.

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.

Through motorcycles and text messages, FrontlineSMS:Medic connects doctors and patients in rural Africa.

In the developing world, most communities don't have access to a hospital, let alone a doctor. Valiant community health workers sometimes serve rural villages, but they don't have the training or technology to assist with major medical problems. The distance between village and hospital, both in terms of travel and communication, often spells doom for residents. But FrontlineSMS:Medic is aiming to change that. It

The TOSBack.org site was, in part, an outgrowth of Facebook's change in its service agreement in February that seemingly allowed the company to use its members' content forever. Facebook changed its terms after an internet revolution of sorts.

The new tracker, chronicling 44 internet companies, shows terms of service agreements side by side with older and new versions, and highlights what is new.

The companies include Facebook, Google,Wordpress, Data.gov, YouTube, Apple, GoDaddy and, among others, eBay.

See Also:

• Experts Say MySpace Suicide Indictment Sets Scary' Legal
• AT&T, Comcast Deny RIAA Three-Strikes' Participation
• Comcast Deflects User's Questions - Updated
• AT&T Revokes Right to Disconnect Based on Political Speech
• Does Your ISP Sell Your Internet History? Help 27B Investigate
• Adware Maker Says Facebook Security Warning False and

I've been staring at a project in my backyard for a few weeks. Staring hasn't gotten it done. So I figured I'd see what it would cost to have these guys do it.

I called them. 10 minutes later the guy came by. He was down the street on another job. We walked out back. I told him what I needed done. He looked around for 20 seconds and said $300. I said deal.

That's it. No proposal. No I'll get back to you tomorrow. No Let me see how much the materials will cost and I'll drop an estimate in your mailbox next week.

Just $300. Deal. When can you start? Wednesday. How long will it take? A few hours for a few guys.

He knows his business. I know what my time is worth. End of transaction. It was so damn refreshing.

I know everything can't be done like this, but often it seems like we've slid down a path of formality with so many things that really don't need it. Extensive contracts, delays, red tape, precise cost estimates based on precise amounts of materials, let me think about it and I'll get back to you, etc. Essential? Sometimes yes, but most of the time probably not.

I remember the tail end of our time as a web design company. When we started we did 20 page proposals. I remember pulling all nighters getting a proposal ready. Pages and pages of stuff. What a waste of time.

Towards the end we were doing one page proposals. It didn't seem to matter. We were going to get the job or we weren't. Over six years I never saw a connection between length and detail of proposal and winning a job.

Same thing with contracts. Sometime we hire an outside contractor or specialist to give us a hand on a project. Our contractor agreement used to be 8 pages long. Lawyers wrote it. Our current contractor agreement is one page long. I wrote it then showed it to our lawyers. They said it was fine. Done.

I know it seems like a stretch to compare lessons from a door flyer for a small landscaping job to 10 page legal contracts for 3 month long expensive web design projects. But maybe it isn't.

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.

An Ohio appellate court has upheld the felony hacking conviction of a man who was found guilty of unauthorized access for misusing his computer at work.

Richard Wolf acknowledged that his behavior was inappropriate when he used his work computer to upload nude photos of himself to an adult web site and view other photos on porn sites, but he didn't think he should be convicted of hacking for doing so.

A jury disagreed and felt he exceeded his authorization on the computer, which the appellate court recently upheld (.pdf).

Mark Rasch, a former federal prosecutor of computer crimes, called the conviction a misuse of the computer hacking law.

This goes to the whole concept . . . that violation of an internal policy on the use of a computer can be piggybacked to make a crime, said Rasch, who now works as a consultant for Secure IT Experts. His uploading of nude pictures is certainly inappropriate and something he could be terminated for, but it was perfectly legal. When you use the heavy hand of the criminal law to prosecute inappropriate behavior, it's just an abuse of the criminal statutes.

Wolf was also convicted of soliciting a dominatrix online for sexual services, a misdemeanor. Rasch says using the computer evidence for proof of this crime is appropriate, but charging him separately for felony hacking goes too far.

Rasch said the problem stems from an amendment that was made to the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act the federal anti-hacking law that states have added to their own statutes.

The early statute only talked about unauthorized access which is breaking into computer, he said. But then they amended it to say or exceeding the scope of authorization to access a computer'.

The amendment was intended to target employees who have access to a computer but abuse that access to obtain data they shouldn't have or go into parts of their employer's network they shouldn't enter.

The amendment arose from the case of an IRS employee who was caught looking up tax returns on an assistant district attorney who was prosecuting his father, among others. Authorities tried to prosecute him on hacking charges but ran into difficulty since he was authorized to use the computer system.

Unfortunately, Rasch says, the amendment created an opportunity for prosecutors to interpret the law too broadly.

That term exceeding authorization' is very loose and ambiguous, he says.

The case began when Larry Wise, the Superintendent of the Shelby City Wastewater Treatment Plant, where Wolf was employed, was deleting old files from a work computer and found a nude photograph of Wolf.

When police interviewed him, Wolf admitted that in January 2006 he joined a web site called Adult Friend Finder to meet women and that, in violation of established work practices, he uploaded nude photos of himself from his work computer after women he met online requested pictures. He also admitted accessing various porn sites and spending more than 100 hours doing personal business on his work computer.

Forensic analysis of the computer's temporary internet files uncovered 703 pornographic photos as well as several sexually explicit e-mails Wolf exchanged with a dominatrix named Mistress Patrice, soliciting her services.

Wolf was convicted on state charges for three counts: unauthorized access to a computer, a felony; theft of services in office (essentially for depriving the city of his paid services while he conducted the unauthorized activities on a city computer on city time), which is also a felony; and solicitation of prostitution, a misdemeanor.

He was sentenced to 15 months and a $5,000 fine for the two felony convictions and ordered to pay the city about $2,400 in restitution for personal business on city time. On the misdemeanor solicitation charge, he was sentenced to 60 days (to run concurrently with his other sentence) and a fine of $500. His sentence was later reduced to two and a half years in community control.

Wolf argued for appeal on grounds that there was insufficient evidence for any of the convictions and that the convictions for unauthorized use of computer and theft of service in particular are contrary to public policy and create such a manifest miscarriage of justice that such convictions must be reversed.

The Ohio hacking statute reads in part that No person, in any manner and by any means, including, but not limited to, computer hacking, shall knowingly gain access to, attempt to gain access to, or cause access to be gained to any computer, . . . without the consent of, or beyond the scope of the express or implied consent of, the owner of the computer, . . . or other person authorized to give consent.

The appellate court wrote that Wolf's conduct was beyond the scope of the express or implied consent and the charge of unauthorized use of a computer was based upon sufficient evidence.

The appellate court vacated the theft-of-service conviction, however.

Judge John Wise wrote that while the State presented evidence Appellant spent approximately 100 hours over a five month-period utilizing internet websites that were not related to his job, there was no evidence presented that his job performance suffered or that he failed to perform his job duties.

Furthermore, even if it could be shown that Appellant failed to perform
such job duties, while it could certainly serve as a basis for termination from his
employment, such could not be the basis of a criminal theft in office charge.

One of the judges wrote a dissenting opinion on this point, saying the state had proven that the city experienced a measurable loss for the time Wolf wasted on the computer.

The county assistant prosecutor said her office will appeal the ruling to the state supreme court.

UPDATE: David Carto, the attorney who handled Wolf's appeal, told Threat Level that Wolf was prosecuted because authorities disapproved of the material he viewed online.

The reason he was prosecuted was clearly because of the content of what he was looking at, he said. If somebody else had been on an internet site studying horticulture, I don't think he would have been prosecuted. It was not obscene. It was just something that was not approved of by certain elements of the city government and by the court in which he was tried. The prosecutor and the judge both treated this basically as a sex offense.

Carto said the photos Wolf viewed were profile pictures from the adult dating site he visited. Some of the profile photos of women on the site showed nudity but not sexual acts.

He said his client was a good worker and had even been promoted after his supervisors found the pictures. Initially he was suspended while police investigated the case, but was promoted after he returned to work. He lost his job, however, when he was convicted of the charges.

He added that the city had never actually disseminated a policy regarding internet usage to tell workers what was inappropriate.

They had crafted one but they hadn't published it, he said. So there was in effect no policy and no protections on the computer no password protection or filtering of any kind so basically anybody could access anything on the internet through the city's computer.

Photo showing a random computer: chunter01/Flickr

On Tuesday, President Barack Obama nominated Sotomayor, a judge in the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, to the replace the retiring Justice David Souter. The former private IP lawyer's cyberlaw decisions ranged from copyrights in a digitized world to warrantless computer searches, so-called click-wrap agreements and the Patriot Act .

In 2002, Sotomayor wrote a decision (.pdf) nullifying Netscape's online click-wrap agreement, which demanded binding arbitration of disputes between Netscape and its customers. The free download button for Netscape's browser software was high on the web page, with the user-agreement well below.

We conclude that in circumstances such as these, where consumers are urged to download free software at the immediate click of a button, a reference to the existence of license terms on a submerged screen is not sufficient to place consumers on inquiry or constructive notice of those terms, Sotomayor wrote.

Consumers sued Netscape claiming browser cookies amounted to illegal eavesdropping. Netscape claimed the click-wrap agreement demanded out-of-court arbitration. As we all know, it turned out that cookies are lawful and mostly harmless.

In a December case, Sotomayor joined in a unanimous appellate decision on the 2001 Patriot Act. The ruling limited the application of the automatic gag orders that bind ISPs that receive an FBI national security letter a type of self-issued subpoena demanding information on a customer.

If confirmed, she will be the first justice who has written cyberlaw-related opinions before joining the court, the TechLaw blog wrote.

As a New York District Court judge in 2007, the nominee ruled that The New York Times could digitize and sell freelancers' work, despite the writers' claims of copyright infringement. The Supreme Court reversed her decision. The court is current set to hear that case again, and Sotomayor would likely have to recuse herself from the rehearing.

In 2001, as an appellate judge, she upheld (.pdf) the warrantless search of a New York Department of Transportation computer. The accountant was suspected of neglecting his duties and the government searched his computer without a warrant, leading to his job loss. The authorities found unauthorized accounting software on Gary Leventhal's computer, which was believed to be used for his private accounting practice.

The searches, Sotomayor wrote, were reasonable in light of the DOT's need to investigate the allegations of Levanthal's misconduct as balanced against the modest intrusion caused by the searches.

See Also:

• Free-Lancers Have Just Begun to Fight
• Court Narrows National Security Secrecy, Limits Oversight

Solid Host, NL v. NameCheap, Inc., 2:08-cv-05414-MMM-E (C.D. Cal. May 19, 2009)

Facts

This case involves an alleged domain name theft. Solid Host is a web host and initial owner of the domain name solidhost.com, which it registered through eNom in 2004. Solid Host claims that in 2008, a security breach at eNom allowed an unknown interloper (Doe) to steal the domain name and move the registration to NameCheap. Doe also acquired NameCheap's "WhoisGuard" service, a domain name proxy service that masked Doe's contact information in the Whois database. Solid Host contacted Doe and sought the domain name; Doe asked for $12,000, and Solid Host took a pass. Instead, Solid Host demanded that NameCheap hand back the domain name and identify Doe, but Doe claimed that he had bought the domain name legitimately. NameCheap, apparently feeling like the cheese in a sandwich, demurred to Solid Host's requests. Solid Host then got a TRO ordering NameCheap to transfer the name and reveal Doe's identity, both of which occurred. For unclear reasons, Solid Host hasn't amended the complaint to name the Doe, but it is proceeding against NameCheap on various claims, including an Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA) claim.

The Opinion

Who is the Registrant?

My understanding of domain name proxy services is that the service acts as the legal registrant, thus supplying its contact information, but it registers the domain name for the benefit of its customer, making the customer the beneficial registrant. An analogy: a bank may take legal title of a property as part of securing a loan on the property, but the borrower retains beneficial title to the property.

So, for purposes of the ACPA, is the proxy service the registrant of the domain name? ICANN's agreement with registrars seemingly contemplates this characterization in Section 3.7.7.3 of its Registrar Agreement, which says A Registered Name Holder licensing use of a Registered Name according to this provision shall accept liability for harm caused by wrongful use of the Registered Name, unless it promptly discloses the identity of the licensee to a party providing the Registered Name Holder reasonable evidence of actionable harm. However, it's not clear to me that a proxy service licenses the domain name, especially if you accept my lender-borrower analogy above. Alternatively, if the proxy service is the agent of the customer, the licensing analogy also breaks down.

Whether the proxy service is the registrant matters a great deal to the legal outcome, and unfortunately, the court's analysis of this important question was cursory, muddled, and possibly internally inconsistent.

In this case, the court's inquiry is made more difficult by the fact that NameCheap acted as both the registrar and the proxy service provider. As a registrar, an ACPA claim against NameCheap should be squarely preempted by the domain name registry/registrar safe harbor enacted as part of the ACPA (15 U.S.C. 1114(2)(D)). For example, 1114(2)(D)(iii) says:

A domain name registrar, a domain name registry, or other domain name registration authority shall not be liable for damages under this section for the registration or maintenance of a domain name for another absent a showing of bad faith intent to profit from such registration or maintenance of the domain name

(This provision only moots damages, not an injunction, but since Solid Host has the domain name back in its possession, damages seem like the only remaining issue).

The court concludes that NameCheap is not eligible for the domain name registrar safe harbor because NameCheap is the domain name registrant. It says, "NameCheap is, by virtue of the anonymity service it provides, the registrant of a domain name that allegedly infringes Sold [sic] Host's trademark." Thus, NameCheap is ineligible for the registrar safe harbor, which applies only when the registrar acts as a registrar.

But, having rejected the domain name registrar safe harbor because NameCheap was the domain name registrant, the court then inconsistently says that NameCheap is not the registrant for purposes of the prima facie ACPA claim. Instead, for ACPA purposes the court treats Doe as the registrant, leaving NameCheap exposed to a possible secondary ACPA liability claim. (The court acknowledges that NameCheap would defeat a direct ACPA claim because NameCheap did not have any bad faith intent to profit from the domain name. Offering the proxy service wasn't enough to qualify as a bad faith intent to profit).

Wait a minutehow can NameCheap simultaneously be both the registrant (no safe harbor) but not the registrant (thus, subjected to a secondary claim)? The court does not acknowledge or explain this apparent inconsistency.

Contributory Cybersquatting

Courts have rarely discussed a contributory ACPA claim. The only one cited by the court was a 2001 case (the Ford Motors vs. Greatdomains.com case) and I can't think of any others. Perhaps this isn't surprising because (1) as the Greatdomains.com case indicated, a contributory ACPA claim is available "in only exceptional circumstances," and (2) registrars are the most likely targets of a contributory ACPA claim, and the domain name registrar safe harbor effectively eliminates their contributory ACPA liability.

Adopting the analysis in the Greatdomains.com case, this court equates contributory ACPA liabilty with the Ninth Circuit's 1999 Lockheed standard for online contributory trademark infringement (as opposed to ACPA liability), which requires that "a plaintiff must prove that the defendant had knowledge and [d]irect control and monitoring of the instrumentality used by the third party to infringe the plaintiff's mark.'"

So how did NameCheap have the requisite control over Doe's instrumentalities? Good question. The court tosses out this gem: NameCheap was "the cyber-landlord of the internet real estate stolen by Doe." WHAT??? The court continues:

NameCheap's anonymity service was central to Doe's cybersquatting scheme. If NameCheap had returned the domain name to Solid Host, Doe's illegal activity would have ceased.

The second sentence is true with respect to NameCheap, but it is also true of every registrar for every domain name they register--and we know from the 1999 Lockheed case that registrars lack control over the instrumentalities of their registrants. So the proxy service seems to make a legal difference, but how does the proxy service evidence NameCheap's greater control over the registrant's instrumentalities? I think something is amiss here.

To complete the prima facie contributory ACPA claim, in addition to control, Solid Host must show that NameCheap has the requisite knowledge of Doe's ACPA violation. The court sets a high scienter bar--mere notice from an aggrieved party isn't enough--but the court conclusorily says that the complaint alleged enough knowledge to survive the motion to dismiss.

Why This is a Troubling Ruling

As I trust is clear, I think the court's analysis is questionable at best. I'm also troubled about the normative implications. Most obviously, this case could portend the deminse of domain name proxy services. Read literally, every proxy service is exposed to potential contributory ACPA liability for every domain name it services. I can't imagine proxy service providers will be excited about that liability exposure, and some may choose to exit the business.

If proxy services evaporate, domain name registrants will have a tougher time maintaining their privacy. This could affect at least two groups. First, businesses seeking to register domain names for unlaunched new brands often want to procure the new brand's domain names without publicly announcing their intentions through the Whois database. (Of course, some businesses register such domain name through agents or shell companies, but at a much greater expense than a proxy service). Second, gripers, whistleblowers, critics and others may want to use proxy services to make it harder for their targets to unmask their identities. This ruling jeopardizes the potential privacy options available to both groups.

I'm also troubled by this ruling's narrow reading of the domain name registrar safe harbors. There haven't been many cases interpreting those safe harbors, and this case might influence other courts to read them narrowly.

A Mini-Trend of Lawsuits Against Registrars

I've noticed a small but troubling increase in lawsuits against domain name registrars in the past few months. In addition to this case, see the Vulcan Golf v. Google lawsuit (which named some registrars as defendants), OnlineNIC cases, Philbrick v. eNom and uBid v. GoDaddy. Personally, I believe this litigation trend mirrors the expansion of new and legally untested non-registration services offered by registrars. I explored this issue with Elliot Noss of Tucows in the most recent installment of TWiL (worth listening to, IMO). Discussing the uBid lawsuit, Elliott explained how registrars monetize dropped domain names before being returned to the available pool of unregistered domain names. The delay is putatively for the benefit of customers who mistakenly let a registration lapse; but this also has the happy (?) by-product of letting registrars create new ad inventory that they are monetizing.

In the past, a lot of the legal attention regarding domain names has focused on trademark owners vs. registrants. From my perspective, those lawsuits are becoming pass. The real litigation growth industry appears to be trademark owner vs. registrar lawsuits over new registrar service offerings that trademark owners don't like. Rulings like this one, with a broad reading of contributory ACPA liability and a narrow reading of the domain name registrar safe harbor, raise the specter that registrars may find more legal trouble than they anticipated.

Web professionals are often expected to be "always on" - always working, absorbing information, and honing new skills. Unless our work and personal lives are carefully balanced, however, the physical and mental effects of an "always on" life can be debilitating.

Scott articulates the "what" and "how" of a burnout pointing to some established research. And, as we've come to expect from A List Apart publications, the article also offers up some great remedies for preventing burnouts. As someone who's been through a couple of burnouts, I can tell you from experience that his remedies are spot-on. Peek into the discussion area for the article and you'll find some more practical remedies. The article alludes to a type of burnout that's caused by your employer/workplace. In other words, burnouts caused by working in a dysfunctional environment; these are very difficult because you don't have much control over how they manifest. However, I suspect that a good number of burnouts in this industry are completely self-induced, especially for folks who are lucky enough to find themselves doing something they love to do in their free time (guilty as charged). While most, if not all, remedies mentioned in the article would still go a long way in fighting symptoms of a self-induced burnout, in my experience they'll never truly fix the source of the issue (i.e. your own personality) and consequently, you'll be prone to relapses.

If you think that your personality is bringing on a burnout, then what you really need to be working on is reprogramming your personality. Here are a few tips that you can try in addition to those provided in Scott's article:

• Acknowledge the Issue

  OK, so Scott talks about this, but I want to stress on it. The source of self-induced burnouts is your own addictive personality, so you need to fix yourself. If you find yourself pulling your mobile device out of your pocket every couple of minutes to refresh your inbox or to glance at the twitter stream, you have issues. You're addicted, and addictions generally have negative consequences. The most sustainable way I've found to fix personality issues around susceptibility to addictions is to truly acknowledge that you're addicted and that you want to do something about it. Once you've truly acknowledged the issue, the other remedies have the potential of permanently fixing self-induced burnouts.

• Work 9 to 5

  Scott talks about how it's becoming impossible to do the 9 to 5 thing these days, but I tend to agree with one of the comments that succumbing to that attitude is one of the root causes of burnouts. The good news is that if you're suffering or on path to a self-induced burnout, then putting a 9 to 5 boundary in place is completely your call. You have no excuses to not enforce it. By putting the boundary in place, you're going to force yourself to make time for yourself, your friends, family and hobbies. At first you may not do anything with this "free time", and that's OK.

• Be Consistent

  Don't cheat. Beating burnout is like going to rehab (OK, never been to one, but from what I hear, it sounds a lot like it) you need to cut off your supply, cold turkey, and then consistently work within the framework of your remedies till you're reprogrammed. It will happen, slowly, but surely. Just do yourself a favor and don't cheat yourself. Not even once.

Having said all this, there is a silver lining here best captured by a Def Leppard lyric, "It's better to burn out, than fade away." So, what's your take? Have you ever had a burnout? Why? How'd you get out of it? Got some tips for us?

While I might use some different language today, this technique I posted in 2004 (inspired by Alexander) is still a major help when I'm designing a UI with many elements to juggle. The reason I come back to it is that it helps me design with language first instead of empty templates. Too often a design starts top-down with empty content areas (maybe a main column and a sidebar) and then we fill those boxes in until its done. Filling in the boxes would work fine, except having a bunch of stuff on the page doesn't mean we served the design goals.

Here's a refresher:

1. List all the things a screen should do. What should the customer be able to accomplish? What information are you sure should be displayed? Which affordances are necessary for customers to start a process or reach a goal? Label these things with numbers.
2. Look for any numbered items that relate to each other, conceptually or spatially. Label these groups of numbers with a letter.
3. Sketch a design (or multiple designs) for each number or letter group.
4. Combine the individually sketched blocks into a unified design. Let the pieces fall together into a whole.

And don't forget, the next step isn't a polished wireframe. It's code you can click on!

The pro se attorney plaintiff in Burcham v. Expedia brought suit against the travel site under Missouri consumer law, claiming that Expedia knowingly misrepresented the hotel amenities for a room that he booked on the site. He sought $5 million in damages and class certification.

It didn't help the court's view of the case that the room was booked for a hotel in Missouri in November, and one of the amenities that Burcham claimed was absent when he and his children arrived at the hotel was an outdoor swimming pool. Fair enough, Burcham also claimed that the hotel lacked an indoor swimming pool, conference room, restaurant and bar/lounge. But the court pointed out that Burcham's complaint did not allege that he or his children wished to use any of the absent amenities.

Burcham was off to a bad start.

Expedia moved to dismiss Burcham's complaint, relying on the forum selection provision that specified Kings County, Washington as the proper venue. Expedia submitted evidence showing multiple versions of its terms of use, including the current and past versions, which the court concluded contained the same material terms.

Expedia also established by affidavit that Burcham's booking had been made by a process under which the user was presented with a legend stating: "By continuing on you agree to the following terms and conditions." Beneath the legend, the full text of the terms and conditions was displayed. In order to book a room, the user was required to click on the "continue" button.

Confronted with this evidence, Burcham argued that he simply did not remember seeing the terms and conditions when he used the Expedia site. He suggested that he may have used the site from a shared computer at his law office without checking to see if the prior user of the computer was already logged onto the site. Thus, he argued, the prior user may have clicked past the terms and conditions, but they were never presented to him.

The court briefly reviewed the relevant case law (e.g., Specht v. Netscape, Register.com v. Verio, ProCD v. Zeidenberg) and the distinctions between clickwrap, shrinkwrap and browsewrap agreements, and quickly concluded that Expedia had an "enforceable online clickwrap agreement" with Burcham. Burcham's argument that he never saw the terms and conditions was dismissed both on the facts and the law.

On the facts, the court found, Burcham offered no evidence to support his "clever theory" that someone else clicked past the terms and conditions, and the undisputed facts showed that the user account created at the time the terms and conditions were assented to was associated with Burcham's own e-mail address. On the law, the court concluded that if Burcham in fact had accessed the Web site under someone else's account, he was still bound by the terms and conditions to which that user had assented, citing, e.g., Motise v. America Online, Inc., 346 F.Supp. 2d 563 (S.D.N.Y. 2004) (individual using the online account of another user bound by the same terms and conditions as the account owner).

Burcham also tripped over the evidence he himself submitted to the court along with his brief. The court noted that the Expedia Web pages Burcham submitted as exhibits contained a hyperlink at the bottom to the full text of the Expedia terms and conditions. The court noted that the terms and conditions stated that users of the site consent to be bound by those terms and conditions by accessing and using the Web site. Thus, the court concluded, even if Burcham wasn't clickwrapped, he was browsewrapped.

Finally, the court quickly dismissed Burcham's arguments that the forum selection provision was unreasonable and in contravention of Missouri public policy and that the contract as a whole was one of adhesion.

The ruling in Burcham v. Expedia is a win for the enforceability of online agreements, and another loss for pro se attorney plaintiffs for whom courts seem to have little sympathy. See, e.g., Field v. Google, 412 F.Supp. 2d 1106 (D. Nev. 2006) (rejecting pro se attorney plaintiff's "manufactured" copyright infringement claim based on Google Web crawling and caching).

Burcham v. Expedia, Inc., 2009 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 17104 (E.D. Mo. Mar. 6, 2009)

Twitter is a one-man show. One has complete freedom of expression, including, if one chooses, the freedom to be scurrilous, abusive, and seditious; or, on the other hand, to be more detailed, serious and high-brow' than is ever possible in a newspaper or in most kinds of periodicals. At the same time, since Twitter is always short, it can be produced much more quickly than a book, and in principle, at any rate, can reach a bigger public. Above all, Twitter does not have to follow any prescribed pattern... All that is required of it is that it shall be topical, polemical, and short.

Many people pointed out the double taxation issue involved with C corporations. C Corporations pay taxes and then when money is removed from the corporation to the investors or founders, another round of taxes is imposed. On the surface, this is a good argument for an LLC but it turns out to not have much of an impact in reality much of the time.

The other issue that people pointed out is that valuable losses can be passed through to the personal taxes of the investors and founders with an LLC. While this is also true under ideal circumstances, it turns out to not be true at all in most common cases.

Victor Fleischer reached out to me by email with a thorough research paper called The Rational Exuberance of Structuring Venture Capital Startups he had written on this very topic in 2003. I found it to be very educational and I think you will too. It's absolutely worth a full read (10 minutes or so) - and it's not as long as it looks because there are many detailed footnotes and supporting references.

Here's the gist of his paper as I read it. Many observers of the venture capital industry believe that VCs ignore LLCs primarily because C corporations are the devil they know, and secondarily because they're focused on gains only and are not typically major participants in losses (since they are investing other peoples money and not their own, primarily). This paper goes a long way towards showing why professional investors prefer C corporations and includes many potential surprises such as:

• Tax losses are often not as valuable as they seem on paper as tax rules prohibit many investors (and entrepreneurs) from capturing the full benefit of the losses.
• Corporations are less complex than partnerships. Friction costs associated with LLCs may make legal costs substantially higher over time for LLCs.
• Gains are taxed more favorably when companies are organized as C corporations from the beginning (vs converting late, if that is even legally possible).
• Employee compensation issues are much more complex with an LLC than a corporation. This can cost more and can devalue options equivalents coming from LLCs.

In short, at least in my mind, much of the argument for LLCs as being more tax efficient ends up being an illusion and only true on paper.

I hope that this starts another big argument. Blogging is for learning, and your comments and participation are really helping me learn. I thank you for that.

Keep in mind the paper is a little old and some tax laws may have changed in the interim. As always, consult your attorney and accountant as I'm no tax lawyer.

Incidentally, Victor is returning to CU as an Associate Professor at the law school this June! I'm glad to welcome him back to Boulder after he spent the last few years at the University of Illinois College of Law. I'm excited that he'll be an asset to the local entrepreneurial community once again.

Related articles

• Why Don't Venture Capitalists Like Investing in LLC's? (dividendsandpreferences.blogspot.com)
• S Corp's vs LLCs (Feld Thoughts)
• Forming an LLC May Be a Wise Choice For Your Small Business (stepbysteptips.com)

As a venture capitalist, I've seen the advantages of outsourcing. One of our largest success stories, Stratify, controlled costs and provided 24/7 support through a well-managed outsourcing strategy. Most professions are outsourcing at least part of their work, why not lawyers?

I can see two potential ways outsourcing can work in the legal setting .

The first way is simply outsourcing outside of metropolitan areas that are expensive to live in. Why make all of your lawyers commute to New York City or the Silicon Valley to work in an office where they never see their clients? In fact, many of these lawyers would prefer to live outside the city centers to avoid the higher costs of living. I would posit that after some type of apprenticeship program at the law firm, well-trained associates could move anywhere in the country and work effectively. I know for a fact that most law firms have some lawyers working from home in locations where offices aren't located and no one knows the difference. Maybe now it's time to do that wide scale. Law offices could start to look like consulting offices in that most of their now smaller and cheaper office space is for visiting professionals. Salaries could be adjusted on cost of living analysis. The law firm could increase margins and pass some of the savings onto their clients. As an example of one firm thinking outside the box, Orrick has outsourced its entire back office to West Virginia. Why not some of the lawyers? Wouldn't many Silicon Valley lawyer prefer to practice from home in San Francisco or Marin? Who says all the good lawyer want to live in expensive places to live? Who says that good lawyers don't exists in secondary or tertiary markets today?

The second way would be to actually outsource work to other countries. This clearly works better for some practice areas than others, but if it works for processes as complicated as software development, it will work for the legal process. I think patent drafting, licensing / contract drafting, diligence and some other non-client facing tasks can easily be outsourced. I'm sure most lawyers reading this will brush it off saying it's too hard, but nearly every other industry has figured out outsourcing. One reader of this blog suggested the following:

Although the model did not work well in the airline industry, I think that smart law firms should develop budget line practices for routine work. These could be staffed with Indian attorneys, part-time stay at home attorneys and maybe attorneys in smaller markets with lower costs of living in all cases, non partnership track attorneys. They would be supervised by the higher paid, partnership track attorneys with a roughly 10%/90% split of time between the supervising attorney and these lower cost attorneys. These groups would not handle things like general client counseling, high stakes litigations or large scale M&A. The managing attorney would manage the allocation of work between the value line and the main line of the firm. Given the lower cost of labor and the increased possibility of leverage, assuming a reasonable mark-up, this proposal still might maintain per-partner profits

I actually think he's got a good point.

Something to consider. As always, fire away

Sojitz Corporation fired its employee Schanfield. Six months later, Schanfield sued for wrongful termination. As many litigants do prior to filing suit, Schanfield sought the advice via email of two attorneys in his family. These communications discussed the facts of the case, underlying strategy, and thoughts on retaining counsel. Schanfield copied his non-lawyer sister on these messages.

Schanfield withheld these emails from production. Sojits moved to compel. Schanfield argued that the messages were protected by the attorney-client privilege because they were confidential and explicitly for the purpose of procuring legal advice about his claims in [the] litigation and the retention of counsel.

The court found that by copying his non-lawyer sister on these communications, Schanfield forfeited the attorney-client privilege. However, the court also found that the emails were protected by the work product doctrine. The messages were clearly prepared in anticipation of litigation, and by sending them to his close relatives, Schanfield did not significantly increase the likelihood that Sojitz would obtain the information. Absent a showing of substantial need for the messages, the court denied Sojitz's motion to compel.

The obvious lesson to be learned from the case is that one must use discretion in deciding who to copy on email messages. Lawyers are expected to understand the contours of the attorney-client privilege and avoid unnecessary cc-ing. But prudent counsel will instruct and remind his or her clients of how easy the protection of the attorney-client privilege can be destroyed, as this case demonstrates. This is an issue which should be included in any corporate email risk management training or program.

Finkel v. Facebook, Inc., 102578-09 (N.Y. Supreme Ct. complaint filed Feb. 24, 2009).

A New York teenager has sued Facebook and four Facebook users (plus their parents) for allegedly defamatory content posted in a private Facebook group called "90 Cents Short of a Dollar."

This case fits neatly with other legal battles over "cyber-bullying" (whatever that means), such as the AutoAdmit lawsuits, the Sandler case and the Lori Drew case. (For another recent and troubling example of cyber-bullying that I read just this morning, see Wolfe v. Fayetteville, Arkansas School Dist., 2009 WL 485400 (W.D. Ark. Feb. 26, 2009)).

In this case, the plaintiff's school peers said some not-nice things about her in a private Facebook page. The Newsday article has some more color about the sour relationships between Finkel and the defendants. The plaintiff claims that the posts meant that "the plaintiff was a woman of dubious morals, dubious sexual character, having engaged in bestiality, an 'I V drug user' as well as having contracted the H.I.V. virus and AIDS."

With respect to the claim against Facebook, this lawsuit is unquestionably DOA. Frankly, I'm not sure why the plaintiff bothered to sue Facebook. Facebook is completely immunized per 47 USC 230, and this should be an easy dismissal. The complaint didn't even try to do anything fancy to get around 230; in fact, the complaint alleges that Facebook "published" the content, the absolutely wrong allegation to make if you're trying to bypass 230. I think it significantly detracts from the sympathy we might otherwise feel for plaintiff for her to have futilely dragged Facebook into the lawsuit. And, it ensures there will be at least one aggressive defendant in the lawsuit.

With respect to the school peers' liability, this case raises some interesting and complex questions. First, and most obviously, how did the plaintiff get a copy of the private group's postings? This reminds me a little of the Washingtonienne case, although access to Cutler's blog wasn't technologically restricted like it was in Facebook.

Side note: the republication of the private group's posts in this complaint reminds us once again that we always have to be prepared for our digital words to show up on the front page of a national newspaper. In particular, including the transcript to the complaint without a protective order was an aggressive move; I suspect other people reading the transcript for the first time will not be happy.

Second, there were only 6 group members listed on the exhibit, which means the total universe of listeners for any defamatory statement was 5 other folks (the person posting the statement doesn't count). This may severely circumscribe any damages. Third, given that this group of 6 presumably represented a social clique with its own norms and mores, it's entirely possible that the small universe of readers completely understood that superficially factual statement weren't really factual and were never intended to be. In this respect, I'm reminded a little of the DiMeo v. Max case, where the judge adjusted the evaluative standards to reflect the fact that message boards fostered a laxer conversation, and readers understood that. A quick perusal of the posts suggests that all of them clearly were utter nonsense and, I suspect, fully understood by all readers to be inane and meaningless chatter. Finally, the posts apparently never referred to the plaintiff by name, although this may be irrelevant if everyone knew who was being discussed.

The lawsuit also goes after the students' parents. Among other things, to try to establish liability, the complaint alleges that the parents negligently supervised their children. I'd gladly write a $100 check today if the plaintiff or her lawyers could articulate a foolproof way that parents can use to prevent high schoolers from doing stupid things on Facebook (without denying them access to Facebook altogether).

From my perspective, going to court over this matter was not a good decision. Nevertheless, I remain troubled by the examples of mean behavior among students that I'm seeing in the alerts I'm getting. For example, the Wolfe and Sandler cases I mention above are absolutely horrifying. Even though I graduated high school nearly 25 years ago, reading about meanness among high schoolers still gives me the shakes, reminding me how bad high school can be! And it weighs heavily on my mind as a parent. However, I can't imagine any legal solution that will make people be less mean to each other.

Appellee Smith was an operator under two joint operating agreements (JOAs) governing exploration and production on an oil and gas lease known as the Bloomberg lease. Chevron was a non-operating interest owner under the JOAs.

In accordance with the JOAs, in May and June of 2004 Smith notified the non-operating interest owners of its proposal to drill four more wells on the lease. Under the JOAs, the non-operating interest owners then had 30 days to notify Smith whether they wanted to participate in the cost of the proposed operations.

On June 17, 2004, Chevron notified Smith that it didn't want to participate. By then, all the other non-operating interest owners had notified Smith that they wanted to participate. But on June 24, 2004, still less than 30 days after Chevron had received Smith's notice, Chevron attempted to revoke its previous notice. Smith declined to accept Chevron's revocation.

So what was at issue in the litigation was whether the notice period ended once each non-operating interest owner notified Smith of its decision or whether the notice period continued for 30 days, leaving open the possibility of a change of heart on the part of a non-operating interest owner.

The court held that the notice period ended once each non-operating interest owner had notified Smith of its decision; in a dissenting opinion, one judge disagreed. I'll let you read the opinion and dissent (or this ContractsProf Blog post) if you want the gory details, but for our purposes, suffice to say that the JOAs weren't sufficiently clear one way or the other. Here's the main language at issue:

1. Proposed Operations: Should any party hereto desire to drill any well on the Contract Area other than the [initial well], . . . the party desiring to drill . . . such a well shall give the other parties written notice of the proposed operation, specifying the work to be performed, the location, proposed depth, objective formation and the estimated cost of the operation. The parties receiving such a notice shall have thirty (30) days after receipt of the notice within which to notify the party wishing to do the work whether they elect to participate in the cost of the proposed operation. . . . Failure of a party receiving such notice to reply within the period above fixed shall constitute an election by that party not to participate in the cost of the proposed operation.

The moral of this story for the drafter is that when drafting a set of such procedures, ask yourself what might happen at every step and address all reasonable eventualities. That makes such provisions a drag to draft, but not as much of a drag as a lawsuit that arises because you failed to address a given eventuality.

By the way, the dissent said that the JOA language was ambiguous. That's consistent with the tendency of courts to use the word ambiguous too loosely. That's something I discuss in chapter 6 of MSCD and in this March 2008 blog post. To my mind, the language at issue wasn't ambiguousit was just insufficiently specific.

My thanks to the indefatigable Steven Sholk for letting me know about this case.

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Connecticut), who helms the Senate's government affairs committee, is annoyed enough that he bypassed the administrators of the system and sent a letter Friday straight to the Judicial Conference of the United States.

He's asking Judge Lee H. Rosenthal to explain why in the age of Google the Public Access to Court Electronic Records, or PACER, system isn't free for citizens. He'd also like to know why federal courts still aren't blacking out sensitive information in court documents as required in the 2002 E-Government Act (a piece of legislation dear to Lieberman).

He writes:

Seven years after the passage of the E-Government Act, it appears that little has been done to make these records freely available with PACER charging a higher rate than 2002. Furthermore, the funds generated by these fees are still well higher than the cost of dissemination ...

If the complaints sound familiar, perhaps you know of public.resource.org's Carl Malamud who's been running a virtual one-man campaign against the clunky and costly PACER system. It's just part of his campaign to "open-source the nation's operating system."

He's also been vigilantly searching through court documents and using automated tools and has found that some judicial districts routinely fail to redact information that would be very handy for identity thieves to have. He's also found just plainly embarrassing and invasive information like medical records of patients not even involved in litigation.

Malamud is running a campaign to become the nation's public printer, and from the looks of this letter, he's already got one senator's attention.

See Also:

• Online Rebel Publishes Millions of Dollars in U.S. Court Records ...
• Rogue Archivist Campaigns to Be Obama's Printer
• Contrarian Libertarian
• Death to Sleepy Stock Data

Seth Godin needs no introduction to this crowd. And there's a good chance many of you already have a copy of this latest book, Tribes.

If not, Tribes is all about leadership in a post-geography world. The Internet allows anyone to become a leader of tribe big or small, with members from across the planet. And people want you to lead them in all sorts of contexts.

But how does one become a leader? What's the process and why does it happen?

I asked Seth 5 questions about the dynamics of tribal leadership, and here's what he had to say:

1. How does a member of any particular tribe know she's ready to lead one of her own?

Seth: Well, everyone is a member of a tribe. A community tribe, perhaps, or a spiritual one. The time to go start your own tribe is when you realize the obligation you have to contribute your leadership and when you are passionate enough about a goal that you will make the commitment the tribe demands to get there.

In other words, do it when you care.

If you don't care, don't whine, don't complain. But if there's change you want to make happen (business change, social change, any change) then this is the way to do it.

2. You've stated that the most interesting things happen at the edges, and I suspect this is true with tribes of all types. I think it's also true at the intersection of neighboring tribes. Are the edges and intersections the most fertile ground for new leaders?

Seth: If you look at the innovations that we've seen online, they've all been at the edges. No one wins by saying, this is a better version of AOL or this is a better version of Yahoo. Google won by finding an edge that Yahoo cared little about (search) and embracing it.

With tribal behavior, we see that most people aren't interested in joining a new tribe. So who does? Fringe types. Restless folks. Dissatisifed seekers. That means that your earliest members are fellow travelers, people willing to take a leap. THEN they bring in their friends and the growth happens.

It's rare that we have a schism between different tribes (Arabs and Jews, Shiites and Suunis, Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich). For more likely is apathy. Far more likely is that most people are just sitting there doing nothing. The big middle. Your opportunity is to peel folk away from the middle and give them what they want, which is movement and connection.

3. We here at Copyblogger are obviously big proponents of using quality reader-focused content to become an online leader. Where's the fine line between giving people what they want and leading them where they need to go?

Seth: Most people have no clue what they want, and if you ask them, you'll get a lame answer. Most people don't know they want Pretty Woman or Slumdog Millionaire. They don't know they want Purple Cow or one of your killer articles. So if you want to have an impact, all you can do is lead. You can't ask.

4. You mention repeatedly that Tribes is not a how to book, since all tribe-building is unique and context-dependent. Are there any universal principles you can share?

Seth: There are many:

• People want to belong, they want to be missed when they don't show up.
• Charisma doesn't make you a leader, leading gives you charisma.
• Most of all, people care about themselves.
• Faith is belief in the future and it is critical. Religion is a set of rules designed to amplify faith at the same time it guarantees the status quo. As you can guess, heretics have a lot of faith, but not so much patience with religion. And heretics are the ones who make change.
• When in doubt, work with small groups. If you can't find 5 followers, how will you find 1000?
• Talk to people with respect, don't advertise at them.
• Transparency is your only option, because the tribe will smell artifice.

5. Does a real leader make moves that the tribe may rebel against, even if only to understand the tribe better?

Seth: It's not a democracy. It never is. It's about acting in a way that you're proud of, that the tribe can interact with. Often, the leader's job is to come quite close to destroying everything but she does it to get to the end goal that everyone needs.

Many thanks to Seth Godin for his time. Pick up a copy of Tribes at Amazon today.

What about you? Do you consider your current online publishing and marketing efforts to be a form of leadership? Why or why not?

About the Author: Brian Clark is Executive Editor of Copyblogger and co-founder of DIY Themes. Get more from Brian on Twitter.

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

BabyAge.com, Inc. v. Leachco, Inc., 2009 WL 82552 (M.D. Pa. Jan. 12, 2009). The Justia page.

Welcome to the cutthroat world of pregnancy pillows. Leachco manufactures pregnancy pillows and has a patent on them. BabyAge is an online retailer of baby and maternity goods and sells pregnancy pillows, including Leachco's pillows as well as the "Cozy Comfort," BabyAge's house-branded pillow.

Leachco asserted patent and trademark claims against BabyAge for the Cozy Comfort. The patent claims get tossed on summary judgment.

The trademark claim is based on the fact that BabyAge creates "featured brand" web pages for each manufacturer it carries. (See the current page, although the relevant action was before 2007). This featured brand page contained a "pregnancy pillows" section that had a 200 word narrative educating consumers about pregnancy pillows and informing them of two competitive brands--the Cozy Comfort and another brand. Each of these brand references included a hyperlink to the product page for those pillows. Leachco's brands weren't mentioned in the narrative at all.

Leachco argued that this narrative constituted a "bait and switch" because the Leachco brand lured consumers to the featured brand page, where they were then redirected to these competitive brands. The court conceptualizes this as initial interest confusion. After running through the multi-factor likelihood of consumer confusion test irresolutely, the court denies summary judgment to BabyAge on the trademark infringement claim.

The possibility of BabyAge being liable for the featured brand page is ludicrous for at least three reasons:

1) BabyAge should be protected under the First Sale doctrine for using the Leachco brand in the featured brand page. (Surprisingly, First Sale wasn't mentioned in the opinion at all). Due to the First Sale doctrine, BabyAge is allowed to advertise that it sells Leachco products, which it did. The advertisement does not have to be exclusively for Leachco products, any more than a grocery store does not need to feature only one brand in any particular ad.

2) There is no possibility of "real" consumer confusion. The 200 word narrative is entirely clear that the pillows being discussed are not from Leachco; and any consumer investigating the linked product pages will be even more clear about the distinction. Thus, the only possible confusion is any initial interest confusion (whatever that means) that occurred before reading the narrative...but since the narrative self-corrects any confusion, where is the harm at all?

3) As I discuss in my Brand Spillovers paper, this looks like cyberspace exceptionalism. Offline retailers create these types of multi-brand product adjacencies all the time. As just one example, a retailer may have a dedicated area for a single brand (such as the clothing area of a department store), but there may be placards or signage in that area that inform consumers of other options, or there may be a salesperson assigned to the area who might orally inform consumers of other options. The signage or salesperson communications not only aren't trademark infringement (initial interest confusion or otherwise), but (as evidenced by the complete lack of cases making such arguments) it would never occur to most trademark owners that they might sue the retailer for this "bait-and-switch." Yet, somehow, when the signage and product information is all digital, suddenly consumers now might be bait-and-switched. Huh? As my Brand Spillovers paper explains, this is both doctrinally wrong and potentially detrimental to consumer search costs.

Red flag #1: The plaintiffs claim they had a verbal agreement with F&L regarding the law firm representing them in an infringement case in the Texas E.D. Seriously? Whether that is in fact true remains to be seen. Nice takeaway for lawyers and prospective clients however: obtain a representation agreement by way of an engagement letter. In writing. Signed by both sides. That spells out the representation and its limits.

Red flag #2: The lawsuit asserts F&L failed to fully and adequately represent Plaintiffs' interests, failed to complete certain tasks while over-billing for other tasks that were unnecessary, and otherwise failed to adequately prosecute Plaintiffs' claims. Mmmmkay. All of this allegedly took place over the course of ONE YEAR. It took one year to come to this conclusion? More details in the case no doubt will help fill in these gaps. But another nice takeaway for lawyers and prospective clients: bill regularly, in detail, and resolve issues over the bill promptly.

Is this just a case of sour grapes? A relationship between law firm and clients gone sour? If the plaintiffs had prevailed in their litigation, would this lawsuit have even been filed? Neither counsel for the plaintiffs nor F&L are talking about the case in the media yet.

In these times when the institutionalized practice of lawyers billing by the hour is under increasing fire from all sides, and flat fees, success fees, and other methods of alternative billing are perhaps coming of age, this case might serve as a signpost to the future for law firms and their clients.

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.
  

TUAWInstall Windows 7 on a Mac originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 23 Jan 2009 22:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

FriendFeed has a real-time feature that some are not aware of. This feature is available for FriendFeed lists, rooms, and your friend streams. It shows FriendFeed activity as it happens and can be addictive if you let it Today, I found (through FriendFeed of course) a little nugget that allows you to embed your friends real-time activity right on your blog. To do so:

1. Navigate to your page by clicking Me on the left sidebar. Then click Yourname + Friends on the top tab bar
   
2. Next, click the Real time link, and then click embed in web page
   
3. You can then configure the embed width, height, and title. Copy and paste the HTML to your blog and you're set.
   

I was aware you could embed real-time FriendFeed through rooms, as I wrote about back in May, but I didn't know you could also embed your friend stream. Here's what mine looks like:

As of now, you cannot embed your main feed, or your discussion feed which consists of your comments and likes. That would be the next logical feature to add since the FriendFeed discussion feed is rich with content that you are interested in. Take a look at mine to get an idea. I'm glad FriendFeed is continuing to improve and if you want the world to know what you're doing on FriendFeed at any given moment, go ahead and embed your FriendFeed activity. See you on FriendFeed.

Related Thoughts

• Intense Debate Is the Easy Choice (9)
• 4 Ways to Enhance Your Blog With FriendFeed (20)
• Stickrz.info - From Tweet To Reality (9)
• My Top 10 Websites of 2008 (23)
• FFHolic Provides The Best Of FriendFeed (1)

I've been reading coverage of Palm's new device, Pre, which is being presented at CES this morning, trying to figure out whether this thing can be a real iPhone competitor (or killer).

Because, you know, it's not about the hardware anymore; or perhaps even the feature set. Every decent smartphone nowadays has WiFi and 3G connectivity, a GPS chip and a lot of memory. You can't beat the iPhone in this area, at least not by a lot. Furthermore, when it comes to features, you can have a great notes and calendar application or a fantastic browser, but it's hard to top the iPhone's applications because they already work so well (better, in many cases, than those of its competitors).

But the way you can switch between applications on the Pre caught my eye. It might be a tad too early to tell, because no one has a real, in-depth review yet, but switching between apps seems fast and seamless; all the applications can work in the background and even notify you of important events while you're working in another app. Palm's buzzword for this is Synergy; but marketingese talk aside, it really is a step forward towards having a real mobile computer that can handle many tasks at the same time.

The iPhone can do all that; theoretically. But right now, it doesn't. The Pre seems to be way better with this regard.

Add to this the fact that Pre's interface seems to be even faster, fluid and responsive than the iPhone's, and you have a very interesting device and platform.

However, whether Palm will be able to motivate developers to start creating applications for Pre's platform, dubbed WebOS, (and under what terms; we all remember Apple's restrictive policies towards developers) remains to be seen. If they do, Pre will be one of the most interesting mobile devices of 2009.

Image courtesy of NYtimes.com

---
Related Articles at Mashable | All That's New on the Web:

Palm Closing Java Support: Another Epic Fail?
Palm Announces Increased GMail Compatibility
Palm Users Get Their Own Optimized Facebook App
Palm Foleo Dies After 3 Months
Palm Launches the Foleo Companion for Smartphones
Palm Software Store: Why'd it Take So Long for Everyone to Figure This Out?
Imeem Partners with Palm Pictures for Interactive Indie Film Access

Higher Balance, LLC v. Quantum Future Group, Inc., 2008 WL 5281487 (D.Or. Dec. 18, 2008). The defendants' (lengthy) celebratory blog post.

If you're a 47 USC 230 junkie like me, there are few better Christmas gifts than a nice defense-side 47 USC 230 win. So just when I thought I was done blogging for the holidays, this goodie appears in my satchel. Ho ho ho!

Maybe I'm overcome by the holiday feeling, but I naively assume that a company selling products to help "customers relieve stress, reduce anxiety, and achieve emotional balance and spiritual enlightenment though meditation techniques wouldn't need to use tough litigation tactics. But this lawsuit belies my utopianism. Can't we all just get in touch with our chakras?

The plaintiff is in the stress-relieving business. The defendants all have some connection to SOTT.net, a/k/a "Sign of the Times," a website that describes itself as "The World for People Who Think." Depending on your definition of "think," they should have either a very large or very small audience, but a few moments poking around the site left me baffled about their editorial focus. (Pictures like this one are interesting and slightly disturbing, but I don't quite understand the message). Their "quick guide" isn't very quick and doesn't do much to guide me, but I get a vague sense that the site may occasionally dabble in conspiracy theories.

OK, back to the lawsuit. Laura Knight-Jadczyk is the key defendant in this lawsuit. In response to some anonymous postings on an SOTT.net message board, Laura allegedly posted disparaging comments about the plaintiff (HBI) to the website, including alleged assertions (quoting from the court's opinion) "that HBI is a front for pedophilia;' HBI is a cointelpro organization; HBI markets nothing more than an act of falling into confluence with a psychopathic reality; and HBI is conning the public." Other SOTT.net forum moderators also posted some allegedly defamatory material. The plaintiff sued Laura plus:

* her employer, QFG
* QFS, a think-tank operated by QFG
* the SOTT.net website. Laura pays the website's expenses and the domain name is owned by her husband

The plaintiff alleged that these parties fund each other's activities and share a common physical location. The plaintiff does not appear to have sued the anonymous posters who contributed to the allegedly defamatory discourse.

This opinion rules on the defendants' joint anti-SLAPP motio