Posts by Sol Rosinberg 5 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Sep 2010
Where it fell down was him giving them his 2-factor ID token and letting them turn the work in for him. He should have simply had them send him the code/finished product via some other means, then at least give it to the company himself. He'd likely either not have been caught or would have taken longer to get caught.
I had some botnet problems arise on my Linux box, so I know how these things go. I still have no idea how they managed to execute commands from the web server and cause the www-data user to run an eggdrop IRC bot along with a menagerie of IRC stuff, but it did, nonetheless. Luckily I run the web server as www-data or it would have rooted me, and that's definitely not good. After updating Wordpress, Apache, PHP, and other things, it seems to have gone away. That, and I blocked the IPs that were constantly scanning me and the providers of the malware in the iptables firewall, which really took a chunk out of the botnet's ability to take over my server. Netstat and tcpdump are your best friends when dealing with this type of problem. Most of the addresses were in China, Russia, and other such places.
I think the term "patent troll" is generically used for people who gratuitously sue people over patents, copyrights, and the like. The better term would be IP troll, but since IP has different meanings (Intellectual Property or Internet Protocol), most people stick with "patent troll".
I had someone reply to my post stating that my previous post demonstrated a lack of understanding of copyright law. I do know that copyright is the stick people wield to try to control who distributes what content and when, but usually if you write something and use a quote or excerpt from a source, as long as the source is cited and isn't claimed as the one doing the quoting's own work, no one cries foul. That was my point. The fact that copyright law is being misused to the end of disallowing someone from putting a quote from a news article on their web site is ridiculous and shouldn't be allowed, especially since the firm involved is getting the rights to the material after the fact that the material was re-posted. There needs to be some copyright reform to disallow this sort of thing from happening, especially since Righthaven isn't even the original publisher. This is an abuse of a system that was put into place to prevent people from copying whole books or other entire works and trying to sell them as their own product. Quoting and citing the source should fall under fair use, and if it doesn't, something is terribly wrong, since billions of students in colleges everywhere are in potential danger of copyright lawsuits being filed on them if this doesn't get straightened out.
I looked at her web site because I felt that I should at least see the situation prior to spouting off about it. The sources were cited, mind you not very thoroughly, but it still gives credit to the provider of the news which was posted, which means that it is NOT plagiarism. She's not passing it off as her own work, so the copyright suit is groundless and all comments about the allegedly offending posts on her web sites being plagiarism are also groundless. The copyright troll involved needs to be put back under the bridge from whence it came.
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