The Streisand Effect

Sequoia won’t let people test their voting machines

Ed Felten has built a reputation as someone good at finding problems with machines.  New Jersey election officials wanted him to test one of the Sequoia voting machines before the election to see if there are any problems with it.  Given the wide array of problems with voting machines in the recent past, this seems like a wise move.

Sequoia doesn’t like it.  In a letter to Professor Felton, they say:

 …certain New Jersey election officials have stated that they plan to send to you one or more Sequoia Advantage voting machines for analysis. I want to make you aware that if the County does so, it violates their established Sequoia licensing Agreement for use of the voting system. Sequoia has also retained counsel to stop any infringement of our intellectual properties, including any non-compliant analysis. We will also take appropriate steps to protect against any publication of Sequoia software, its behavior, reports regarding same or any other infringement of our intellectual property.

If I was an election official in New Jersey, I would drop those machines as quickly as I could.  They’ve gone from possibly having a security hole discovered (or maybe coming out clean), to looking like a company with a big problem to hide.

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Bill Kristol, Ronald Kessler and Newsmax

(via Xyre) In a column in the New York Times today, Bill Kristol stated that Barack Obama “was in fact in the pews” when his pastor, Jeremiah White, made some disparaging remarks about the United States last July.

It was pointed out very quickly that the information was incorrect, and Senator Obama was not at church that day. It turns out that Kristol’s source was an article by Ronald Kessler at Newsmax which asserted that Obama was there. Kessler knew that this didn’t reflect well on him, so cleaned up his Wikipedia entry to try to hide it. We know how well that worked out for him…

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Small-town police chief upset with blog; tells everyone all about it

The 14,000 person town of Whitewater, Wisconsin has an anonymous blogger (freewhitewater.com) that is critical of how the city does business. He blogs under the name “John Adams”.

Whitewater’s police chief, James Coan, is often featured in the blog. Among other things, the blog recently criticized the chief for wasting the time of city employees (at the taxpayers expense) in an effort to reveal the identity of the blogger.

City officials have referred to the blogger as a “suspect”, and Coan has involved at least two detectives, the director of public works, the city’s information technology officer and the city clerk in this mess. Beyond the waste of time and money involved, this is also likely a violation of the blogger’s civil rights because no laws are being broken (free speech, anyone?).

Of course, in trying to get this blogger unmasked, the chief has directed a LOT more attention to the blog:

• An article in the Wisconsin State Journal
• A reference on Fark
• A bunch of other blogs — 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5
• Our post right here

This is a blog that had a relatively small following until the chief started fighting so hard.  One local man, Laird Scott, was accused by the chief of running the blog.  Scott said “I didn’t even know that blog existed until the chief of police came to my house and accused me of operating it.”  Exactly.

Good move, chief!

Posted in Bloggers | 2 Comments »

Police upset with RateMyCop.com, so they tell the media all about it

RateMyCop is a new site that allows you to rate police officers that you deal with, similar to sites for teachers, doctors, restaurants, etc.  However, the police aren’t happy about it at all.  A few sites (Wired, TechDirt) call the fears of the police unnecessary, because the site doesn’t post information about undercover officers, nor does it post personal information like home addresses.

To try to fight back against the site, police are using the media to vent.  However, most people hadn’t heard of the site until the police started complaining about it, and now it’s all over the news.  To add to the popularity of the site, GoDaddy recently disabled their account, leading to even more media attention.  Before it was shut down, the site had received 80,000 pageviews that day, and around 400,000 the day before.  How many of those were a direct result of the police outcry?

The site is back up and running now, though it’s responding pretty slowly due to the huge influx of new users…

Posted in Websites | 5 Comments »

The brief MobiTV vs. HowardForums fight comes to a peaceful ending

After discovering that their public, unsecured streaming URL was posted on HowardForums, MobiTV decided to sue.   HowardForums came back and essentially said “bring it on“.

Now comes word that MobiTV is wisely giving up this fight.   The president of MobiTV spoke with Howard Chui (the “Howard” in HowardForums) and said they’d just be friends.  The full information can be found on HowardForums.

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HowardForums isn’t going down without a fight

Howard Chui, owner of HowardForums, has decided to defy MobiTV’s cease and desist to take down the “illegal” post that is on his site.

I think Howard will find a lot of people on his side.  While I’m quite sure he’ll win the battle, I hope it doesn’t cost him too much in unnecessary legal fees.

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MobiTV mad that their public streaming URL was discovered

MobiTV provides a paid service that allows you to stream TV to mobile phones.  However, the data stream is sent using a completely open URL that anyone can access.

Someone over at HowardForums noticed this and posted the URL of the feed.  MobiTV has responded; not by securing the feed, but by threatening to take down HowardForums.  They’ve contacted his web host and they’ve threatened to contact the registrar.

Mike Masnick, as always, has summed it up best:

There is no hacking going on. There is no encryption broken. There is nothing illicit whatsoever. The feed is a public URL. However, it appears that MobiTV thinks that because it did not properly secure its own feeds and left it on a public URL that somehow Howard Forums has broken the law.

Posted in Websites | 2 Comments »

Teachers are inadvertently promoting “Bully: Scholarship Edition”

Have you ever heard of the game “Bully: Scholarship Edition“?  We hadn’t either.  However, a group of teachers is pushing hard to get the game banned, which is leading to a lot of publicity for the game.

Michael Hoechsmann, an assistant professor at McGill University, has a good take on things.  He compares the attempted ban on the game to “flailing at windmills” and goes on to say that “as tempting as it may seem, I’m not so certain that banning this will somehow result in a more peaceful and more loving school population”.

The first edition of Bully, released in 2006, got an extra boost from a Florida lawyer that tried to have it banned and a school superintendent that warned parents about the game.

(via TechDirt)

Posted in Video Games | 2 Comments »

Never heard of Httpshare? Now you have, thanks to the IFPI.

The IFPI, the RIAA of the UK, has convinced a judge to have Httpshare.com — a torrent tracking site — shut down.

The site is located in Israel, and doesn’t appear to be breaking any Israeli laws. Like many other sites, this site is simply a torrent search engine and it doesn’t actually host any infringing content. Mike Masnick predicts that this will end up being a big win for Httpshare, much like a similar situation with the Pirate Bay. Lots of people that have never heard of Httpshare (like you and me) are now curious about what’s going on. Traffic to the site is probably going to soar, but I’m guessing the IFPI will call it “a big blow in the war against piracy” or some garbage like that.

Posted in BitTorrent, Music | No Comments »

Lawsuit against Wikileaks dropped

Bank Julius Baer, the Swiss firm that sued Wikileaks last week and had their site taken offline, has dropped their lawsuit.

Techdirt has the details, where they add that this is “One more lesson for overly aggressive lawyers to think about the consequences of certain actions, rather than just launching lawsuits because they can.”

I agree completely.

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