Will MySpace Suicide Case Set Dangerous Legal Precedent?

By Mark O’Neill

A dangerous legal precedent could be set if a woman is convicted of harassing a clinically depressed girl on MySpace to later commit suicide. This is because the only crime in which prosecutors could charge the woman with was violating the MySpace Terms Of Service contract (TOS) which you agree to when you set up your MySpace profile for the first time.

Although what Lori Drew allegedly did to Megan Meier was despicable, it is a bit of a stretch to charge her with “unauthorized access” to MySpace’s computers. Since no cyber-bullying laws exist, they are using the fact that Drew used an account with false details to harass Meier – which is a violation of the MySpace TOS contract – to charge her under the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. In other words, because she failed to give her real name on her online profile, she’s screwed.

Why is this dangerous? Because if Drew is convicted for violating the TOS of MySpace, then ANYONE in the future caught violating the TOS of any website can also theoretically be charged under the same law. As the Wired Story says, some TOS prohibit you from saying negative things about the company. So if you say anything bad about MySpace, can you be charged with a crime? Other TOS’s have also banned linking. Is that a crime too?

How many online social network users use false names? Are all these people in violation of the law too? Do they all have to be arrested for violating MySpace?

More to the point, how many people actually read a TOS before clicking “I accept”? So how many people could commit a crime without realizing it?

As I said, if Drew is guilty, then I don’t condone what she did in any way. But in their over-zealousness to get a conviction for the Meier family, prosecutors may have gone a bit too far.

So next time you are presented with a TOS on the screen, you might want to hesitate a few moments longer before clicking “I accept”.

Via Wired



Can someone be forced to hand over a domain they are wasting?

By Mark O’Neill

Now here’s the situation. There’s a domain I’ve had my eye on for the past several years but the current owner has had an “under construction” sign on it for as long as I can remember. About two years back, I started emailing him, asking him if he ever planned to use the domain, and if not, would he release it back into the public arena so I can take it? I have some big plans for it if I ever get my hands on it.

At first he ignored me, but I can be a pretty persistent stubborn kind of guy when I want to be (just ask my former journalism professors). Eventually he emailed me back and told me rather irritably that he had no intention of doing anything with the domain but he planned to keep it nonetheless – now get lost.

Now to me this is inexplicable. Why keep a website domain if you don’t plan to use it? Why waste it? Why not release it back into the public arena so it can be claimed by someone else? But he wasn’t willing to explain his reasons and I suppose he doesn’t have to. If he wants to act weird, I guess that’s his perogative.

Now before anyone asks, I’m not going to name the domain. The domain owner and I are not getting along and naming the domain would just inflame things between me and him. But what I started thinking today is ‘can someone be forced into giving up a domain? If someone has a domain and they are needlessly wasting it, is there a procedure in place to force them to relinquish it? If so, what is that procedure? If not, why the hell is there not a procedure?’

If there is such a procedure, has anyone here been through such a procedure and what was the outcome?



Cell Phone Security: Using your Phone to Monitor your Home





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By JR Raphael
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

This week, we’re talking cell phone secrets — easy-to-use services that can help you unlock the hidden powers of your phone. I started by showing you a bunch of ways to get more for your money with cool services like Braincast and Cellfire.

But today, we’re taking on a different kind of underused force in your phone: its ability to keep your family safer. We’ve seen how cell phones can be used to let other people spy on you. This trick, though, turns the tables and lets you watch them.

Easy access

Imagine this: You’re at work for the day. With a few clicks on your phone, you pull up live images of your home from every possible angle. You see what doors are unlocked, who’s inside, and what they’re doing. You check up on the babysitter trusted with your kids. Or maybe you dial in from the road and look at images of your office to see if your staff really showed up to work when you were out of town. Whatever the need may be, it’s all possible — and not terribly hard to achieve.

There are a number of systems out there that can let you do this. I’m going to focus on the one I’ve seen in action: the WiLife (formerly Lukwerks) Home Surveillance System.



A simple setup

Who wouldn’t want to watch their property when they’re not around? A system like the one WiLife offers makes it easy. You just set up a series of cameras, configure your account, and you’re ready to roll. These things operate through the electrical wires you already have, too — you just plug the cameras into the wall and plug an adaptor into your computer — so there’s no need for any elaborate installation. You’re probably looking at 15 to 20 minutes tops.

Once you’re all set up, the rest is automatic. You dial some digits on your phone, and you’re tapped in. You can monitor the live feeds at your disposal, provided your phone or PDA can handle the streaming video. But the cooler part is how the system can do the work for you.

Instant alerts

WiLife’s alerts will watch your property and let you know any time anything changes. If someone comes in, if a light turns on, or if any motion at all is detected, WiLife sees it and alerts you. You set the level of sensitivity, then you can choose to get a text message, a picture message, or even a video message as soon as WiLife finds trouble. Now, the second something happens, you know it — and you’re watching.

Link to the law

If you do discover something amiss, the system makes it easy to alert police right from your phone, too. And the best part: It’s recording it all for you, so you can pass off a single evidence file to the officers the minute they arrive.

The WiLife kits start at $269 ($449 for a 2-camera system) and include the text and video messaging alerts for the life of the hardware, without any additional monthly fees or subscriptions. From what I’ve seen, they work pretty darned well. Speaking of which, nice shirt.

The Truth Behind File Trading Traps

By JR Raphael
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

Ever wonder how the record industry catches all those people trading music? Today, we’re getting some insight.

The Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) says it uses the same exact tools familiar to file sharers to track them down. Specifically, RIAA officials told the Chronicle of Higher Education it watches LimeWire for a list of copyrighted songs. It’s actually hired a full-time company to monitor those titles and look for anyone trading them.

From there, the virtual cops use software to scan through the hosts and find individual IP addresses, then go after the violators. This program is only focused on college-based servers at the moment.

Introducing the “Living Band-Aid”

By JR Raphael
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

The next time you get a bad papercut, you may want to consider trying a living Band-Aid.

Okay, the truth is you can’t try one just yet. But they are being developed. New Scientist Magazine highlighted some recent research that used healthy living cells to create a bandage-type wrap.

Scientists placed the wrap around blood vessels that had been damaged and found it stimulated regrowth. By the end, the damaged cells looked “virtually uninjured,” the researchers found.

No word yet if the bandages will be available in Scooby Doo designs.

It’s time to get rid of email

There are few things in life that I hate more than spam.  But I hate receiving one type of message even more:  delivery status notifications for spam that was sent to bad email addresses, spoofing my address as the sender.  Lately, I’ve been getting a couple hundred of these per day.  Of course, that means that probably several thousand spam messages reached their destination, fingering me as the sender.  I wonder how many mail servers have black-listed me.  Even the most intelligent spam filters have probably begun to assign a high spam probability to my address.

As far as I know, there’s very little that can be done about this.  SMTP was not designed with spammers in mind.  Back when email protocols began evolving in the ’70’s, the only people who used email were innocent geeks.  Even though the first spam message was sent thirty years ago, spam didn’t really become a popular marketing tool until everyone and their grandmother got on the Internet in the 1990’s.

Spam isn’t the only reason why email is a broken communication medium, though:

  1. Delivery is not guaranteed.  Between potential problems with your email client, a server hiccup somewhere in between, or any number of junk mail filters that your message might encounter along its journey, the odds of it actually reaching its destination are getting worse daily.
  2. Too much noise.  Even if your message reaches its intended audience’s inbox, they might not even notice it among all the other messages they receive every day — especially since 90% of the ones that aren’t caught by spam filters are still spam.
  3. It isn’t private.  Sure, you can set up secure email, but who goes to the trouble?  In my experience, many companies send sensitive business plans over unsecured email.  Individuals, too, often send personal information over that same public channel — even passwords.
  4. Sender spoofing means you can’t trust that the message is from the person that claims to be the sender.  If you hit “Reply”, you’d better examine the resulting Reply-to address, or you might not know to whom you’re telling all your deepest secrets.
  5. HTML mail makes it easy to hide phishing links.  A savvy email recipient will never click a link in an HTML email without viewing the source to verify the domain — but how easy is it for most people to be fooled?

Clearly, the time has come for a replacement for email.  We need a secure, private service with guaranteed delivery, verified identity, and no spam.  Messages should be organized into discrete conversations to which only specific people are granted access — to read or to contribute.

Hmm…I may have just given myself an idea…

Blu-Ray vs. DVD: The New Format War?

By Patrick Biz
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

With HD DVD now buried six feet under and all major Hollywood studios onboard in the Blu-ray camp, the stars are aligned for next-generation format sales to finally take off. Surprisingly, prices aren’t falling, and customers still aren’t buying.

The War Has Just Begun

Don’t laugh, Blu-ray vs. DVD is really THE new format war. When comparing specs from Blu-ray and DVD players, on paper, Blu-ray has a clear advantage. But on the field, it’s a different story. Truth is, there are many reasons why consumers are happy with the traditional DVD format:

  • They barely see the audio/video improvement
  • They already own a DVD player
  • DVD Players are much cheaper to buy
  • DVDs are 30% to 40% cheaper than Blu-ray disks
  • Video stores have considerably more DVDs for rental
  • While this one may seem odd, the fact that DVDs are easier to copy also plays in favor of the old poorly protected format

Upconverting DVD Players: Simply Too Good?

If you want to take your DVD collection to the next level on your sexy high-definition television, get yourself an upscalling DVD player, also known as an up-converter, such as the Sony DVP-NS700H/B, the OPPO DV-980H or the Panasonic DVD-S54K. Equipped with an HDMI cable, these players upscale the 480p signal to 1080i/1080p by using complex maths to improve color ratios, contrasts and the overall picture quality. Of course, with a native signal of 480p, they cannot beat the native resolution of a Blu-ray disk that’s 1080p. But the wow effect is not significant enough to make people drop 400 bucks (and up) on a Blu-ray player.

Not Enough Bang For The Buck

This is where DVDs overtake Blu-ray by a mile. Looking at the concept of bang for the buck from a mathematical and graphical perspective, we understand that when prices go up, devices usually provide more features. At a certain price though, quality cannot sustain value as cost increases substantially, while the product itself has less and less to offer. DVDs and up-converting DVD players are comfortably sitting in the bang for the buck area of the graph, while Blu-ray has not yet fallen from the overpriced zone.

Christmas 2008

While many of you may be tempted to wait for the holiday season before taking the next-generation format highway, experts are expecting no significant decrease in price in the upcoming months. Surprisingly, Blu-ray prices have gone up since the death of HD-DVD. Also, the rising price of oil increases transportation costs, and directly impacts the production of plastic.

The format war is far from being over, and the economical situation resulting may restrain the Blu-ray group from making it to your living room. All things considered, DVD may end up being a stronger contender than HD DVD ever was.

Edit: Nearly 6 months have past since we wrote this article, and the situation has changed quite a lot since then. With Christmas time coming, it is now possible to get a very good blu-ray player for around $200, namely the Samsung BD-1500. Amazon.com is the cheapest place to get it right now.

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New Virtual Telescope Offers Awesome Views

By JR Raphael
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

There’s a new way to access far away galaxies right from your home computer.

Microsoft has just unveiled its long-awaited WorldWide Telescope utility. The program lets you check out views from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory Center, and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey — some of the same images actual NASA scientists use for their own explorations.

At a first glance, you might think you’re just inside another random computer-generated world. But once you realize that this is the real deal and that you’re looking at the actual universe, these views will blow you away. You can check out the stars in such clarity that you’ll feel as if you were in space yourself.

Microsoft hopes the tool will become an important part of future education that’ll inspire students and teachers alike. And so far, it’s getting rave reviews.

“Users can see the X-ray view of the sky, zoom into bright radiation clouds, and then cross-fade into the visible light view and discover the cloud remnants of a supernova explosion from a thousand years ago,” explained Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics researcher Roy Gould.

“I believe this new creation from Microsoft will have a profound impact on the way we view the universe.”

The software isn’t for the faintly resourced. It requires a full gig of hard drive space, with a recommended 10 gigs for optimal usage. Microsoft also recommends two gigs of RAM for the best viewing experience, and you have to have .NET Framework 2.0 or later and DirectX 9.0 or later to play.

WorldWide Telescope provides some astonishing images, no doubt. For me, though, Google’s easy-to-use, download-free Google Sky does the same trick with a lot less hassle. One click, a few seconds load time, and you’re getting pretty impressive sights from worlds far, far away. This space cowboy gives Microsoft a nice nod but ultimately tips his hat to the G-team once again.