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I experienced a powerful dream last night. Everything started out normal in this dream, which is unusual in itself. Some friends and I were walking up a hill towards my car, but we were having trouble finding it. I had just come from school or something, so I had a few bags with me. The bags contained things that I did not want to give up: keys, documents, clothes, some beers and my phone. In addition to my overly-stuffed luggage, there was something strange about the hill we were climbing up. The hill was steep, so steep in fact that the sidewalks were wrapped with cars that had all rolled into each other single file, like shopping carts.

I walked in front of the group, the first to discover just how steep this hill was turning out to be. Before long, the bags I was carrying began to weigh me down, but I was not about to let go of the things that were so dear to me. My car keys were in the bag and we definitely needed those to get out of that place, if we ever could find my car. Each step up the hill became increasingly difficult. The incline was almost vertical. I was using my hands now to grapple myself up the slope, inch by inch. The load was unbearable. My arms were weakened from the bags hanging from each hand, and it was too late to try to lighten the load. I just hoped that it would even out soon, and told myself over and over again that we would reach the top any second. The incline just got worse, and my arms began to lose feeling.

Then I let go. I didn’t want to, but it was just too much weight for me to take. That was when the miraculous occurred. I did not fall, nor descend even an inch. I felt a pressure under my feet, a push from friends and family who were now driving me upward. I felt like the angels had lifted me. With them behind me, I found a new hope and resumed my crawl towards the hilltop.

With my friends and family pushing the bottom of my feet upward, I reached the top and immediately rolled over onto my back. I had never been so exhausted in my life. I ripped off the jacket and jeans I was wearing, and for the first time enjoyed a cool breeze and some rest for my tired arms and legs. I had conquered the myth of Sisphyus, and the feeling of relief was overwhelming.

Then I woke up, soaked with sweat. Time to climb the hill all over again.

A very compelling argument as to why net neutrality is so important on all levels. Who but the ISPs can enforce something that the judges have had such a hard time understanding? Hopefully we discover the answer before it’s too late.

But telcoms firms are all recipients of invaluable public subsidy in the form of rights of way and other grants that allow them to string their wires over and under our streets and through our homes. You and I can’t go spelunking in the sewers with a spool of cable to wire up our own alternative network. And if the phone companies had to negotiate for every pole, every sewer, every punch-down, every junction box, every road they get to tear up, they’d go broke. All the money in the world couldn’t pay for the access they get for free every day.

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We have all seen the e-mails from “The Prince of Nigeria” or “his secretary”, trying to con us out of our hard-earned money. These “419 scammers” (typical advance-fee fraudsters), often located somewhere in Africa, have been around since before the internet and continue to thrive by sending out fraudulent correspondence through all channels of the Internet in hopes to wrangle in a sucker dumb enough to cough up some bills. Although you may think the world would be aware of such scams by now, many people are fooled each day and millions are lost each year to these scammers.

What interests me, however, are the people who deliberately set out to “bait” the scammers. Their purpose is simple: to waste a scammer’s time so that there is one less scammer in the world. “Scambaiters,” as they are often called, will get a scammer’s hopes up so much that the scammers do some pretty hilarious things with the presumption of a largely unearned (and ill-gotten) profit in return.

It works like this: A scammer sends out an email to your inbox. You see their ridiculous claim and turn the tables on them by making up an equally or slightly less ridiculous response that involves instead promising them some sort of payout provided they do something for you. If you are good enough at it, you can get a scammer to do some pretty funny things, provided the irony the whole situation. I have read stories about scammers getting symbols tattooed on themselves, scammers traveling over 3000 miles, getting arrested at airports, and other nuisances as they seek their precious fortune, which never even existed in the first place.

All in all, I think scambaiting is a fun and effective way to not only bring awareness to these types of injustices, but it’s also something to do when you’re bored which is always nice. Whether or not it is legal to lead people on in this way is another story, but you also have to consider the nature of your first contact with said scammers in the first place before giving it too much thought.

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The Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI) has a bunch of very nifty little methods to make complex tasks easier. One that immediately stood out to me was isAncestor, as I can attest first-hand to the cross-browser troubles when trying to detect ancestry in the DOM. Although a very basic concept, most drop-down code often becomes bloated or restrictive. I’m not advocating the use of JavaScript drop-downs over a CSS method, but there are some added benefits of using JS to achieve this effect:

1. Clean markup, no need for conditional comments
2. The ability to animate show and hide events
3. Added styling opportunities, won’t break so long as the nested list structure remains in tact

Below is a simple example of how to use YUI’s isAncestor to create flyout menus with HTML and CSS.

(function() {
	function mouseover(e) {
		var menu = this.getElementsByTagName('ul')[0];
		YAHOO.util.Dom.setStyle(menu, 'display', 'block');
	};

	function mouseout(e) {
		if (!YAHOO.util.Dom.isAncestor(this, e.relatedTarget) || e.relatedTarget == document.getElementsByTagName('html')[0]) {
			var menu = this.getElementsByTagName('ul')[0];
			YAHOO.util.Dom.setStyle(menu, 'display', 'none');
		}
	};
	YAHOO.util.Event.on(YAHOO.util.Dom.get('nav').getElementsByTagName('li'), 'mouseover', mouseover);
	YAHOO.util.Event.on(YAHOO.util.Dom.get('nav').getElementsByTagName('li'), 'mouseout', mouseout);
})();

See Example »

If you need something more complex, see the YUI MenuCreator page.

Apparently judge Tomas Norström from the Pirate Bay trial has been a member of several copyright groups and other intellectual property engagements. For some reason, he did not see himself in a conflict of interest when asked to take the case. Interestingly enough, he presented three other attorneys with the question of whether or not they were involved in any media or copyright protection organizations, to which one of them belonged and as a result was asked to pass on the case. Looks like script kiddies everywhere may get the re-trial that they were hoping for.

http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-lawyer-is-biased-calls-for-a-retrial-090423/

Chad Muska, Run DMC, and the Fresh Prince all had boom boxes. I had an iPod dock and 100 square feet of linoleum, but it’s the same idea. Check out these sick boom boxes, yo!
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Just minutes ago the verdict in the case of The Pirate Bay Four was announced. All four defendants were accused of ‘assisting in making copyright content available’. Peter Sunde: Guilty. Fredrik Neij: Guilty. Gottfrid Svartholm: Guilty. Carl Lundström: Guilty. The four receive 1 year in jail each and fines totaling $3,620,000.

Very interesting they decided not to hear any technical explanations and judged this solely on intent. We’ll probably see much more of that as the web becomes more and more tangled. Under that premise, the notion that “all ISPs are guilty of the same thing” is hardly logical. ISPs are not knowingly and willingly facilitating illegal file sharing like these guys clearly were. The only part that astounds me is how long it’s been able to go on (oh, I’m also astounded at how many kids are acting behooved at the ruling).  I also disagree with the idea that you kill one and two more pop up in its place. You kill a big violator such as this, and you’ve killed one. If other fools feel like stepping up and rolling the dice, well maybe they will have to pay the piper like these guys do.

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Ars sits down with “Billion Dollar Charlie” Nesson, the Harvard Law professor who’s taking on the RIAA in federal court. Winning his case would be great, but Nesson’s thinking even bigger. He wants nothing less than a national, Internet-enabled conversation about copyright and damages in the digital age.

Charlie Nesson will likely break ground with this case, providing new insight into internet copyright law and how it applies to different usage cases. By using the internet to broadcast each meeting, conference, and deposition, he may just get the publicity he needs to open a real discussion. His argument is backed by logic, but it appears there is a web of technologies and technicalities (no pun intended) to work through before finding justice for the plaintiff. No matter what the outcome, I believe this will be a landmark case in the complexities of modern copyright law.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/03/billion-dollar-charlie-vs-the-riaa.ars

Attention iPhone users, Apple will be unveiling their new OS3.0 tomorrow, so be sure to check it out!

http://apple.com/iPhone

All you designers might not agree with her, but she speaks the truth!
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