Technology, the Internet, legal issues, sports, and anything else I find interesting.

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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Lots of useful information in here. I learned things about why 301s are the best way to redirect users from non-www to www or vice versa, how to create a video sitemap, and that Google has a whole bunch of webmaster tools to help analyze every aspect of your web site and it’s search engine visibility.

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It’s reassuring to hear some progress is being made in way of monitoring and cracking down on those who abuse their outsourcing laws and rights to provide truly equal opportunity employment.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/02/feds-finally-cracking-down-on-h-1b-abuses.ars

Let’s say that an H-1B-free labor market has set a price on a year’s worth of work from a programmer with a bachelors degree and two years experience at US$35,000 + $12,000 (benefits like health insurance for a family of four) = $47,000. Now let’s say that companies acquire the ability, via the introduction of the H-1B program, to import foreign labor of comparable quality. The average imported worker is willing provide the same work for $35,000, but instead of benefits she wants health insurance for herself only ($3,000/year) plus a green card. Thus the promise of a green card to the H-1B worker is valued by the market at $9,000/year, and you can and must factor this in to account for the H-1B employee’s total compensation.

The cost of the green card to the employer is much less than the cost of the American worker’s insurance coverage, plus the foreign worker is obligated to work for the employer for a set period if she wants to get the promised green card. This is a win-win for the employer and the H-1B worker, but not for the American employee, to whom the green card is worth exactly US$0. The American has been priced out of the market because the H-1B will sell her labor at what amounts to a steep discount in exchange for a green card.