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The Courts

Submission + - Boston Judge Denies RIAA Motion for Judgment

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "In a Boston case, Capitol v. Alaujan, the defendant is representing herself, without a lawyer. Nevertheless, the Judge denied the RIAA's motion for summary judgment, which the RIAA had based upon the defendant's alleged failure to respond to the RIAA's Request for Admissions. The Court's decision (pdf) held that the RIAA had served its requests for admission prematurely, prior to the conduct of any discovery conference. The Court also noted that the RIAA had upped the ante quite a bit, trying to get a judgment based on 41 song files, even though it had originally been asking for judgment based on 9 song files. This would have increased the size of the judgment from about $7,000 to about $31,000. The Judge scheduled a discovery conference for October 23rd, at 2:30 P.M. and ordered everybody to attend. Such conferences are open to the public."
Caldera

Submission + - Judge rulest that IBM did not destroy evidence

UnknowingFool writes: "From the latest in the SCO saga, Judge Wells ruled today that IBM did not destroy evidence as SCO claims. During discovery, SCO claims it found an IBM executive memo that ordered its programmers to delete source code, and so it filed a motion to prevent IBM from destroying more evidence.

The actuality of the memo was less nefarious. An IBM executive wanted to ensure that the Linux developers were sandboxed from AIX/Dynix. So he ordered them to remove local copies of any AIX code from their workstations so that there would not be a hint of taint. The source code still existed in CVMC and was not touched.

Since the source code was still in CMVC, Judge Wells ruled IBM did not destroy it. Incredulously, SCO's Mark James requested that IBM tell SCO how to obtain the information. IBM's Todd Shaughnessy responded that all during discovery (when IBM gave SCO a server with their CMVC database) SCO never once said that they were unable to find that information from CMVC. Judge Wells asked IBM to help SCO out in any way he could. I'm guessing she probably said "pretty please" so that SCO does not have much to appeal."
Security

Submission + - Web vulnerability disclosure

Scott writes: I'm submitting my own story on an important topic: Is it illegal to discover a vulnerability on a Web site? No one knows yet but Eric McCarty's pleading guilty to hacking USC's web site was "terrible and detrimental" to tech lawyer Jennifer Granick, who believes the law needs to be at least clarified, if not changed to protect those who find flaws in production Web sites as opposed to those who "exploit" production Web sites. Of course, the owners of sites often don't see the distinction between the two. Regardless of whether or not it's illegal to disclose Web vulnerabilities, it's certainly problematic, and perhaps a fool's errand. After all, have you seen how easy it is to find XSS flaws in Web sites? In fact, the Web is challenging the very definition of vulnerability and some researchers are scared. As one researcher in the story says: "I'm intimidated by the possible consequences to my career, bank account and sanity. I agree with [noted security researcher] H.D. Moore, as far as production websites are concerned: 'There is no way to report a vulnerability safely.'"

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