Phil Greenspun has posed his own account of what’s going on with the lawsuit filed against him by arsDigita and its venture capitalist investors. It’s a wonderful cautionary tale for those who would get in bed with VCs.

Ford is suing 2600 (and Eric Corley, natch) for redirecting a profane domain name to their Web site. That’s silly. This is the first I’ve heard of this case, and I can’t find anything about it on the 2600 Web site. I must know immediately: what is that profane domain name?

More details on the SDMI thing: the rules of the contest included a “no publishing clause. The Princeton research team did not participate in the contest. Apparently, the SDMI greedheads are arguing that by clicking through on an agreement to download the sample files used in the contest, the Princeton team implicitly agreed to the rules of the contest, despite the fact that they did not participate. This could end up being the case that does away with clickthrough agreements altogether (if we’re lucky).

Is it possible to destroy the music industry without eliminating the prospect of income for musicians and songwriters? I hope so, because I firmly believe that if we don’t destroy the music industry, it will continue to subvert our constitutional freedomes one by one. The latest example is the SDMI’s threat of legal action against the team that cracked its content protection schemes as part of a contest they held last year. Some of the academics who participated in the contest want to publish a paper on the techniques they used, and the RIAA is attempting to stop them, citing a click-through agreement and the DMCA. Bastards.

Salon’s interview with Adam Isacson addresses a lot of my questions about the downing of a civilian flight transporting missionaries by Peruvian antidrug forces. The plane was shot down by a plane made in the US, paid for with US drug war funds, and given to the Peruvian air force for the purpose of shooting down drug trafficers (or whoever else flies by, I guess). The surveillance plane was also a US plane, operated by US mercenaries, provided by the CIA.

The weekend incident where a Peruvian military aircraft shot down a plane carrying U.S. missionaries raises a number of tough questions. The order to intercept the plane, which was suspected to be carrying drug smugglers, was given by a Peruvian aboard a CIA-operated surveillance aircraft. How can the other members of the crew of the plane deny any responsibility for the incident? Is this how our drug war dollars are spent, randomly shooting down planes that might be smuggling drugs? How can we make any rational assessment of whether these programs are successful when they operate in secret (at least until they start killing innocent Americans)? Does the CIA ever get anything right? Ugh, this pisses me off.

I’ve gotten a number of messages from people confident in their search engine skills on the Carol Brady thing. Most people came up with the answer “Martin,” which is incorrect. Her maiden name is “Tyler,” “Martin” is her previous married name. It was in many ways the perfect question for foiling contestants who call someone sitting at a search engine prompt. I wonder if they test the high dollar questions against search engines in order to make it difficult for people to get the answer from the Web within 30 seconds.

One of the contestants last night on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire is the wife of former major league baseball player Jack Aker. Here are his career stats (courtesy of Baseball Reference, which is back up, at least temporarily). Also, someone got to the million dollar question last night and phoned a friend who tried to look up the answer on the Internet using a search engine. The friend didn’t find out the answer in time, and ended up leaving with $500,000. After the show, I tried to see if I could find the answer using a search engine within 30 seconds, but couldn’t. (The question was, “What was Carol Brady’s maiden name?”)

Lore Fitzgerald Sj

An Economist op-ed favors continued U.S. surveillance of China.