4Chan, a group of immature script-kiddies that anonymously post online and organize “attacks” against various groups, organizations, and websites, are it again. This time, it’s not the Church of Scientology they’re attacking, but innocent children. As the BBC reports, members of 4Chan have been uploading videos containing explicit sexual content in droves to YouTube today, specifically targeting children.

The videos uploaded by members of 4Chan consisted of children’s clips that start off innocently enough, showing cartoons and other rated-G material usually targeted at children around 5 years old, but soon enough change to videos of adults engaged in sexual activity. 4Chan has the uncanny ability to strike a nerve, driving even the most liberal of internet users to condemn their behavior as pure evil. The problem is, the anonymous 4Chan members are perversely motivated by this sort of response, and cannot be shamed into bringing an end to their disgusting activities.

This isn’t the first time 4Chan does something that can only be described as pure evil. In March of 2008, 4Chan members flooded an internet board for victims of epilepsy with fast-moving and colorful images intending – and succeeding – in bringing about photosensitive seizures in visitors to the site. The last attack was carefully planned to occur just over the Easter weekend, guaranteeing less moderator activity on the forum and giving the attackers a bigger window of opportunity to maximize their damage.

The difference between the behavior that 4Chan engages in and what just about every other script kiddy organization on the web does is that 4Chan doesn’t do it to prove a point. They don’t do it just to prove they can, they do it to hurt. And the malicious intent makes all the difference. The internet isn’t the best place to pride yourself in holding the moral high ground, but in cases like this, it’s near impossible to understand just what it is that makes people like this tick.

Obviously there is no clear solution to bringing about the end of groups like 4Chan, but someone needs to do something, or else we’re all guilty of standing by and letting evil go.

If you’re like most people, the answer is not much. But there are people out there that really care, and with good reason. If you’re the FBI, Oprah Winfrey, or one of the million other celebrities currently on Twitter, you probably don’t want someone out there passing themselves off as yourself while posting fake updates to an account literally millions are watching.

Some people to whom money is not an issue already pay thousands of dollars for meaningless SSL certificates – something tucked away in the corner of your browser window that no one pays much attention to. But imagine if Twitter were to start offering “verified accounts” that have been authenticated as belonging to a particular person or institute… how many of these celebrity accounts would suddenly turn into cash cows for Twitter?

Right now, it looks like that’s what Twitter has in mind. In a recent blog post, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone talks about the upcoming limited release of “verified accounts” in order to curb fraud amongst accounts claiming to belong to celebrities. There is no mention of charging customers for this service, but the way it’s worded, that is pretty much taken for granted as a future step in the process:

The experiment will begin with public officials, public agencies, famous artists, athletes, and other well known individuals at risk of impersonation. We hope to verify more accounts in the future but due to the resources required, verification will begin only with a small set.

And later:

When we do start testing Account Verification, we will be sure to provide ample methods for feedback. Initially, verification will not be tested with businesses. However, we do see an opportunity in that arena so we’ll keep you posted when we have something to share.

That’s not to say this isn’t a good idea though. Has Twitter finally found a way to make some serious cash without alienating its userbase, providing “additional features” no one really needs but can make them plenty of cash from the more high-profile accounts currently on the site? God knows Paris Hilton, et. al. would be willing to pay the cash, while the rest of us rely on word of mouth, links back from official websites, and common sense to give our followers the confidence they need to trust the updates we post.

Follow me on Twitter @mqudsi.

And the two companies that have impressed us with their support? Pubmatic and Assembla – both excellent startups that we highly recommend in their individual fields. Pubmatic is an ad-revenue optimization service that intelligently chooses between different ad providers to maximize your ad impressions and CPM rates. Assembla provides quality hosting of SVN and other services that cover all aspects of the software development cycles for teams & small companies.

A couple of days ago, Kaspersky antivirus began flagging the ad-frames from Pubmatic as possible attempts to download a virus. Kaspersky is, of course, famous for its high false-positive counts (though it’s protection is great, nothing is without its cost). Pubmatic support staff were incredibly quick to respond to our queries, and immediately contacted all the involved parties to resolve the problem in a timely fashion.

As for Assembla – we’d been using their SVN hosting for a couple of years now. It’s thanks to them that we were able to develop software efficiently back before we had our infrastructure and development set up and going. They’ve recently overhauled their accounts system and have suspended free accounts, and they’ve been nothing short of wonderful helping us migrate our data to our own servers (data portability is a sensitive topic these days – but Assembla clearly knows how finicky developers are when it comes to ownership!) and helped us wrap everything up nice and clean.

Thanks to both these great companies for their wonderful customer service and their dedication to their userbase. If you’re looking to outsource your development services or for a better ad management system, there’s no one we recommend more than Assembla and Pubmatic.

Facebook recently conducted a poll which showed up on the homepage newsfeed, and asked Facebook members just how exactly did they think Facebook’s “friend finder” worked when it prompted them for their email address & password in order to get a list of contacts. The numbers pretty much speak for themselves, here’s what they looked like near the end of the campaign:

Now ignore the dark blue bar: it’s a red herring and doesn’t contain any interesting info. The real juicy bit is the “Yes” option, and its 20% response.

20% of Facebook’s 80 Million active users (give or take) believe that the passwords for their email addresses are being stored when they use the Friend Finder…. and that doesn’t bother them in the least. That’s sixteen million people who don’t give a damn about their privacy, the contents of their email, or who has control of their entire online personas.

This is a subject that’s been chewed half to death already countless times by people far more in the know than myself; Jeff Atwood’s excellent article on the topic covers the dangers of sites asking for users’ email addresses & passwords, and – far more importantly – presents several more secure alternatives for web application developers looking to expand their social networks.

To put things in perspective, take a look at this downright horrifying tale on ReadWriteWeb about software that prompted users for their email addresses & passwords, then proceeded to save them for malicious use… then realize that 16 million Facebook users out there don’t care if this happens to them. Think about all the private, sensitive, confidential information available on your email account and just how truly terrible it would be for that info to fall in the wrong hands.

Of course all this begs the question: who’s to blame for this bout of end-user stupidity (for lack of a more politically-correct term)? Is it naïveté/trust in the goodwill of others that gets users to give out such sensitive data to people (Facebook has 500 employees!) they don’t know from Adam? Or is it that they just don’t get how dangerous it can be (see the ReadWriteWeb article for proof)? Or is it, maybe, that they’ve simply gotten accustomed to being asked for their email address and corresponding password by “trusted” sites they love to visit, too caught up in the “gather as many friends as you can” game to give a second thought to identity theft and fraud?

Personally, I can recall a time when most “normal people” I know would refuse flat-out to share such sensitive data with a site (phishing, tech support, etc. obviously excluded); but in the wake of “Web 2.0” it’s become so normal to ask for email addresses and passwords that no one ever gives it a second thought.

And it’s not just Facebook. To be totally frank, even if Facebook were to store end users’ passwords in their database, the access to that info would probably be very highly guarded… but when every new social network on the block is suddenly doing the same thing – you can get a good picture of just how easy it would be to steal users’ passwords.

MQ’s 3 Steps for World Domination

1. Send out an email purporting to be from “the hottest new social network around” informing the recipient that their “friends” want them to join: “Click here to show Peter you’re a real friend!”
2. Get the user to register a new account – make the procedure as pain-free and simple as possible… and right then and there on the registration page ask for the user’s email address and password so as to “make it easy to tell all your friends you care and get popular really fast…”
3. Profit.

As soon as it’s OK for one person to do it, it’ll be OK for everyone to… and then we’ll be in too deep to do anything about it.

So why does Facebook – after polling their end users and seeing just how dire the situation is – continue to use the same flawed mechanism of harvesting email addresses… especially when better, safer alternatives exist?

And this is your internet on drugs bandwidth meters:

Cartoon originally published by Toles for The Washington Post.
[source]

Richard Stallman: legendary founder of the Free Software Foundation, purveyor of the GPL, defender of open source. And – as of today – expert FUD manipulator.

Obviously someone was seriously pissed off at the abundance of (largely positive) press coverage Bill Gates has been receiving as he stepped down from his final roles at Microsoft.. and it appears Mr. Stallman just couldn’t bear to let the man he hates more than any other step down without getting that last word in.

In an article by Richard Stallman published on BBC today, Stallman pulled back no punches bashing not only Bill Gates, Microsoft, and makers of proprietary software everywhere but also took the incredibly cheap shot of accusing the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation of working to ruin the very countries they’re trying to help:

Gates’ philanthropy for health care for poor countries has won some people’s good opinion. The LA Times reported that his foundation spends five to 10% of its money annually and invests the rest, sometimes in companies it suggests cause environmental degradation and illness in the same poor countries.

Never mind the fact that those are unsubstantiated rumors following money trails several-hundred pockets deep – what does the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have to do with Free Software? Is Stallman so desperate to make Mr. Gates out to be the bad guy that he’d sink this low?

Stallman, one of first people to accuse people of spreading FUD to further their opinions, doesn’t stop there:

Gates is personally identified with it, due to his infamous open letter which rebuked microcomputer users for sharing copies of his software.

It said, in effect, "If you don’t let me keep you divided and helpless, I won’t write the software and you won’t have any. Surrender to me, or you’re lost!"

Here Stallman is referring to Gates’ now-famous letter asking people illegally copying, distributing, and using Altair Basic to stop. Stallman somehow neglects to mention that – regardless of whether morally acceptable or not – Microsoft had the legal right to demand payment in exchange for their software. Ignore for a second whether or not Bill Gates and Microsoft were in the right or in the wrong to ask for payment in exchange for their work – is Richard Stallman seriously suggesting that it’s right to illegally obtain copyrighted software?

It’s one thing to say that Gates should never have charged for his software and another to say that it’s OK to use it without paying. Gates chose to ask for money, users (as Richard Stallman himself has advocated on many occasions in the past) should be looking for an alternative if they don’t want to front the cash.

Who Richard Stallman thinks he’s kidding, we don’t know. But he’s obviously crossed that line that shouldn’t be crossed; apparently desperate enough to stop Microsoft the minute he senses an opening… even if it means spreading FUD, making pointless accusations, and generally talking nonsense to get his point across. This isn’t any way for a respected figure in the open source community to act, especially not when it comes to someone who has – whether Stallman likes it or not – contributed as much to the tech community as Bill Gates has.

You’ve got to hand it to the Facebook team though, they have scaling and uptime perfected down to an art. For instance, when servers are due for updates, the maintenance is performed in a staggered manner, updating one set of servers at a time as attested to by the unavailability of certain Facebook accounts while others can still be accessed.

If your account is on one of he servers being serviced/maintained/upgraded, you’ll see a message like this:

If you have another account or a friend nearby, it’s quite likely that a different login attempt will work just fine.

In our opinion, the latest wave of downtime for Facebook accounts is due to the upcoming “major overhaul” to the way Facebook profiles and pages are displayed and interacted with… at least, we hope that’s the reason; because it would royally suck if Facebook were to go the way of some other once-popular services that became victims of their own popularity and lack of scalability.

This morning I came across such an event that penetrated that virtual suite of armor when I read this Wired.com article about a recent script-kiddy attack on a web forum run by The Epilepsy Foundation – the news is so bad it makes one’s blood boil. A group of crackers launched a bone-chillingly cold-blooded and thoughtless attack on the members of the epilepsy forum. They weren’t looking for money, private info, fame, or acknowledgement — they were merely searching for a way to cause as much physical and mental harm as possible.

Epilepsy, as defined by Wikipedia:

Epilepsy is a common chronic neurological disorder that is characterized by recurrent unprovoked seizures. These seizures are transient signs and/or symptoms due to abnormal, excessive or synchronous neuronal activity in the brain. About 50 million people worldwide have epilepsy at any one time.

This particular attack focused on hacking the forum to display images that triggered epileptic attacks in visitors; invoked by a series of images flashing at pre-determined intervals showing certain shapes and patterns that are known to cause seizures to people suffering from epilepsy.

Everyone has seen the photosensitive seizure warning on video games at one point in time or the other – they’re there for a reason. Epileptic attacks are not a joke, and purposely invoking such an attack on innocent website visitors as some sick person or persons’ sick idea of a joke must not be tolerated.

What’s even worse is that the first round of attack was not enough for the perpetrators. Instead, a second attack followed which used javascript exploits to redirect visitors to more-complex images and animations; affecting even more people.

The compromised forum posts and code were available for approximately 12 hours:

But she’s satisfied with the Epilepsy Foundation’s relatively fast response to the attack, about 12 hours after it began on Easter weekend. "We all really appreciate them for giving us this forum and giving us this place to find each other," she says.

While that may not seem like too long of a time, if you consider the fact that these are human beings being attacked and not machines or web-browsers then 12 hours turns into a lifetime – after all, for some people this really is a matter of life or death.

At the moment evidence suggests that "Anonymous," a group of crackers recently come to fame for their web-cracking endeavors; the true identity of the perpetrator(s) remains unknown. But whoever it is, this kind of ridiculous, immature, and down-right evil attacks most not be tolerated by the tech community at large.

At the moment, users are being redirected to a tongue-in-cheek “isoHunt is Sick” page, letting them know that isoHunt’s hardware and software services wouldn’t mind a bit more attention and that, hopefully, isoHunt will be back up shortly..

The message:

We’ve already informed the isoHunt team of the issue, and they’ve confirmed that they were not aware of this region-specific behavior until now, so you can put your conspiracy/censorship theories away for now. We don’t have a list of all the regions affected, but users in the Middle East have reported not being able to access the site. The isoHunt team has promised to look into the issue, and we’ll post updates when they’re available.

For isoHunt loyalists hell-bent on using the site but cannot, we recommend using this alternative URI for the time-being:

http://isohunt.com.nyud.net/

This is the coral-cached link, and fortunately access from the Coral servers is directed to the proper site and has full access. Yes, it’s a bit slow & slightly out-of-sync, but it should do until isoHunt is back up and fully-operational.

Update: 12:42 UTC
Our own internal analysis seems to indicate that isoHunt’s web servers are incorrectly bouncing requests from certain IP ranges to the temporary downtime page. We believe this may be an unintended side-effect of the major overhaul isoHunt underwent last week when they added commenting and voting to torrent listings on their site (which is very nicely implemented, by the way!); especially seeing as the timings between the downtime and the code overhaul are too close to be called a coincidence – at least not without evidence to the contrary.

Update

As of approximately 01:00 UTC access to isoHunt.com has been restored.

But the truth is, what Mashable does is nothing, nothing in comparison to what goes on in the non-English territories on the web. A couple of days ago, we published an article along with a download link to a Windows Vista Recovery DVD… Within 24 hours, we’d gotten first taste of the Chinese Web. For some odd reason, our story download link to the 120MB ISO image spread like wild-fire in the Chinese corners of the internet.

To put things in perspective, NeoSmart Technologies was under load the equivalent of 15 simultaneous Slashdot effects. Impressive, right?

Well, the problem is that not a single one of these Chinese sites bothered to even link back to the story or NeoSmart Technologies. Not only did they take our content almost word-for-word (translated into Chinese, of course), but they also were kind enough to provide their readers with a hotlinked 120 MiB ISO image download link… from our servers, of course.

As a result, we were forced to disable hotlinking on the download and redirect all external referrers to the article, as well as set up a bittorrent server (tracker) to keep up with the demand.

But the question is… why is that every single Chinese site that came across our article decided not to link back, and didn’t have a problem with hotlinking a pretty sizeable download? It’s as if the web were built on….. communism. Where one’s hard work is the same as another’s; we toil together and we harvest together.

But that’s not the blogosphere. At least, not the English-speaking blogosphere at any rate. Perhaps it’s the way the Chinese blogging and tech news sites do their thing, but that’s considered highly-unethical in the rest of the blogging world. If you’re going to take some news and use it on your site, you link back to the original source (even if it’s at the bottom in the form of a “via” link). But to take the news and the bandwidth, and not even bother to link back? That’s something else.

Wall of Shame: ChinaHacker, TTWinBug, Tech Sina, OOVista, CRSk News, Sky News, eNet, MyDrivers, and then some.

I’ve been doing some thinking, and after having numerous conversations with some individuals who will remain un-named, I’ve come to the conclusion that some people are too wrapped-up around the computer system that they use, to the point where they could very well border-line on “fanboy,” and I feel that this is affecting the credibility of the tech community as a whole.

Example:

“John,” a PHP developer, switches his personal home computer from Windows to Linux, and he enjoys using Linux because of the advanced functionality that it provides to him.

Now, “Jim,” a long-time Windows user and Microsoft supporter, who has conversed with John for several years, criticizes John for his decision, stating that he is brainless and dim-witted because Linux is open-source, and that Windows is the only platform that matters.

John doesn’t care about using Windows, he’s comfortable on Linux and he gets more enjoyment out of his system than he did when he was running Windows, but Jim is unable to see that and continues to insult John for his choice.

What do you see wrong here? To me, I see this constant criticism as being petty, and shows that one is unable to look past their own needs. Just because you’re a supporter of one system doesn’t mean you have to hammer down on everyone else running a different system. Remember, we’re all just human beings sitting behind a computer screen. So what does it really matter what the person on the other side of the screen is running?

I’m not against any platform, I’m currently running Windows XP on two of my home computers, Ubuntu 7.10 on one notebook, and Mac OS X 10.5.1 on my MacBook Pro. They all serve their purpose, and at the end of the day isn’t that what really matters?

I believe that we should all try to contribute positively to the tech. community as a whole, enough of the “flame wars” and the un-necessary bashing.

Also, for the record, I never said that Windows sucks in my previous article. I stated reasons that I believe that Mac OS X may be a better choice for some people, and how overall it has a lower TCO when it comes to upgrading systems down the road. If you want to use Windows, Linux, BeOS, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, or hell even DOS, that’s up to you. It’s your choice. I’m not trying to force my choice on anyone, I merely posted my thoughts on the matter.

Flickr is for photos. Scribd is for documents. Period… Or at least that’s the way it should be – theoretically.

So why is that so hard for people to get? Something about Scribd’s ease-of-use and flexibility has made people forget – and it looks like the people up top don’t seem to mind much, either. For instance, “i LOVE Milla Jovovich,” a group with over 1500 photos pretending to be documents was one of today’s “Featured Groups” on the Scribd homepage.

But the thing is, Scribd isn’t only not intended for photos, it’s not optimized for photos either. Users are uploading photos as PDF documents – unnecessarily increasing their size and limiting the photos’ usages. It has limited tagging options, doesn’t support any form of EXIF implementations, and offers all the wrong tools.

What Scribd is good for is full-text searching of documents and essays, downloading a file uploaded in multiple formats – regardless of the initial implementation, playing back text as audio, and more. It makes it easy to view documents quickly and easily with their Flash-based reader instead of forcing the users to double-check that they have Microsoft Word and Adobe Acrobat installed on the PC they’re currently using. In short, it web-enables content that isn’t already natively supported by browsers – and that’s not something that photos need.

Photos are already natively supported by just about every browser on the planet. You embed them, you play them, you save them, and you share them. You don’t need a special program to view them, nor do you need to worry about different proprietary formats and codecs. They just work.

So what is it about Scribd that makes people flock to it instead of Flicrk, even when the latter is so much more enticing when it comes to photo-based options and features? Well, it’s not too difficult to find out.

• Scribd is 100% free. No limits on file size and no “Pro” accounts.
• Scribd doesn’t require you to register. This may sound stupid since it’s just a click away and doesn’t cost a thing, but a lot of people hate to have to go through the whole process of signing up for an @yahoo.com email just to get access to Flickr. Scribd doesn’t even block you from doing things just because you’re not registered – you can do anything real users can!
• Scribd has the sexiest uploader(s) on the planet. With a Flash, Java, HTML, and ActiveX interfaces to make uploading multiple files simultaneously straight-forward and oh so easy, that’s another reason to snub Flickr and its primitive upload interfaces.
• Scribd has great SEO and SEO tracking. Just click in the sidebar to see a map of user visits to your site, search result rankings, and indexing activity.

So what’s a site to do when it’s too popular for its own good? Not that the Scribd admins seem to mind, of course, but seriously?

When Scribd first kicked off, pretty much no one realized what a gold mine sharing text could be. A lot of people wrote it off as something only academics and geeks would use – and they turned out to be quite wrong. People love to read, and they love to share. Combine that with an incredibly flexible system, and you’ve got a killer service.

Our opinion? Give it six months or so, and Scribd will give in to popular demand and provide a more comprehensive & full-range of media options that will do away with all pretense and fully support both text and photos.

Kristan Kenney’s contributions to Windows Vista community started before the Vista beta program even began, and it’s always been just a matter of time before this appointment happened. From the days of 4074 to RTM and now SP1, Kris has been at the forefront of finding tricks and hacks to make Windows Vista a more enjoyable experience. Hopefully we can expect even more (and greater) contributions to come from Kris in the future.

Congratulations, Kris, you deserve it!

When you upload a document to Scribd (which accepts almost all popular formats like OpenOffice, Microsoft Word, PDF, PowerPoint, and more), it’s automatically converted to .doc, .pdf, and .txt – and it comes with a converted-to-audio MP3 version as well. But most importantly – it’s a hell of a lot more convenient for your readers.

While you can embed a self-hosted video in your blog and have it streamed to your readers with little to no effort, inline and all, it’s a lot more complicated (rather, impossible) to embed a binary-encoded text file in a post or article. With Scribd, you can instantly embed a document like this:

That’s (our good friend) Andre Da Costa’s recently-published Windows Vista Quick Start Guide originally uploaded to Scribd as a PDF. Previously, it required having Acrobat Reader (or an alternative) installed, a couple of minutes to download, and a lot of RAM to boot. Not “easy” to say the least. You should read it, it’s quite interesting

Even better, you can just click a button and have it sent to you in the format you choose. Quite handy! You can also click in the textbox at the top of the embedded document and search for text.

Scribd has lots of little nifty features each of which doesn’t seem like much, but in our opinion, at the end of the day all those little features add up and can blow your mind – and reduce your hosting costs, too.

Bottom line: Scrbd is one Web 2.0 services you don’t have to be “on the bandwagon” to use and love; it’s just one of those things that make sense no matter what way you look at it.

A Texan family is now suing Virgin Mobile for using a photo of their daughter, Alison Chang, in an ad campaign – the catch is, it was released by the photographer on Flickr under the Creative Commons Attribution license, and that’s where Virgin Mobile got the photo from. The problem is, the girl featured in the photo had no idea her photo was being used – or that it was released under the Creative Commons license.

As the case currently stands, the Changs are suing consumers of open source works and not the original party responsible for the release of the work as an open source material without a proper media consent form.

It gets more complicated than that. Appearances in the media need a media consent form, but posting a photo online technically doesn’t. At least, not yet — is this another issue at stake? So in this case, a photographer posts a photo online, fully within their rights and releases the photo itself as an open source work. Then the open source work (and not the actual person) is used in a media appearance – what’s the ruling then? Why is the family suing Virgin Mobile and not the photographer? Do they (and their lawyer) fully understand the concept of open source and creative commons licensing? Do end-users of open source material have a legal obligation to ensure that the material they use was cleanly and wholly legally released as open source in the first place? Just how far does one have to go?

Still not confusing enough for you? Well, Virgin Mobile added insult to injury, captioning the photo in their advertisements with what amounts to – more or less – an insult to Alison Chang. Is the question of whether the subject of an open source’d photograph can be used against one’s self a legal or a moral issue? Does releasing a photo to the public under a lax license let it be used by anyone for any purpose, even when “hurting” the original producer/subject?

This is quite the legal tangle, and we’re betting it’ll be settled out of court – but even if it is, it’s certain to come up later in one court case or another. We’re not lawyers, but this is clearly a case that poses quite the risk to open source, attempting to redefine just how “open” it really is. Here’s a re-cap of the issues at stake:

• Are “consumers” of open source legally liable for using “dirty” open source’d code? Do they have a legal requirement to verify its validity before using it?
• Will legal consent forms be required for simply posting photos online? What about “personal” sites like Flickr, MySpace, and Facebook?
• Just how global is an open source copyright? In this case, Virgin Mobile Australia is charged with breaking a US copyright.
• Previous court cases have ruled that bloggers are journalists in their own right. Does the freedom of press protect online photo-journalism, too? ((In this case, we’re referring to the original “blog post” on Flickr by the photographer, and not the subsequent use by Virgin Mobile))

It’s unlikely that all of these issues will actually appear in a court of law, but it certainly is possible. The first and second are very likely to appear, and have far-reaching effects; whereas the latter two are stretching it a bit, but anything is likely when money is involved. Creative Commons has an optional “country” setting that determines, in the case of a legal dispute, which country’s laws and jurisdictions shall apply. We have no details at the moment which setting was specified, but the default is USA, and that’s where the photographer and subject both resided. The Creative Commons license is recognized by law in both the United States and Australia.

Should it actually be ruled that Virgin Mobile is guilty as charged, a huge online panic in the open source community will likely ensue. At the moment, most big open source projects perform a cursory check on any code/content submitted for possible legal violations (and, let’s be honest, for plausible deniability more than anything else). But in some cases (read: Wikipdia) it’s almost impossible to practically do so, thanks to the enormous volume of content being constantly contributed and the difficutly of vigorously checking it for legal trespasses. What happens when you can no longer simply trust the EULA that ships with a particularly code library? Or when the content you grab off of Wikipedia (technically licensed under the GFDL) isn’t as open source as it claims to be? And most importantly, that using such “dirty” materials makes you, in the eyes of the law, guilty of content/idea theft?

If any ruling of this sort were to be passed with an actual verdict on the open source angle, it would instantly destroy the entire spirit of open source. No one would be able to trust any open source project or the other, destroying one of the most important benefits of using an open source license the first place: being able to instantly convey the rights a consumer has or doesn’t by simply telling them it’s “GPL” or “BSD” or whatever. You’d need something tantamount to a chain of custody for each and every modification/copy, telling people exactly where each bit of code or content came from and what grounds you had to use it, and no project would be safe without a lawyer of its own. In a word, it’d be the death of open source… In the United States, that is; because the rest of the world (for the most part) is blissfully immune to many of the issues outlined in this post.

Not only does the United States system of copyrights and software patents have to be rewritten to prevent ridiculous things like this taking a toll on the entire open source industry, but also a legally-recognized free software “Bill of Rights” needs to be drafted to ensure that lawsuits like this one don’t jeopardize everything that the online community has been working on for decades. Just like the current Bill of Rights defines basic freedoms for US Citizens that no law can overrule (the Patriot Act excluded because GWB says so), free software needs a similar document to set down its (proverbial) foot and ensure that open source lives on – freely, as it was meant to be.

It’s important to note that the Creative Commons license that the photo was released under was not marked as non-commercial, and that Virgin Mobile fully complied with the letter of the Creative Commons license, by properly citing the Flickr page the photo was grabbed from at the bottom of their advertisement. As far as Virgin Mobile is concerned, they didn’t really do anything wrong. It is no wonder most magazines still insist on getting explicit legal permission before including anything in their issues, even if the EULA/copyright is clearly indicated on the site/source!
This might just be a case of a family trying to get rich quick; and if it is, it’s quite unfortunate that the entire spirit of open source has to be put on trial for a couple of bucks and a 16-year-old emotional teenager’s injured self image. If it’s not, it’s still a damn shame.