Gearfuse

Poor, poor YouTube. The courtrooms just can’t get enough of ya’! According to Wired’s Threat Level blog the judge in the Viacom/Google lawsuit has made a ruling which forces Google to turn over “every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users’ names and IP addresses,” to Viacom.

Although Google argued that turning over the data would invade its users’ privacy, the judge’s ruling described that argument as “speculative” and ordered Google to turn over the logs on a set of four tera-byte hard drives.

So, according to the judge: Viacom being able to monitor what YouTube users are watching is not a violation of the users’ privacy. Did I miss something here? The Consumerist says, “Viacom is arguing that it needs the data to prove that its copyrighted material is more popular than user created videos,” but I can’t help but think Viacom has some other nasty plan involving this data. YouTube users’ – be wary.

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This past weekend, during the Defcon hacker convention in Las Vegas, several MIT students who were prepared to give a talk regarding the security of Boston’s public transit system were stopped. A judge ruled to ban the presentation after the city realized a gaping vulnerability was about to become exposed. For now, the talks have been stopped, but now everyone has focused attention to Boston. The city must have quite the security flaw going on.

Though the talks were stopped, Defcon attendees received the key data on a CD. It’s only a matter of time before the system is duped and Boston is forced to plug it’s security holes.

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Last month, we spoke about the World of Warcraft bot program Glider and how Blizzard is taking legal action against the developers. Now it’s seeking an injunction against making the program open source. Sound odd? It might, but it’s a smart move.

You see, Blizzard has to protect both copyrights and intellectual property. Glider infringes upon both and the creators of the bot, frightened from a huge lawsuit, could easily release the code so that their special project will live on forever. Blizzard knows this and isn’t having any of that crap and thus, they’re asking the courts to prevent Glider from going open source. Some are up in arms over the fact that Blizzard might gain control and/or ownership of someone else’s code. I say you get what you get for messing with a multi-billion dollar cash cow.

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