Linux Hippies Rejoice!

I'm not sure quite when this happened, but at some point universities got drafted as copyright police. To that end, the MPAA recently released a network monitoring kit that would help universities find P2P users so that they could duly be sued for money they likely don't have, having spent it on tuition (oh, irony). Now why the copyright nazis insist on going after people in the lowest income brackets eludes me, it is not only bad policy but a bad way to make money. Bad policy aside, the MPAA is now in violation of the very rules it commonly uses to beat up on unsuspecting citizens. The toolkit was based on, of all things, the Ubuntu Linux distribution. Wait, using open source software to police draconian copyright laws? Wait, it gets better. They failed to make available the source code for the toolkit, which is a violation of the general public license under which Ubuntu is distributed. Now, of course, the folks that oversee the Ubuntu project tried to get in touch with the MPAA and when the MPAA ignored them, the ISP that hosted the toolkit download site got slapped with... a DCMA take-down notice. BOOM! See that, we can abuse the legal system too! Read all about it on Ars Technica...

While you're there, read the story about Microsoft's "study" that proves that internet exploder is inherently safer than Firefox. I wonder, when did "study" come to mean "a biased, unfounded, unsupported opinion; a statement with no proven factual basis." Sigh.