The Libertarian

eBay to end all Louis Vuitton auctions in fake purse dustup

A french court has ordered eBay to pay €38 million ($63 million) to LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SA, a French luxury goods manufacturer, due to claims that the auctioneer hasn’t done enough to prevent sales of counterfeit luxury goods. But the order went beyond simply fining them for lax policing of their auctions, as it bans eBay from selling any Louis Vuittan goods, legitimate or not.

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In addition to the fine eBay has been ordered to pay by the Tribunal de Commerce in Paris, the ruling also ordered the company to stop all sales of LVMH perfumes, counterfeit or not. “It’s a groundbreaking decision that will help protect creativity,” said Pierre Gode, a member of LVMH’s supervisory board and adviser to chairman Bernard Arnault. It is also a decision that, unsurprisingly, eBay will appeal.

Protect creatvity? HAHAHA! More like your pocket change, asshole. Louis Vuitton’s greatest achievement seems to have made one baseline design for a leather bag in one colour scheme (medium brown, or whatever bullshit name they’ve made up for it internally), and then plastering their own brand initials all over it. Nike sports, move over. Odd thing is, well-funded women all over the world doesn’t seem to mind making themselves walking advertisements for LV.

“If Counterfeits appear on our sites we take them down swiftly, but today’s ruling is not about our fight against counterfeit[s],” eBay said in a press release issued quickly after the ruling. “Today’s ruling is about an attempt by LVMH to protect uncompetitive commercial practices at the expense of consumer choice and the livelihood of law-abiding sellers that eBay empowers everyday.”

Bullshit is bolded, truth is italicized. FWIW, eBay has my support - in principle - on this one, although I could care little less about two corporate giants on the throats of each other. Second, it suits eBay well to feel the teeth of law sink in, because they have been major assholes in that league (and others, most notably the ban on PayPal payments until they squeezed the proprietor of that biz enough to make him sell out to them) several times before.

Applied game theory in action:

DoS extortion is no longer profitable

In the last six months of 2006 we saw a pretty sharp decline in the daily number of denial of service attacks. Although there are likely a number of factors at play here, I think there is one primary factor: denial of service extortion attacks are no longer profitable.

DoS extortion attacks are usually carried out by a bot-network owner. Using their bots, the extortionsist has to make a successful DoS attack against a target organization. Following that they have to issue the extortion request and hope the target organization pays it.

The thing is that DoS attacks are loud and risky. Whenever a bot-network owner carries out a denial of service attack they run the risk of losing some of their bots. This could happen either because an attacking computer is identified and disinfected, or if it is simply blocked by its ISP from accessing the network. Furthermore, if the bot-network owner isn’t careful they could lose their entire bot network if their command and control server is identified. Since a DoS extortionist has to carry out at least one successful DoS attack before they can even demand their pay, they run some serious overhead risks.

So what happens if the target of the attack refuses to pay? The DoS extortionist is obligated to carry out a prolonged DoS attack against them to follow through on their threats. For a DoS extortionist this is the worst scenario because they have to risk their bot network for nothing at all. Since the target has refused to pay, it is likely that they will never pay. As a consequence, the attacker has to spend time and resources on a lost cause.

It is likely that bot network owners are now moving away from DoS extortion and towards more lucrative ventures like spam. Not surprisingly, we saw a noted increase in spam volumes in the last six months of 2006.

Source.

From a recent Slashdot article comment:

Commercial music was once one of the great joys of my life. I loved mainstream rock’n'roll, high-profile jazz artists, famous classical artists; in fact, I loved just about everything except country. I spent a lot of money on vinyl, then tape, then CDs, often re-buying the same music when a new format came along. You wouldn’t believe how much I’ve spent over the years.

I loved Napster and Kazaa when they came along because they allowed me to sample a lot of music I wouldn’t have heard otherwise. When I found something I liked, I’d go out and buy a CD. You know, to ’support the band’. Only it turns out the bands didn’t get much (if any) of the money, anyway; it went to the record companies and stopped there. Didn’t matter, because the RIAA shut the download sites down. No more music sampling for me.

Then the RIAA went on a rampage and started dragging grannies and gradeschoolers into court. That’s when I stopped buying music. I just quit completely. I haven’t bought a new CD in over four years.

I began listening to Internet-streamed radio and loved it. Then the RIAA began trying to shut that down. Now they’re going after commercial radio.

Well, screw them. I’m done. No more commercial, big-record-company music for me. The RIAA can kiss my shiny metal ass.

In the process of listening to streaming music, I’ve discovered some great independent music. I don’t need the craptactular garbage the record companies dish out anymore. Especially not if they’re going to try to fine me or send me to jail if I don’t listen to it on their terms.

Screw them. I hope they all starve, and their children, too.

I wholeheartedly agree (and I have bought a lot of CD’s since i got my first stereo system 14 years ago). Of course, the RIAA will certainly blame the evil pirates if people only buy indie labels’ music…

…from an environmental POV.

As most other places in the western world, in the 1st of May this year, the reds gathered together on public spots to celebrate their traditional “international workers day”. In Copenhagen, Denmark, around 100.000 of these people met up in the large park system (”Fælledparken”) in the center of the city to drink beer and listen to the statist-collectivist demagogues fire off the usual bullshit verbiage.

That, however is not the interesting part. The interesting part is that afterwards, 13 tons of trash was left behind by the reds. Thats 13.000 kilos of waste, people. The park services had to have 15 men spend almost a week cleaning up the mess.

And these reds claim that they are proponents of a “clean nature”? Garbage!

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In short: Almost half of Nigerian mohammedans say suicide bombings are generally “OK”, at least 53% of all mohammedans think that muslims did not carry out the 9/11 attacks, and at least 84% of a middle eastern mohammedans feel that the Mohammed cartoon crisis was due to “western disrespect”.

Surprisingly, more mohammedans than westerners think that democracy can work in islamic countries. Too bad Rudolh Rummel’s work indicates that liberal democracy is incompatible with Mohammedanism.
Source (PDF, 62 pages).

Yesterday, Gore testified before the US Congress on the subject of Global Warming. One of the sound bites that slipped out of his head was that “humanity’s survival is threatened by global warming” or something to that effect.

Oh for fucks sake, how does he get away with crap like this? The survival of humanity and human civilization is NOT threatened by global warming! An absolute worst-case sea level rise of approximately 90 centimeters by year 2100, plus some more droughts and possible extreme weather is not a mortal threat to humanity, only to our way of life.

Then again, he is obviously a damn hypocrite, who thinks that the necessary change of lifestyle needed to bring about a stop to climate change should not apply to himself, only to the peons…

1. Anybody you don’t agree 100% with is a “liberal”.
2. No matter how much of a jerk and a betrayer of your values the candidate is, ALWAYS VOTE REPUBLICAN!
3. Any website or source providing whatever data that you don’t like (talk.origins, WikiPedia, RealClimate) has a liberal agenda. (see #1)
4. Voting machines can always be trusted, but exit polls can’t.
5. Anybody who doesn’t believe in Biblical Creationism is an atheist “evolutionist”. (see #1)
6. Failure of the government to endorse your religion and proselytize it equals oppression of your faith.
7. People who disagree with your stance on the War on Terror are “supporting the terrorists” and are “anti-american”. (see #1)
8. You think that people who support a secular society want the terrorists to win.
9. Anybody who wants the state to keep out of the institution of marriage is pro-gay and a “sodomite agitator”. (see #1)
10. You think Fox News really is “fair and balanced”! (…and the rest of the media is leftist! ALL OF IT!)
11. You think that there were WMD in Iraq, and they have been found. Anyone who denies that is a liberal (see #1).
12. Abortion is murder, but capital punishment is A-OK (and so is bombing abortion clinics)!
13. WE ARE WINNING THE WAR IN IRAQ!!! (any day now…)
14. You know that the USA was founded on christian principles, and should be ruled according to biblical law. Never mind that the founding fathers were strongly skeptical of involving religion in political matters… (hey, they were probably liberals!… see #1)
15. You think anthropogenic global warming is a hoax perpetrated by useless scientists who only want government handouts.
16. You think that atheism is a religion.

I’ll add more facts as they I think of them.

From the Daily Mail:

A teenage schoolgirl was arrested by police for racism after refusing to sit with a group of Asian students because some of them did not speak English.

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Codie was attending a GCSE science class at Harrop Fold High School in Worsley, Greater Manchester, when the incident happened.

The teenager had not been in school the day before due to a hospital appointment and had missed the start of a project, so the teacher allocated her a group to sit with.

“She said I had to sit there with five Asian pupils,” said Codie yesterday.

“Only one could speak English, so she had to tell that one what to do so she could explain in their language. Then she sat me with them and said ‘Discuss’.”

According to Codie, the five - four boys and a girl - then began talking in a language she didn’t understand, thought to be Urdu, so she went to speak to the teacher.

“I said ‘I’m not being funny, but can I change groups because I can’t understand them?’ But she started shouting and screaming, saying ‘It’s racist, you’re going to get done by the police’.”

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A complaint was made to a police officer based full-time at the school, and more than a week after the incident on September 26 she was taken to Swinton police station and placed under arrest.

“They told me to take my laces out of my shoes and remove my jewellery, and I had my fingerprints and photograph taken,” said Codie. “It was awful.”

After questioning on suspicion of committing a section five racial public order offence, her mother Nicola says she was placed in a bare cell for three-and-a-half hours then released without charge.

Insanity such as this is slowly becoming commonplace here in Europe, not just in Great Britain. Congratulations, PC morons, you’re creating more members for the BNP the more you do this.