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“Subject: Urgent Warning”

daniel.haxx.se

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Re: “Subject: Urgent Warning”

#41

Post by USNetizen »

vxxzy wrote: post #4

If you desire to respond, I would relate the topic to her field. She claims to be a photographer. Surely she has a vague idea of copyright law. I would explain that you had developed a piece of Intellectual Property and licensed said property in a specific form -akin to taking a photograph. The person who takes a photograph owns the copyright. It just so happens that Spotify and Instagram, "enjoy your work" and have…

It's analogous to someone calling and threatening Firestone tires because someone broke into their Ford car.

Re: “Subject: Urgent Warning”

#43

Post by cookiecaper »

madaxe_again wrote: post #33
xlayn wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"When you have a conversation with an idiot, nobody watching can tell which one of you is the idiot". They are not idiots, they are average people, tech is complex, I wonder if people who have to be told or explain things to represent a market to attend? Imagine, something were you call a number ask for something to be bought; later someone go picking up the money, you perform the purchase and you later deliver. No c…

If you bellow at a stranger because you don't understand something, you're an idiot, sorry. I'd like to hope an "average" person would not gloss over gaps in their knowledge and jump to a hostile conclusion. In your scenario, say you're the phone company - would you think it reasonable if the customer who called in your example blames you for their having made a call and placed an order, because the phone line must h…

>If you bellow at a stranger because you don't understand something, you're an idiot, sorry.

To be fair, the email included in the OP is not really bellowing. She's politely explaining that she found his contact information inside the documentation distributed with the app, and providing screenshots as proof. I think a simple explanation that the name is included only due to technicalities of copyright law and that there is no direct involvement whatsoever is sufficient. After that reply, there is no need to respond further, and almost all lawyers will immediately understand and refuse to proceed with a case.

It should also be noted that hosting an ecommerce platform is a lot different from being one of the many low-level libraries employed by the application. It's not necessarily unreasonable to expect an ecommerce processor or host to have reasonable fraud detection schemes in place, and it's certainly plausible that some lawyers would consider suing the ecommerce vendor (especially if the company makes money).

Re: “Subject: Urgent Warning”

#44

Post by nradov »

jerf wrote: post #27

About nine years ago now, I worked for a small security startup that managed to make its way up to PCI certification for scanning websites before keeling over dead. It died the "just one more feature before we can release" death, so you've never heard of it. You've probably never even heard of the company that bought it/put it out of its misery. I'm pretty sure the customer base never exceeded the low single digits.…

Ha ha yes. I worked for a healthcare startup and for a while the email to webmaster@ went to my inbox. We sold software to large provider organizations and didn't deal with patients at all. This was very clear on our web site. Yet I routinely received emails from random people seeking medical advice: heart disease, indigestion, headaches, diabetes, etc. It was kind of shocking the level of private personal details some of them would include. I just sent back a polite form letter suggesting they contact a physician.

Re: “Subject: Urgent Warning”

#45

Post by stronglikedan »

peterwwillis wrote: post #21

How terrible would it be to just create new accounts?

That's not her problem. She's her own worst enemy.

> help me salvage my original Instagram photos, pre-hacked, despite Instagram serving as my Photography portfolio and my career is a Photographer.

Re: “Subject: Urgent Warning”

#46

Post by JoshTriplett »

madaxe_again wrote: post #24

Ah, this sort of thing is as old as the moon. We run an eCommerce platform, have a variety of clients using it, they have a number of customers. At least once a week we get an accusation either from a client or an end-user of some outlandish nefarious behaviour, usually due to some complete lack of understanding of the nature of technology. Way back when, we responded, tried to help, tried to explain, but it tends to…

> Anyway. When you have a conversation with an idiot, nobody watching can tell which one of you is the idiot.

A friend of mine who works as a college professor has a fun approach to deal with the kinds of random cranks who contact him out of the blue seeking someone to validate their wild Time-Cube-style theories and "research": he responds to each one by providing an introduction to the previous one. Apparently, he received followups from some of them afterward saying how much they appreciated the introduction and how much it helped them.

Re: “Subject: Urgent Warning”

#47

Post by johannes1234321 »

I can't count how many mails I got via php.net webmaster and security mails (yeah, I admit my involvement there ...) from people who locked them out from some website with a "powered by php"-button and asked me for a password reset. The picture of the producer of a screw in a machine often seemed to work.

Re: “Subject: Urgent Warning”

#48

Post by kolinko »

mattlutze wrote: post #29

Lest Stenberg get tangled up too much in the email-sender's unfortunately troubles, he should likely refer the emailer to Instagram and Spotify's customer support. As an aside, hopefully someone can recommend to the emailer as well to use a different service to host high-quality versions of her photography so that potential clients can evaluate critical clarity in her technique. I'm not sure I'd want to rely on Insta…

Spotify has a messaging system, so it might be the same reason as with the other messaging systems. To send spam or scam.

Re: “Subject: Urgent Warning”

#49

Post by mariuolo »

lazyant wrote: post #28

This reminds me of the case when some state or local agency got the default CentOS / Apache page and they contacted them as if they were hackers. EDIT (thanks mariuolo): http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/24/tuttle_centos/

That was the city manager of Tuttle, Oklahoma.
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