Police conducted search in the Nginx office due to a copyright claim • Hacker News Board

Re: Police conducted search in the Nginx office due to a copyright claim

#131

Post by iaml » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 5:52 PM UTC

chupasaurus wrote: post #93

blackearl wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can't walk away from an interrogation, you've been detained.

Maximum continuous time for an interrogation in Russia - 4 hours, after which there should be a pause of at least an hour. Maximum total time is 8 hours within a single day. Maximum time for a detention is 48 hours until the court's decision. The difference is how much time one would have to actively prepare his defence themselves, not via advocates.

You could use those 'rules' instead of toilet paper - not even half a year ago a ton of people were detained longer and without proper accommodations like food, water and place to sleep. Nothing happened afterwards, maybe in a couple years un human rights council will make government give those people some money, but that's it.

Re: Police conducted search in the Nginx office due to a copyright claim

#132

Post by LinuxBender » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 5:55 PM UTC

auiya wrote: post #32

ivan4th wrote: post #26

I see it this way (being a Russian): it's not a copyright claim issue, but rather a hostage situation with bandits involved (a.k.a Russian authorities), and what they want is ransom so that top #1-2 nginx contributors don't go to jail for some 10 years.

It feels like an intelligence shakedown. Nginx has a rather large install base. FSB would love to have an entry point in it I'm sure, or maybe they previously had one and are trying to gain it back?

NGinx is owned by F5 Networks [1]. F5 customers could probably open a case and ask what contingency plans are in place.

[1] - https://www.f5.com/company/news/press-releases/f5-completes-...

Re: Police conducted search in the Nginx office due to a copyright claim

#133

Post by rolph » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 5:59 PM UTC

considering this thread and a host of others, regarding mobile phones being rousted, I think its time to start looking at developing systems that have a "panic mode"

as in "we would comply if we could but you guys scared the system and it hid, we have to wait until it comes out again"

Re: Police conducted search in the Nginx office due to a copyright claim

#134

Post by larkost » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 6:05 PM UTC

larzang wrote: post #23

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But even if they "owned" nginx - what does it get them? The community would immediately fork it and change the branding. The same happened to MySQL when Sun was bought by Oracle when MariaDB was forked - though I concede MariaDB isn't as popular as I hoped.

> though I concede MariaDB isn't as popular as I hoped I would think that's more due to the huge boom in Postgres popularity than any failing of Maria. For the projects that do still use MySQL, all the ones I know of are on Maria or Aurora rather than the Oracle implementation.

Not really. The real reason is that Oracle has done a reasonably good job of continuing the development of the Open Source project. You can certainly argue about what things they should have focused on (the MariaDB community has done that, mostly arguing there should be more engines), but Oracle has done nothing to damage the project, and a lot of good in it (serious improvements to the main engine, InnoDB).

Re: Police conducted search in the Nginx office due to a copyright claim

#135

Post by TheRealDunkirk » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 6:07 PM UTC

auiya wrote: post #114

stjohnswarts wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's not going to happen, too many security experts constantly monitoring nginx. That's the beauty of it being a high profile open source project.

Yeah? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleptography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartbleed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shellshock_%28software_bug%29 https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252473363/EU-patches-20-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG

"I keep track of these things, Clark. One of us has to."

Re: Police conducted search in the Nginx office due to a copyright claim

#136

Post by privateprofile » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 6:09 PM UTC

fit2rule wrote: post #65

seibelj wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not trolling... if they outlaw encryption, as most governments want to do, it will require creative org structures.

Australian checking in - and I'm not trolling either: I can just as easily read that 10-point list off for Australia.

Which companies were taken over illegally by organized groups in Australia?

Because the OP's list was likely referring to a very different reality than what you imagine: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jun/24/russia.interna...

Re: Police conducted search in the Nginx office due to a copyright claim

#137

Post by Corazoor » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 6:10 PM UTC

chupasaurus wrote: post #72

ma2rten wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it works like that. The supposed copyright violation is ongoing.

I should remind you that there was a 1:342 ratio of "Not guilty" to "Guilty" decisions on the criminal cases in Russia last year, and the it's declining year-to-year.

I was interested in the ratio for the US, which based on a quick lookup seems to be 1:249 for federal cases... (Numbers taken from here: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/11/only-2-of-f...)

Just wanted to note that it is not a very good way to gauge opressiveness or fairness... In a perfect world, charges would only ever be brought against the guilty, and only the guilty would be found as such by court. In such a World the ratio would be 0:...

Re: Police conducted search in the Nginx office due to a copyright claim

#138

Post by chupasaurus » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 6:13 PM UTC

chupasaurus wrote: post #112

chupasaurus wrote: post #38

My bad translation of a related part from Sysoev's interview to a russian journal "Hacker"[0] made in 2012: - Interesting: you were working at Rambler while developing nginx. Did Rambler had any rights? That's a subtle question. How did you manage to keep the rights for project? Yes, that is a subtle question. It interests others beside you, and we thoroughly worked on that. Russian law works this way: the company ha…

And the same quality translation of a commentary by Lynwood Investments CY Ltd, the company which initiated the case, given to the online magazine The Bell [0]: The Rambler Internet Holding (edit: it's legal name is Rambler Group LLC) company found that it's exclusive rights on NGINX web server, which was developed by it's employees with use of corporate resources, were violated by third parties. The company gave the…

The commentary[0] of Igor Ashmanov, who was CEO of Rambler when they hired Sysoev, on the document in tweet:

Sysoev was developing in his work time, in the office, with company's equipment. (quote from the order: edit)

1. Bullshit. There isn't anything on that in our laws. You have to very accurately prove that there was an assignment on that. "In his work time" or "with company's equipment" - doesn't work. Everything's allowed - and IP is within authors.

2. Besides, when I hired Sysoev - it was in 2000 - we have talk specifically that he had his pet project and he'd have the right to work on it. It was called "mod_accel" or something, he renamed it in 2001-2002.

I can make a statement about that in court, if needed. And my partner in my companies, Dmitriy Pashko, then-CTO of Rambler, could, I think.

3. He had worked as a system administrator. Software development wasn't in his responsibilities at all.

4. I think, Rambler cannot provide any paper, more so an assignment, on development of a web server.

I asked our advocate, ..., to look what's going on. The lawyers of Runa Capital (edit: early investors of Nginx Inc.) already work in the case, so probably our help wouldn't be necessary.

I think, skunks would fail.

[0]https://roem.ru/12-12-2019/281134/rambler-nginx/#comment-292...

edit: link to the source

Re: Police conducted search in the Nginx office due to a copyright claim

#139

Post by gbuk2013 » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 6:15 PM UTC

chris_wot wrote: post #129

lolc wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But this is absolutely a copyright issue! If a company has copyright on something I use, I need a license from them. Now we don't know what Russian courts will decide here, and we also don't know whether courts in other countries would respect that. What could happen as a worst case "robbery" scenario is that the developer is forced to agree they never had copyright! So whether or not the claim was unjustified, it mi…

And yet, copyright is a civil dispute. I’ve never heard of a police raid due to copyright.

According to the warrant[1] it seems to be a criminal case.

Anyway, you should read up on the BSA copyright raids. Fortunately they seem to have fallen out of fashion.

https://mobile.twitter.com/AntNesterov/status/12050861295041...

Re: Police conducted search in the Nginx office due to a copyright claim

#140

Post by ChrisMarshallNY » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 6:18 PM UTC

The company I worked for made photo equipment, and had a lot of creatives on staff.

As such, they did not have the typical "We own the ideas you came up with in the shower" clause that most companies have.

Because of that, I was able to develop a fairly popular OS package (popular in a limited demographic, so it's not "A-List").