The Tom’n'Tiff Wedding Curse is in full swing. First, it was the caterer.
Then, this weekend, our church caught fire. (No, no one was hurt. The damage wasn’t extensive. Yes, there’s insurance, and yes, everything is going to be just fine.)
Am starting to reconsider this elopement thing.
I really have no desire to rehash all this again, but there’s one thing left in this whole webhosting drama that still really chaps my ass about the situation.
I posted The Revolution Will Not Be Silenced Thursday evening, shortly after bringing my archives back online from the, er, unplanned migration. By 3 PM EST the afternoon of the 27th, I had received a cease-and-desist email from Quinn Whipple, accusing me, of all things, of trademark violation for using QWK.net’s name on my blog without permission.
I’ll repeat that, because it bears repeating.
Trademark violation. For talking about QWK.net by name.
Let me just list for you some of the other trademarks I’m violating, then: Apple, Microsoft, Diet Coke, Robeks, Wegmans, Giant, Safeway… you get the idea.
I knew that accusation was ridiculous on its face, but just to be safe, Tom and I forwarded the C&D (which I’ll post in the extended entry) around to a whole fleet of lawyers we happen to count among our friends.
Almost universally, they had to restrain their laughter upon reading it. (My favorite response? “Trademark law does not prohibit the use of company names or trademarks when discussing one’s experience with the company. See U.S. Const., Amd. I.”) And after an attorney had reviewed the blog post in question and determined that I probably wasn’t exposed to a defamation suit, I decided not to worry too much about being the subject of legal action.
Quinn had, however, CC’d this bogus C&D to Dreamhost’s owner and their abuse address, signaling a clear intention to have them shut me down, because apparently it wasn’t enough for him to kick me off his own systems- it appears that, at the time, he’d have liked to have me kicked off my new host, too.
It was at this point that I decided, “It’s on now, bitch,” and began going over my options for countersuit and injunctions for harrassment with my own attorney.
Why am I posting all this? Because if Dreamhost, in a reasonable effort to protect its own interests, decides to treat this email like a “notice and takedown” (it seems like that was the intent) and shut me down, I want you all to know why. It would be a misunderstanding of the legal issues involved to do so, but Dreamhost isn’t who I’ll be blaming for it.
Quinn apologized over on Tom’s blog for the abruptness of shutting off my service. He then made Brad apologize for posting bitchy comments on my blog and Dawn’s. But he refused to do anything to rescind this C&D he sent to my new host.
So basically, he completely missed the point.
I thought (and continue to think) that Quinn treated me poorly by overreacting to the anti-hotlinking image. If he had simply asked me to take it down, I would have. But the fact is, it’s his company and I was indeed in violation of the TOS, so I wasn’t especially looking for an apology for running his business as he sees fit. This is America, after all, and we can agree to disagree about the quality of his decision, but it was still his decision to make. In fact, at the time I posted about it, the person I thought was being most ridiculous in this situation was the person who whined about having to see pr0n while she was trying to steal from me.
I also wasn’t particularly looking for an apology from Brad/Nateguts for his comment (though perhaps Dawn was, because what he said to her was especially nasty). Remember, I’m the girl who uses gay pr0n to thwart thieves, so you know I’m not that sensitive. If I had really been that torqued about his comment, I could have deleted it. Meanwhile, his so-called “apology” implied that I was lying to you all about the situation and that you were only reacting out of some sense of loyalty to me personally. That’s silly, because I don’t even know all you guys, and those of you I do know are generally the first ones to call bullshit on me when it’s warranted.
What I did want, however, was him to acknowledge to Dreamhost that he had falsely accused me of a trademark violation. He has not done this. We’ve asked him to do this, and Quinn has refused. It bears noting at this point that falsely accusing someone of committing a crime is itself a crime, and I’m bearing that squarely in mind should I be forced to pursue legal action to put this issue to rest. Copying the C&D to Dreamhost and referencing their TOS implies, at least to me, that he was actively trying to have me shut down again with his accusation. (I welcome an alternate explanation if anyone’s got one.)
But for now, I’m sharing all this because all I wanted in all of this was it to be over and to be left alone to have my little website. It seems that Quinn has backed off from leaving comments and sending me frivolous legal notices, but as far as I know, this C&D copied to Dreamhost is still hanging out there, which means for the moment, I’m not sure I will be left alone to have my little website.
And for me, that’s what this is all about.
(UPDATE: Hey look! I force porn on an unsuspecting public!! And little children whose mothers teach them to steal! I’m a baaaaaad person.)
(more…)
This is what happens when Tom shows Tiff how to use PhotoBooth on the iMac… and then leaves the house for a little bit.
I’ve got about 6 of these in my Flickrstream, but I think this one might be my favorite.
This is mostly posted on my previous entry as a comment, but I think it also deserves a blog post of its own:
Just to clarify a few points-
At no point do I dispute that I violated QWK.net’s TOS. Apparently I did. I simply point out that QWK.net appears to not be especially concerned with making its TOS available to current customers. All I really had at the time was Quinn’s word that I violated the TOS, since the TOS itself is buried under an avalanche of unrelated links at QWK.net, rather than being conveniently linked on, say, the POLICIES PAGE. Of course I agreed to it, but that was 4 years ago and I have more important things to memorize than my host’s legalese, so it seems like making it easy to refer to for current customers would simply be a best practice for web hosts.
Nor do I dispute Quinn’s inalienable right to run his business as he sees fit. As a raging capitalist pig, I celebrate his right to make whatever business decisions he deems necessary. I only express my opinion that this was a particularly bad one.
I chose a method to protect my images and bandwidth that would continue to allow me to use my images as I see fit- the images in question were almost all embedded in assorted blog posts, and locking them down in a password-protected directory, as Quinn suggests, would have broken the img src links on the rest of my sites, as Quinn surely knows. I didn’t force the alternate image on anyone- it was the complainant’s choice to attempt to steal from me, and I just don’t have a lot of sympathy for the argument that this “filth” was foisted upon her. If she doesn’t want to run into these problems, perhaps she could try not stealing from me next time.
Also, it’s “hardcore,” not “hard core.”
Additionally, I suspect that Quinn is not going to find many sympathetic ears in this audience. We’re all either:
- not especially bothered by pr0n, or
- convinced that image/bandwidth theft are bigger scourges on the internet than pr0n, or
- libertarian enough to think that people should just CLOSE THE BROWSER WINDOW when they see things they don’t want to see, or
- my mom. She’s not likely to take your side either, dude.
In fact, the only comment I’ve personally seen that was sympathetic to Quinn in all of this (a copy of which is now on my hard drive) was posted on another site (run by a current customer of QWK.net), contained one racial and several sexual slurs, and was posted from a QWK.net IP address. (Guys, if you’re reading this, how could you possibly NOT know that your IP is being logged?)
In fact, the comment originated from a host named mail.technologycs.com. Viewing that site shows the address (the same as QWK.net’s) for Technology Consulting Services. The email address Quinn Whipple has been using for all these comments he’s posting, as well as all his correspondence with me (including the poorly thought-out cease-and-desist he sent me today, hah) has been a technologycs.com address.
So, my anonymous racial-slurring commenter, while you may not be affiliated with QWK.net, you’re pretty clearly affiliated with Quinn.
And you’re both acquitting yourselves pretty poorly in all this.
….Aaaaand we’re back! Those of you who read Tom and Dawn already know the basic story behind my sudden downtime, but the story is just too sordid not to share again.
A few weeks ago, I used a little web-fu to thwart people who were stealing my images and bandwidth. It involved swapping out the image that was the object of the theft for another… less pleasant image. Some uptight soccer mom stumbled across this alternate image in the process of STEALING from me, and demanded that I take down the alternate image. Riiiiight. Because I routinely let random strangers on the Internet tell me what to do so that they can steal from me with impunity. Why don’t I just post my credit card numbers to my blog as well? “I’m not trying to tell you what to do,” she protested. This was, of course, a blatant lie, because when I refused to do as she said, she complained to my host, who got down on its knees and disabled quibbling.net. The reason given was that I had violated their TOS, but of course their TOS isn’t actually posted anyplace you can actually find it, unless you happen to be standing in the owner’s office, reading it off the wall.
So, let’s review, shall we?
Theft is okay, but pr0n is not.
And also:
The opinion of an admitted image thief rates more than status as a paying customer of 4 years.
This is the moral equivalent of getting sued for shooting the guy who was robbing your house.
So I asked if I could have my site back if I took the image down, figuring at least I could have my site while I found a new host to move to. The response? A long-winded lecture from Quinn Whipple, founder of QWK.net, about how abrasive and deeply offensive the image I chose was, and how that sort of behavior was not going to be tolerated, so I could just take my business elsewhere.
Is this supposed to get a rise out of me? Did he expect me to argue so he could continue to exercise his overblown sense of moral superiority? Because really, he’s a vendor. His opinion means about as much to me as that of the dude who makes my sammich at McD’s.
At this point, I had to demand access to my own data, 4 years of my intellectual property, because he surely wasn’t offering any solution to let me download it. So Tom and I pulled our respective sites down, shook the dust from our feet, and began the move to Dreamhost, which is about $24/month less than we were paying before, and which gives us more shiny geek toys to play with. Yay. (If you went with QWK.net on my recommendation, let me take this opportunity to encourage you to move to a better host, with or without naming me as a referral.)
I won’t bore you with the technical details of the hassles I went through to get control of my own domains due to the ass-backwards way QWK.net has been handling my registrations for the last 4 years. Suffice it to say, it was a pain in the neck, but everything seems to be working now.
The funny thing in all of this is that even though the aforementioned soccer mom (or her computer science professor husband) knew how to figure out who my host was to complain to, she evidently failed to realize how easy it is to take the information she left in my comment box to Google and find out her name, home address, and phone number. But whaddya know? Even though I’m a dirty, evil purveyor of pornography, I’m apparently a nice enough person not to USE that information to pull any snarky little pranks in the form of payback. At least, until she fucks with me again.
In any case, even the offending anti-hotlinking image is back (though hosted offsite, just to be safe). Tom and I are saving money on our hosting. I finally managed to get my blogs upgraded to WP 2.0. So really, all’s well that ends well.
But if you’ve tried to email me at anything but my mac.com address in the last few days, you’re going to have to send it again, because I didn’t get it.
With the Steelers’ playing the Broncos for the AFC Championship this week, I thought I’d share with you this profile of Myron Cope, inventor of the Terrible Towel and the voice of the Steelers for more than 30 years.
Retired broadcaster Cope can still get out a good ‘Double Yoi!’:
A cover can generally only be a success if it meets one of the following two conditions:
1. The artist is bigger than the song he/she is covering.
2. The artist is covering a song bigger than him/herself as an homage to the original artist.
Thus, Johnny Cash could cover just about anything and make it work (cf. “Hurt,” “Personal Jesus,” “One”). Madonna’s cover of “American Pie” sucked because she chose one of the few songs that is bigger and more iconic than she’ll ever be. At the same time, almost any artist with a reasonable level of musical talent can cover “Ring of Fire” if in doing so he/she is paying tribute to Johnny Cash.
segue from a conversation about Law & Order: Criminal Intent
Tiff: “…but I do that too. When I’m at someone’s house, I’m always checking out the pictures on the walls, the books on the shelves… you can tell a lot about someone that way.”
Lisa: “Sure, and their music collection, and how they keep their music collection.”
Tiff: “I had a system. I kept the Christian music separated from the secular, then alphabetized by artist, but then chronologically by album release date.”
Lisa: “Okay then.”
Tiff: “I was one of those kids who kept their markers in rainbow order. Drove me nuts when someone messed ‘em up.”
Lisa: “Of course it did.”
I could just email Jeff this, but I’m in a ranty mood tonight, so I’m going to post about it. Jeff cites a columnist who cites a Canadian study which found that Canada can’t really ban polygamy while also permitting same-sex marriage. Therefore, he argues:
If we can take the exact same arguments people use in support of same-sex marriage — that heterosexual marriage only is discriminatory, that we shouldn’t legislate morality, that marriage is a personal matter and not a civil one — and use them to support something as obviously disturbing and depraved as polygamy, doesn’t that mean those arguments are nonsense?
Well, no that’s not what that means, and for one very significant reason.
Government is a simple creature.
Think of it this way. As a practical matter, one’s marital status only matters to government for a few very finite purposes. There’s taxation, inheritance, next-of-kin stuff like who gets to decide when to unplug the ventilator, child custody issues, and as anyone who has ever watched Law & Order knows, the rights of spouses to not incriminate one another in a criminal proceeding. There might be a couple of others, but it all comes down basically to a question of who-gets-what.
For those civil purposes, it does not particularly matter whether there is a man and a woman or two men or two women or whatever. The point is, there are two. And in a relationship of two, it’s very easy for Mungo government to decide that both partners are equal owners of community property, they can claim each other as dependents for tax purposes, they can each make medical decisions for the other, etc. And really, it’s not even that easy- Terri and Michael Schiavo taught us that government doesn’t have that solid of a grasp on the rights of spouses to make medical decisions for each other, and don’t we all know someone with some horror story about child custody arrangements that don’t work for anyone?
There’s no fundamental legal reason why a person with a vagina is better suited for making care decisions for a person with a penis than another person with a penis is. There’s no magical combination of heterogenous genitalia that makes community property work. It’s still a fairly standard set of rights, in a civil sense, as long as it’s two people. There just aren’t that many possible permutations of how taxes and property and power of attorney should work.
Polygamists, on the other hand, are far more complicated. Even with just three people in a relationship, how is government supposed to figure things out? Are A, B, and C all equally partners? Or does A have two partners, B and C, who aren’t particularly into each other? What if A is incapacitated and B and C don’t agree on treatment decisions? Are A, B, and C really financially interdependent or are they just trying to get out of taxes?
Mungo can’t sort out that many choices in a practical manner, because as soon as a legal relationship is more than two people, the question of who-gets-what become far more complex. Marriage between two people, from a legal standpoint, is a fairly one-size-fits-all proposition. Not so with polygamy. What polygamists need is not marriage, it’s articles of incorporation.
