Month: July 2016

We’d been chatting for the better part of two hours when Chris Kraft’s eyes suddenly brightened. “Hey,” he said, “Here’s a story I’ll bet you never heard.” Kraft, the man who had written flight rules for NASA at the dawn of US spaceflight and supervised the Apollo program, had invited me to his home south of Houston for one of our periodic talks about space policy and space history. As we sat in recliners upstairs, in a den overlooking the Bay Oaks Country Club, Kraft told me about a time the space shuttle almost got canceled.

It was the late 1970s, when Kraft directed the Johnson Space Center, the home of the space shuttle program. At the time, the winged vehicle had progressed deep into a development phase that started in 1971. Because the program had not received enough money to cover development costs, some aspects of the vehicle (such as its thermal protective tiles) were delayed into future budget cycles. In another budget trick, NASA committed $158 million in fiscal year 1979 funds for work done during the previous fiscal year.

This could not go on, and according to Kraft the situation boiled over during a 1978 meeting in a large conference floor on the 9th floor of Building 1, the Houston center’s headquarters. All the program managers and other center directors gathered there along with NASA’s top leadership. That meeting included Administrator Robert Frosch, a physicist President Carter had appointed a year earlier.

A federal judge has recently allowed an ongoing libel lawsuit filed against a popular online forum to go forward.

Bleeping Computer, the website, has characterized the lawsuit as "frivolous," and has asked its readers to help defend its "freedom of speech."

The case revolves around numerous posts on the site concerning Enigma Software Group, which makes an anti-virus software known as SpyHunter.

If you currently share your Netflix password with a family member or a friend, or if you're on the other end of the leeching process, then watch out - you may be helping to commit a federal crime, at least if you believe recent media reports.

Many users share their Netflix or HBO Now passwords, in an attempt to save money, and up until now, streaming companies have turned a blind eye to the practice.

But a new opinion issued by the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has change all of this, according to reports. The court has ruled on a case that appears to involve password sharing, and has ruled that the act is prosecutable under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). The case in which the opinion was handed down for relates to an ex-employee accessing confidential data using a colleague's password, but if interpreted in the wrong way, the ruling could apply to the sharing of Netflix passwords.

Netflix password sharing was not specifically referred to in the dissenting opinion on the case, but Judge Reinhardt, the dissenting judge, expressed worries that password sharers may become "unwitting federal criminals" under this ruling, for he believes the case is mainly about "password sharing". But ruling addresses and dismisses this concern, citing the narrow interpretation of the case ruling that won't extend to common password sharing.

"But the circumstance here - former employees whose computer access was categorically revoked and who surreptitiously accessed data owned by their former employer - bears little resemblance to asking a spouse to log in to an email account to print a boarding pass," the court's opinion read.

In other words, the ruling may be far too narrow to apply to Netflix or HBO password sharing, and so millions of users and their leecher friends/family have nothing to worry about. 

Even in the event that password sharing was made a criminal offense, services like Netflix will be unwillingly to face the huge public backlash from referring their customers to federal prosecutors. In fact, Netflix has specifically referred to password sharing as a positive for the company, as a way to advertise their services to potential customers (who aren't willing to pay, just yet). HBO has also previously referred to password sharing as a "terrific marketing vehicle for the next generation of viewers".

[Via Fortune, Techcrunch, and Snopes]