Re: [Fsfe-uk] BBC slander

[Alex Hudson]

On Sat, 2004-02-07 at 17:59, P.L.Hayes wrote:
> The substance of my complaint is better represented by the draft 
> letter I've made and I would welcome your comments about that Alex.

Well, to put it shortly, I don't think you can claim either gross
inaccuracy (I don't think there are any facts of the case which
contradict the published article) or defamation (no group or
organisation is specifically named nor implied; I can't see loss of
standing). 

I also doubt you can claim the piece should be labelled opinion; I can't
tell what the reporter's opinion is from the piece (although I can see
how he judges the effect of people maliciously writing viruses to attack
legitimate businesses, which appears to be the point of the piece). 

However, it's your opinion, so you can do what you like with it of
course :o)

I think you have missed a trick though. Although I do not think that you
have any case the producer's guidelines have been breached, there is a
question of right of reply. 

Personally, I think there are two scenarios:

i. Virus was written by a Linux zealot

The thing attacks SCO and Microsoft, people we don't like. It started
growing in America, during American working hours - that's fairly
unusual for a virus, as I understand it. The thing specifically doesn't
attack [mail] the FSF, GNU, Mozilla, IBM and a number of other of our
friends. It's also a fairly simple virus that could have been built out
of code already out there; it's not rocket science in any way. It also
has unusually good English for something which is supposedly Russian.
Means, motive & opportunity obviously all fit.

ii. Virus was written by a pro-vandal.

MyDoom turns an infected machine into an open proxy. The #1 users of
open proxies are, of course, spam-gangs. The SCO attack is a
smoke-screen - quite a good one, at that - and has successfully covered
the tracks of the originators.

I'm not personally convinced ii) is as likely as i), since one trait of
the MyDoom worm is that it's internal SMTP engine sends e-mails that are
fairly easily filtered due to it's lack of Message-ID. You would think a
spam-gang would have an idea how SMTP works (previous virus SMTP engines
have been surprisingly sophisticated; there was a published analysis of
one not so long ago). Someone writing an SMTP engine themselves for the
first time, on the other hand, would easily make such a relatively
schoolboy error. 

That all said, the scenario of ii) wasn't presented at all, even though
it is fairly well-discussed online, and you could probably get some
experts from MessageLabs or whoever to back it up. I think there is a
good argument to say that BBCi ought to run an alternative article which
does present this point of view, especially since the subject is
industrial and controversial. Since I think it is unlikely they would
correct/retract their current article, it would probably be more
beneficial to press them to publish an alternative.

(All my p.o.v., of course, I won't be offended if you ignore it..)

Cheers,

Alex.