Maszman Speaks!

A com­pany called Affin­ity Engines is claim­ing Google stole the code in Orkut, their social net­work­ing tool.

In par­tic­u­lar, they claim engi­neer Orkut Buyukkok­ten brought over source code from them when he joined Google. They’re cit­ing sev­eral soft­ware defects that are in both sys­tems as proof. If that’s cor­rect, then it’s prob­a­bly a slam dunk case. A lot of peo­ple have to sign a non com­pere agreee­ment when they leave a com­pany for another and in most com­pa­nies, any­thing you write belongs to the com­pany unless there’s a spe­cific agree­ment otherwise.

Of course, Google is a big tar­get right now, so you have to take any­thing in this vein with a grain of salt.

The DOJ’s response to a FOIA request to share the their data­base on for­eign lob­by­ists was to deny it because shar­ing would cause their sys­tem to crash. No, really. Appar­ently, their data­base is so frag­ile that merely access­ing it would result in mas­sive dataloss.

Please, think about who you’re going to vote for in November.

gap­ingvoid is a weblog by Hugh MacLeod. He’s an adver­tis­ing guy and a cartoonist.

Pre­sented with­out com­ment: Ferry goes bused again: No 7:30.

Now that the Supreme Court has blocked enforce­ment of COPA some peo­ple are mak­ing it seem like it’s a rul­ing in favor of giv­ing porn to chil­dren. Wrong. It’s a vic­tory for free speech and a reminder that as a par­ent (like me) you are the one respon­si­ble for pro­tect­ing your chil­dren, not the gov­ern­ment. You have to be active and aware, there’s no law that pro­tects 100% of the peo­ple its sup­posed to 100% of the time.

iWork​With​Fools​.com is where you can read or anony­mously share work related sto­ries about the fool­ish cowork­ers and bosses we all deal with daily.