{"id":334,"date":"2008-07-23T20:53:56","date_gmt":"2008-07-24T00:53:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/zeroday\/2008\/07\/23\/a-court-ordered-someone-to-switch-to-windows-to-enable-monitoring\/"},"modified":"2008-07-23T20:53:56","modified_gmt":"2008-07-24T00:53:56","slug":"a-court-ordered-someone-to-switch-to-windows-to-enable-monitoring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/zeroday\/2008\/07\/23\/a-court-ordered-someone-to-switch-to-windows-to-enable-monitoring\/","title":{"rendered":"A court ordered someone to switch to Windows to enable monitoring"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A friend shared an interesting post with me from Ars Technica about a recent torrent website owner <a href=\"http:\/\/arstechnica.com\/news.ars\/post\/20080629-jury-convicts-elitetorrents-admin-with-mpaa-help.html\">  getting jailtime <\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>One of the more interesting facts from the article was the disposition of a <a href=\"http:\/\/arstechnica.com\/news.ars\/post\/20070824-court-orders-movie-pirate-to-switch-to-windows.html?rel\">previous case in 2007 <\/a> which somehow escaped my attention back then.  Scott McCausland was forced to have his computer monitored as a condition of his probation.  He noted in his blog that, &#8220;their software doesn&#8217;t support GNU\/Linux (which is what I use). So, he told me that if I want to use a computer, I would have to use an OS that the software can be installed on.&#8221;<br \/>\nI think there is a snarky lesson in all of this.  Windows is the choice of those who want to monitor your every move.  Irony aside McCausland &#8220;added a donation link to his blog to help pay for the cost of a Windows license.&#8221;  This is a very real additional cost that wasn&#8217;t really considered by the judge.  I&#8217;ve complained about this privately when the Extension School at Harvard offered a statistics class which only allowed the use of a Windows based statistics program.  This was not known to me when I signed up and I subsequently withdrew from the course (costing me both time and money) because I refused to deal with a Windows only learning environment.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A friend shared an interesting post with me from Ars Technica about a recent torrent website owner getting jailtime . One of the more interesting facts from the article was the disposition of a previous case in 2007 which somehow escaped my attention back then. Scott McCausland was forced to have his computer monitored as [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":214,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[274,270],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-334","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interesting-tech","category-wayback"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/zeroday\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/zeroday\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/zeroday\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/zeroday\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/214"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/zeroday\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=334"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/zeroday\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/zeroday\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/zeroday\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/zeroday\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}