2005-12-10 02:40
by Vasil KolevThis evening in Divaka we had a meeting to drink a bit and to speak on the situation at online.bg – Assen Totin came, and we questioned him for a few hours. A lot of things got clearer, one of which – that the journalists are dirtbags – we already knew…
A short chronology – on 30th November (Wednesday) at online.bg’s office arrive to good people from NSBOP with the FBI guy for Bulgaria and say that there’s child pornography on their machines, take the free hosting machines and take the four admins for witnesses. Then there is a first interrogation, after which they keep them in custody. After that they’re accused of infringing on copyrights (because of the mp3s and movies on the machines), and Friday they’re set remain in custody, not to be able to hinder the investigation (the arguments of the judges’ decision are that they’re smart people and may interfere with the gathering of evidence).
What followed was a storm of crap from all kinds of media, combined with information leaks, the things that were written were horrible. The media was blowing the story out of proportion, it started to sound like the foundation in which’s building was their office was living with the money from child porn, and the sysadmins were making and distributing it.
Thursday (7th december) online.bg made a press conference (which’s recording we’ll be uploading these days), at which they explain that the administrators themselves have nothing to do with the pornography and the charges are different (which was missed in almost all newspapers). Of course, a of of the articles (like the one in Standart (who are being sued in the moment because of this retarded article, Delwin has written a pretty good rebuttal) they mention nothing about that that the charges are for infringing on copyright and skew the words of Aseen Totin… There are some good articles although, like the description of the press conference in Computerworld.
The latest development is that Friday (9th December) there was a hearing about the keeping in custody and the more understandable and informed judges have changed it to a signatory, so the people can go home, and online.bg to function normally… I can’t imagine the heroism of the other two people there (one of who – a junior admin), who kept the ISP running even through the collapse of the Sofia MAN – I’ll have to give them a beer, they’re the upstream for my LAN ISP.
And in the end is there a free hosting server in Bulgaria on which you can’t find child porn, mp3s and movies – I don’t know, probably on the smallest ones… For all them there are terms&conditions, which say what’s allowed, what’s not and how can you complain if you find a problem. In practice, it isn’t possible for an ISP to look through, control and clean the bad things – the users are too much and you just can’t catch up with them. That’s why we have a law (for the electronic trade, not accepted yet), which says (it its good parts) following some EU directives that the providers of connectivity, storage, etc., CARRY NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ACTIONS OF THEIR USERS.
(and if someone wants to argue about the hostings’ control – can do that after giving me a beer, because my throat becomes dry. I’ve worked 4 years in a company, that was doing mostly this and know how NSBOP looks from the inside because of such problems.)
And for the journalists we should make a course (for some with an electric shock added) to explain some elementary things about the internet…
(p.s. I accept corrections on the facts, I might’ve garbled something because of the late hour).