 This is not about textfiles.com at all. So, sorry. This is actually about a second site that I put up for fun, which resulted in a lawsuit against me. And this is mostly a discussion, a narrative, a story about my personal experience about it, possibly with the idea of you guys getting some, I don't know, some advice. I do wanna know, who here has been sued? Have you guys sued by a corporation or an individual? Corporation. And you and the both. Traffic problem, huh? Okay, well anyway, so I do wanna actually forward this with since it's being recorded with a disclaimer. I am not a lawyer. I once dated a legal secretary. The relationship didn't work out. So, what you're hearing may or may not be real or not. I may have forgotten events. It was a very traumatic experience, so I may be kinda glossing things over. And I don't want anyone to think that this is an exact photographic documentary of what happened. The site that this is about is still up and will eventually have all of the really funny legal stuff that happened with it. So, the site that I ran was called harvardnetsucks.com. This, about a couple years ago, I was looking for a job while still having one. And I saw this place called harvardnet, a headhunter found for me and said, hey, good company, good people. Looks like it's gonna go IPO. You might be able to make some bucks, exciting and everything else. So, I said that's great, got interviewed, got a job, UNIX guy, and I went to go work there. And I was there for about a year. Ended up going back to my old place. During that year, it was just like any other place. It had its triumphs, it had its sadness. There was a guy I hated, because he did this wrong. And there was this person who impressed me, who had been there forever. And all the usual ups and downs of a company. This wasn't some little short one week thing that I was there. I was there for a year, and I made friends, and I made enemies, and it was a generally good life. Towards the end, things stopped being very enjoyable. So, after a while, you start to get that great bunker mentality where it's just, yep, our company is doing it, so it must really be bad. After a while, you've built up this negative thing, and you gotta say to yourself, am I here just because I'm being paid, or do I wanna go look somewhere else? Because I'm not gonna do anything by anybody. So, I finally said that I was leaving. There were tears all around, and sadness, and everyone else, and it was horrible. And so, I left under a less than bright cloud. I actually left, are you just coming up to touch me? Oh, he wants your hat back. I left under a less than beautiful white cloud. Basically, one of the reasons I left was because there was a guy I hated. And I forwarded a letter. This actually does have some relevance to the legal case. Basically, I was asked to impart information to his team, and the letter included in the letter his letter to my manager, in which he claimed that I had done nothing, that I was a complete incompetent, that in other words, the letter I shouldn't have seen. I would have done the thing. So, I started to write a letter back to my manager, in which I said, you know, that's just not true. I've been doing my best, and you know, and the company, when I think of the company, I get so angry, because we could have done this, and we could, and so I'm basically doing the beginning of Jerry McGuire. I've got this whole thing where I'm just writing this paragraph after paragraph, and I'm like, you know, this isn't good enough for my manager. The whole company needs to share this experience. So, I fired that bastard off, and I did this at home. I was working at, at that time, it was the last week, I was the last two weeks I was working there, so I was kind of coming in at 11 and leaving at one, and I, so you know, it was like one o'clock in the afternoon, and I was like, you know, I had to go in and clean out my desk now, because I don't, if, you know, I can't imagine they'd be so unhappy as to get rid of me, because of our letter, but I, you know, I don't want a situation where I go, I'm so sorry, you know, leaving with all your crap hung around, you know, horrible way to go. So, I went in and quietly cleaned out my desk that night, came in the next day, smiling at noon, and, you know, smiling everything else, and my, you know, my manager, flunky guy comes in, like, oh, we got to talk with your man, and he's like, it's about the letter. I'm like, isn't that a great letter? It was a great letter, wasn't it? I was sure I was going to get in trouble for it, and he's like, well, you kind of did. We're not going to fire you. We're just going to ask you not to show up for your last week. So, I said, okay, you know, they're getting paid for it, called up my other company, said, I can start early. So, I was getting two paychecks, and they actually said, you know, hey, you know, you will pay you, you don't have to come in yet, but we'll officially start you now. So, I was getting two paychecks while sitting at home. So, that definitely took the edge off the experience. And, you know, I got to do the high fives on the way out and all the things anyway. So, that was that. And I left that, and I was like, well, that wasn't a very, that wasn't great. That wasn't a great experience. My feelings on it were actually somewhat neutral. I had some anger, but I wasn't really crushed, as you might say. So, I'd hang out with the old operator, the old operation staff, and the old engineering staff, and one by one they were leaving, and they're, oh man, place sucks, place sucks. And, the guy who I didn't like, I did some research into, group of us actually, did a research into hiring one of those planes that has the banner that it drags behind it. So, that one lunch hour, it would just say, Andrea sucks on this banner going over the company. And then just make a few key phone calls in various departments, say, look out your window. We didn't go with that, and we all laughed about it. It's $1,500, and I can tell you the guy who does it. And he is a great guy. He's like the one guy who does those, and he said to me, why don't you find out where he lives so we can fly over his house after we're finished with his work? So, I think he would definitely be open to anything that you guys might want to suggest. He's like, you know, I was like, do you have a problem with sucks flying over Boston? And he was like, we're the guys who flew condoms over Long Island. Anyway, so this group of friends of mine, and I were all, you know, kind of bitter having our little melon list, and yada, yada, yada. And I was like, I'm kind of a domain pig. I kind of like to buy domains just for fun. I had it inappropriatelydressed.com for a while and hollamiers.org, and you know, it's open, let's register it, what the hell, let's have fun. And I checked, and harvardnetsucks.com was open. And to give you an idea of how completely non anything I was with this, I didn't even buy it then. I kind of said, hey guys, it's open. Wouldn't it be funny? Didn't do anything with it. Couple weeks later, people like, you know, it'd be kind of funny if you got it. And I'd go like, yeah, if you all put money in for it, I'll post it, I'll give you a mail forwarding. You can be the CEO at Harvard Netsucks. And so they each did that, they each gave me like 10 bucks or something. And I went off and registered Harvard Netsucks, set up a mail forwarder, ooh, I'm a protester. I kind of left it like that for a while, you know, about a month. I was like, well, that was fun. And I thought, you know, I'd hear things going on at the company, that kind of sucks there still and they're still doing this, and wouldn't it be kind of fun to put up a site? I had already registered Harvard Netsucks under the company's own address and name. So there was already some sort of a, you know, you have this initial defense thing. I do want to mention that to people, you know, yeah. When you make an action like that, when you do things like you register with something or you do something, I mean, this sounds blatantly obvious, but you would be surprised about, if you're going to register a domain that makes horrendous fun of someone, don't give them your home name and address. Don't do that. So I had it under their name, the building department was incorrect billing at their place and it was a little protest all there. I also registered not with network solutions, I registered with Easy DNS up in Toronto and I'll explain why I like them so much. They're a very fun little place up there. They're related with two cows and they let you administer your DNS remotely and they run it and they have their own anyway, if you like that kind of thing. So I registered with this and then I put up a site and it was kind of, everything I did on it was in the we form, you know, we here at Harvard NetSucks are our staff or you know, in other words, you're using that classic terrorist or guerrilla technique where you're a guy named we, who we believe this shall be done, our spies are everywhere. Now technically I did have spies everywhere because you know, people would call but the site was a little harsh unpleasant, they'll see me refer to my notes occasionally because I just want to make sure I'm mentioning everything. I kind of made fun of the people who had been problems and I hinted that there were things were not quite right there and I got a really nice coup the second day. I got a letter from the founder of Harvard Net who had been driven out a number of years earlier in which he apologized to everyone currently at Harvard Net and how much the company now sucked. I think that's what initially got their attention because remember this was a pre-OPO company so you know, very unpleasant. And I got the other founder of Harvard Net who mailed the next day going hey, he mailed in. Yeah, I too agree, it really bites there. If I could, I would just wipe out who's there and just put in a totally new team, we'd get it right and I'm sorry and everything else. I was getting an awful lot of hits from Harvard Net. I run a logs and web Eliza, you know if web Eliza right? Everyone here by the way, this is vital. Does everyone here know what a firewall is? Okay good, I don't want to lose you. I got a lot of hits from some site and I want to be a bastard and say the name again but I forgot it but it was something, you know, wall, keeper, blah, something.harvard.net. Hundreds of hits from that, nothing else at Harvard Net. On Tuesday, no sorry, Wednesday I get a call from someone who's like hey man your site went down it's someone browsing from within and my site's not down and the hits from this machine have stopped and I'm like oh. So I put up a little thing that looks like they're blocking me at their firewall. What are you afraid of? By Thursday I'm pretty damn cocky. I'm getting, I'd also taken out Harvard Net sucks at hotmail.com for the email, another blind. So I was getting quite a bit of hate, not at me of course but a lot of hate at people, you know, like you're right I'm glad someone stood up and spoke for us because in every company like this people come and go and they just take their little pain and move on and that's the end of it and now these people are like hey someone's getting pissed mob and basically they were starting to look at me as some sort of an interesting figure someone they could go, you, my handle was broken promises at harvardnetsucks.com. So my little site, I find out that the CEO is on a rampage, who the hell is this guy? Doesn't know who it is, just going nuts. He's accusing his head of engineering of like you must be it, you're him, you're him. Who is bro, could you imagine this just big fat guy running down like who is broken promises on his dry? So like on Friday, so on Friday I ended up calling him. We're talking five days, Friday I call him up. He never answers his phone, you know. So I left a message, hey Mark, next time, pick up your phone. So as you can see I was flying high and he picked up the phone next call and he was like, Jason, you have to speak to my lawyer. I was like. Most people when they're used to the, what they think of now is the current process of the law is you put up heinous thing that's really bad. Company that you did this to sends thing that says please stop it, we're really angry. You either choose to put up the letter and go fuck them or you take it down, running like a little baby. But that's not how it was. I was invited to a nice party of some of the ex-arbor and employees and I'm already making connections, I'm making friends now that next Tuesday. Hey, come on down, I'll have some food, it'll be great, you'll love it. So I'm there. While I'm there I get a call from my girlfriend who is not in the best emotional shape. Letting me know that a man has come to the house with a pack of papers from a law firm and made her sign it and gone away. And by the way the guys who, there are guys whose job is to deliver that stuff who aren't really affiliated with anything. They're just like guys willing to get screamed at in the face for however many bucks. But they are neither aware of your case, cognizant of you or anything else. They don't even care, I mean I'm the guy mentioned on it, the girlfriend signed for it, good enough for Bobo he was gone. And we're at the thing, we're at the party, she's not gonna open it, she wants me to read it and we're all like ha ha, cease and desist, got the fuckers running. So I get home and that's not exactly the case. That's not exactly the case. The exact letter that was waiting for me. You are hereby summoned to require to serve a Clinton's attorney in answer to a complaint which is herewith served upon you in 20 days. If you fail to do so, judgment by default we take it against you and I'm looking at it like that doesn't sound like a cease and desist letter. We also notify you that application has been made in said action as appears in complaint for a preliminary injunction. They got what's called an ex parte restraining order against me. In the meantime, until such hearing, we command you said Jason Scott and your agent's attorneys and councillors and each and every one of them to desist and refrain from using or making any further disclosures of any Harvard net proprietary information in a form substantially similar to the order attached as exhibit one. Ugh. Now, the exhibit one was an actual court ordered restraining order. It's what's called an ex parte restraining order which I did not understand at the time. I'll jump out of sequence. My lawyer explained to me what this is. Basically, usually what happens is guy beats the shit out of his wife. Then, his wife says, I would not like him to be near me anymore before he beats the shit out of me. She goes to the court with her lawyer who says, we would like the court to ask this man not to beat the shit out of her. The man says, what does he have to say about this? Let's bring him in and have a chat. So, he sends a notice to wife beater and says, please come to the courthouse in a week where we will see if you should have a restraining order. But knowing you, you're at the bar drinking Jagermeister and you will not show up and it will be given to you in your absence. That's usually how restraining orders work. There's a notification to the two parties like, we'd like to do a restraining order party. Come on down. And they go down and they argue or one of them just says, bite me, have your fun with your lawyers and it's given. And next part to your restraining order is the guy beats up the girl really well. And she shows up in such a horrifying state that her lawyer says, we can't wait the week for her to sit around waiting for Jaws three to come back from wherever the hell he is and kill her. So they say, fine. The restraining order is now down now and in a week he gets to fight it. Very special case. They got it for me. For what? That's the question. Of all the horrifying things I had said that week, what thing was it that was so horrible? What had I done? What were they gonna sue me for? How much? And when I started to read through the actual lawsuit, I started to, you know, the actual thing which I started to read and sweat a little more and more. They were suing me for $120,000. They were suing me for violating my employee non-disclosure agreement and printing information of a proprietary nature such that could bring down Harvard Nets network, expose their company secrets, trade information, financial information to the internet at large, make them a guided target for hackers in quotes and generally destroy them. It took quite a while to figure out what the fuck they were talking about. I'm a newsletter for God's sake. Well, it turned out I had published the firewall name and their indication was by printing the firewall name, I had breached the security of Harvard Net and revealed to everyone how to get in. Now you sit there and you chortle with your little fucking giggles. Dude, doesn't he understand? It's a firewall. No, he does not understand. He doesn't understand at all. He's near retirement in my case. He doesn't give a shit about this computer crap. He's got a nephew probably tells him that computers are fun. The initial response is fucking beat this rap in no time. The hard part is how do you tell a 64 year old judge that a firewall host name is perfectly okay to know about because it's not gonna breach the security and then you go into what, network maps? Here's my problem. So now I'm in a panic. I'm in an absolute panic. I don't have a lawyer that was probably the roughest night I've had in recent memory that didn't include kidney stones. I was just wrecked. I mean, you know, $120,000 was way more than they had paid me even in a year. The number, by the way, if in case you're wondering where it's $120,000, it cost them $60,000 to set up the firewall and purchase the software and the hardware and they were doubling it. The theory being that by publishing the host name, you know, I don't know, the firewall turned into a Sega Genesis and that was the end of that. Sonic going, come on in, we're open. So that was, I guess, the theoretical concept. So I had to find a lawyer. Now I'm going to say something which takes a little bit of the edge off my experience or you might think so. I had an individual who I will not name who mailed me and said, and this, this is like having a close to religious experience as one can have, I suppose. I hate Harvard Nets so much, I will pay all your legal fees until you are exonerated. Yeah, that was, he's a very pleasant fellow. That took a little bit of the edge off, obviously. So, you know, I could fight this. Now most people would go, ah, and you know, now what do you do? And I don't know, there aren't as many, well there's a good number of youth here. It's a little bit different when you're young and you're middle aged and you're old and it all depends on your perspective on things. What a company suing you for, what a, the experience of having a company say, we'd like to take a damn good shot at grabbing a house out of you. You know, some, when you're young, fuck off, that'll cover it, you know, and so on. And the older ones are like, I must settle immediately. And you know, and other people are like, you know, I'm going to eat a Remington right now. You know, so you have different opinions. Mine was, I must fight this. I am right, I'm completely right. So, a week had gone by. The hearing was in a week after that. Now, normally in the hearing, we might go, fine, you're right, whatever, we're not going to fight this. Not put up the firewall host name information and you know, go for the trial. But we didn't want to do that. I was given a lawyer. She's a very nice lady. Her name is Lucy Loverian and I will plug her because she was very good for my purposes and she, you know, she was very communicative, she was friendly, she thought about the stuff she wanted to learn. She knew nothing about networks, period. And initially, you'd think, you know, that's really bad. But actually, it's one thing when you have like slick hacker lawyer, a horrifying mutant that I will hope I never meet. The hacker lawyer. We have no vaccine. The, but you know, you'd have a slick back. You know, yeah, your judge, look on. I mean, look at this, it's a firewall host name. Who gives a shit? She was like, what is this thing? Tell me what it is. What is it like? What is it for? How does it work? Where are the problems? And I have to sit there and I have to enunciate out my entire defense instead of just going for shorthand, going, you know, whatever. So I met with her and she immediately said, we have to get affidavits. We have to find people who will say that this is not a big deal. We have to get people to show that you couldn't have known this information. We'll show things where you will, you know, you will say yourself how innocent you are and everything else. And we will present all these on that day in a week where we will make this happen. Now, my lawyers was one, you know, my lawyer was a lawyer. Their lawyer was Hale and Doar. Does anyone know Hale and Doar? No, one day you will. Hale and Doar are, no, they're not the McDonald's of law because that would probably be that Jacobian Myers thing. They're not the McDonald's of law. They're like the old style, no, they're the Microsoft of law. They really are. I hate that, what a shorthand, but they are. They have, they were Nixon's lawyers. No, no, no, it's okay, he's erasing everything, those guys. They're fucking huge. They have hundreds, hundreds of lawyers. They have powerful lawyers. They are a bunch of rabid, fucking wolf bastards who will eat each other alive to get to the top, meaning that the person that you are going up against, in my case, they tried to get a top guy, is some tarnished, a modeled, angry sort of a man who is just going to destroy you. I love them. I must repeat my disclaimer now. Anyway, so basically, the Hale and Doar people said several things in their letter. Now, if I'm worried about my heart rate, if I need my exercise back up, I just go back and read anything they wrote. You know, you know, Mr. Scott was privy to every machine name, password, application, network, that I was a UNIX guy. And they went, their thing indicates that I was the Uberman who ran everything, who quietly went away and began his terror campaign to destroy them from within. And, you know, this wasn't just simply not the case. For instance, the host name of the firewall had not been set till a month and a half after I'd left. Little things like that that just didn't quite work out that we had to put into the affidavit. We got a firewall guy to go, you know, it takes 20 minutes, let's say an hour, to set the new IP address for the firewall. And it will cost, if I charge $300 an hour, so it's not a $60,000 process. You know, and so on, all these things. And my boss, and this is something, my old boss, who was not privy to my being dismissed by the way, the manager over my boss dismissed me. He wasn't even in the office that day. He came in to find out he was down a guy. That's how connected he felt by the end. He submitted an affidavit. Now he is working for the company, and he submitted an affidavit going, the company is lying to you. The company is not telling the truth. They are attempting to screw him. It is not true. He wasn't really feeling all that secure anyway. But the thing about that little action though was the next day, well, okay, let's say at the hearing, when the hearing finally showed up, I didn't actually testify. When you're at a hearing like this, your lawyer generally does all the talking for you. I didn't even sit inside that stupid little fence. I actually sat out in the audience. The little sad look in my face and a big suit and just, oh, they made me wear a suit. And you had this guy, Daniel W. Hulston, the Esquire, who was their guy with his little toadie, Jeffrey, who, because one of the things they do is they have Primo lawyer and they have, lawyer, the little dog in a hack basically, who kinda follows them and can be there if there's a problem. It cost them, I think we were, we estimate it cost them $45,000 to have these two guys in the courtroom for four hours, including waiting time, and set things up. Enormous amount of money on their case. To do this, to get me. Things came out, my ISP called me and, hey, I heard you're having some legal trouble. Turned out they had called him the day before they filed the lawsuit to tell him to shut my machine off. Trading in on the fact the CEO had worked with the guy, had been an old business partner with him and said, hey, my old buddy, look, he just kinda shut this machine off, it's in your machine room. Which, by the way, is unbelievably illegal in Massachusetts. It's called restriction of someone's trade or something. It's actually, if you're in a case like this, have your lawyer look, everything that they did, because this came out of nowhere, that was gonna be one of our things. Well, the guy remembered that, hey, he'd done business with this guy, he didn't remember he'd really fucked him over. He'd forgotten, oh, my old buddy. Yeah, the one who desperately needed bandwidth at one point and I wouldn't even return his phone calls. And he went off and got his business up running anyway. So basically, that came out that they were doing that. I called up my easy DNS people because one of the things they said that I owned, harvardnetsucks.com, harvardnetsucks.org and harvardnetsucks.net, other people owned it. They had gone, it looks like a lot of fun to do. They put up a big picture of a pile of garbage and said, look at their machine room and so on. And easy DNS said, you know, some guys called up wondering about your address. I was like, really? What'd you tell them? He goes, why don't we tell them to fuck off? And I said, oh, and I said, hey, could you put that in the letter for me? And he went, hmm, no, fuck you. You're doing your stupid American shit, we don't care whatsoever. You show up in Canada with something, we'll talk to you. He's like, oh, we're not talking to nobody, nothing, nowhere about anything. I like that attitude. So easydns.com, very nice guys. I started to notice that I was getting a lot of hits to my site. One important thing was I did not shut down my site. I did not stop printing information. I did not stop putting things up. That was the important thing, because what they wanted to do was they wanted to shut off my dumb little site while they tried to go for the little IPO. And I was just not gonna have that. I started to put up really funny pictures. I found anytime someone said anything bad about them and put it up, I was a muck raker. And a muck raker can be a really fun thing. It's the thing that most companies are really scared of because muck rakers find all the, most companies, oh, I'm getting trouble for this, one or two companies. You always have skeletons in their closet because it is almost impossible to do business in America without doing something illegal. There is always something where you're supposed to sign this, do this, you're supposed to talk to this guy, you're supposed to open this up to the public, you're supposed to do this and you didn't because you had to get it in and Murphy got his $15,000 bonus and he all screwed it. No one's, who's gonna give a shit? That was two years ago, it was a network connection who gives a shit. Well, I give a shit now. I'm gonna go find out, I'm gonna print it. That was probably, that probably didn't actually enthuse them all that much. So I found out looking at my logs, I started to take a real interest in my logs, that there were a lot of connections from a machine that came in twice a day whose browser was listed as Mozilla Halendor. Fuckers had put it in their browser tag. They must have had like some, from my point of view, I think they must have had some sort of customized browser they paid for that was the special Halendor browser with a little like, you know, sue the fuck button or something, I don't know. So, you know, big judgment hammer or something, sue the bastard and they, you know, basically I noticed this and now they've submitted a second order. Believe it or not, they submitted a second order. I'm still not even off that first week, although it is a pretty tough week. Just before they submitted a second order because I had put up a thing going, we are being sued, everything must go. And I put the domain name up on eBay at like, with like a $300,000 secret minimum thing. So it was like, it was a joke, but it was just to prove a point, ha, ha. And hey, $300,000, I can do some with that. Pay those bastards off, go home. Anyway, they submitted a thing going according to Mr's, you know, because I said, you know, I wrote in a style which you might find surprising to be funny of, you know, all of our assets is pretty much our domain name and a few JPEGs. You know, so we've got to make money for these bastards who are suing us. And they submitted that in a court order and said, as is proven here, Mr. Scott has no known assets. Therefore, we need, you know, we will not allow him to sell off this asset of his domain name because we expect to receive it in a judgment. That's what I knew. I had to make them stop browsing my site. So, you know, there's this great thing and I started doing a lot of research. I knew this had to be possible in Apache. You can do things based on what comes to you. In other words, like you can go, oh, this, how do I say it? You know, like this IP address is coming in so give him this kind of page or if someone connects with this referer, send them to this page and so on and so on. If anyone from Hail and Door browsed in, I'd send them to the ACLU. No, they come in, ACLU page. The hits stopped after a while. They'd kind of come back like once a month or something just to check. That's how I knew when the checks had stopped coming to them because I could see when it, you know, they stopped even trying. But that kind of stopped them for a while and I was almost proud of myself. Their humorlessness is unbelievable but you know, that's the thing you have to realize is that the minuté of hackerdom is very actually similar to the minuté of lawyerdom and lawyers have these funny little things they do. For instance, my lawyer would give the other guys my entire defense an hour and a half before the court case. This was something that was done and they did the same. They're like, here's your defense. Got an hour and a half to do it and the thing I will credit Mr. Halstead, the model sword guy, is he would produce out of his flaming ass the most amazing things up on the stand. He would just go, based on what I just read. For instance, we had said, just as a small example, I don't want to get too much into the minuté of that because it's just typical, just, you know, minds bigger. And one of the things that we said was, was, you know, the non-disclosure agreement doesn't cover the firewall host name because it's public information. And they said, Mr. Scott does not dispute the legality and validity of our non-disclosure agreement. Well, yes, technically that's true. Your non-relevant document is probably really sound. But that's what, you know, and what do you do? You want to scream that from the back and you can't. So we had our hearing. And at our hearing, we presented our affidavits and this guy stood up and just tried to slam us and said, you know, your honor, this thing. And this guy, the judge, Judge Julian was just, he was an older gentleman, he was nearing retirement. This was the last thing he went on his plate. But I got to hear a beautiful old baritone go, so tell me more about this, Harvard net sucks. What sort of site is this? And he actually even got a little, like, ringer off at one point. My lawyer was like, this is a total, you know, this is a total prior restraint of his First Amendment. And he's like, I'm well aware of First Amendment defenses. Anyway, he, I'm well aware of the First Amendment. The, in the case, he took all of our stuff and it's not like TV, they don't just go, thanks, Matlock, here's my slam credits. No, it's not like that. They said, we'll take this under consideration, you'll get the decision in the mail. At which point, it will happen at some point. So I was in a twilight zone for about a month. The next day, fucked company, took a very big interest in this because my boss, my ex-boss had done this and Pudd thought this was the greatest thing in the world. Does everyone here wear a fucked company dot com? Well, that explains the 15,000 different sites that came to me the next day. Now everyone knew that Harvard Net sucks. They, you know, everybody was in on this. Now, I was getting contacts from the Boston, Boston, Boston Herald wanted to talk to me. I got other people who wanted to like go, hey, you know, I can't believe this. I haven't worked that company year. They're still fuckers. Holy shit, I hate them and so on. I became this, you know, broken promises. And I had set it up so that all mail addresses came to me. So of course, every time I published a story, I'd give a different email address. You know, like the correction site was, you fucked up at Harvard Net sucks. And, you know, I'd go like, hey, you know, like write to me if you know of the good lawyers. And I would say lies, lies, lies at Harvard Net sucks. And, you know, I was a very funny little revolutionary. So for that three weeks, I was kind of publishing things kind of in this, you know, just basically floating, waiting for the decision. Will I get the decision? Will they deny it? Now, keep in mind, this is not the trial. This is just my response to them trying to get a temporary restraining order against me for publishing the host name before they sue me for $120,000. So we're already like nine grand in the hole. Just doing that. Just saying, no, chitching. That's why when someone goes, I'm gonna sue your ass. He better be a lawyer or sleeping with one because he, it's gonna cost him a lot of money. Now there are a breed of lawyers who will make a deal, a very interesting deal. I will do your case for free and take half of what you win. Get away from those guys. They're like the thing that comes at the end of a video game level to make you stop playing that level because you've been playing it for too long. They're not gonna give up and they're gonna come up with everything, but most times when you go to a lawyer, a lawyer will go, I don't even think you should be taking this case on. You're just suing the guy because you hate him. Well, our guy, Harvard Net was funded by Fidelity Investments and Fidelity Investments doesn't care about money. I mean, other than that's coming in a lot. But they weren't really all hurt by 45 grand, it's just retainer. It's like, go ahead, whatever you gotta do, make it happen, I don't care. So there was a lot of money behind it. However, they were a little bit displeased that this Harvard Net suck site was starting to get some publicity even though it was web publicity which they don't really acknowledge. But then the interview started. I got into an interview with Tom Kerchoffer at the Boston Herald. I actually had my lawyer in the office. I was submitting stories, but each time I submitted a story, I submitted it to my lawyer. My lawyer would look at it and go, yeah, you probably won't get sued, sorry, it doesn't look all that actionable. And then, up it would go. So I'm funny after it goes through my team of lawyer. And she also became our legal staff, by the way. So gotta keep that up. And so those three weeks were pretty unpleasant. I mean, it's nice that I'm being covered and all that stuff, it's a very unpleasant experience when you just know there's this thing hanging over your head. And I do wanna say, if you ever do get into one of these things, they are long drawn out, stupid ass things that last for like an hour and a half every six months and can go on for years and years and years unless somebody pulls an amazing amount of strings at which point you probably got other problems anyway. They're probably gonna come to, if they're pulling strings that fast, they probably wanna talk to you and you're gonna talk to them. So you can't let yourself just put your life into a parking brake and just hope and go, oh, life is horrible. Cause you just, it's, they're winning. They're killing you. They're actually killing you. One piece of advice I have just don't do that. Don't fall into that trap of letting them crush you like that. The actual hearing that I'm talking about sorry, lost my, completely lost my train of thought. Basically three weeks later, he came back with a response, the judge in which he said, they are completely denied. Basically he looked at all the stuff we'd written. He said, you're right. This host name stuff is bullshit. You shouldn't have a restraining order against you. So I'd won. And everyone, everyone who looked at it right, they were like, you won. I'm like, yes. In the process of falling off a cliff, I was able to pull up my pants so I had some dignity. The, you know, I put up the host name like, I did not put up the host name actually the next day. I said, you know, we could put up their stupid ass host name, but it's lame and it's stupid. So we're not going to do that. It actually had, I remember this now, it had the brand name of the firewall product as the host name. That's right, assholes. Anyway, he kind of blocked those little dumb details out. One other thing, they fired my ex-boss two days later. So basically they brought him into a little room and said, what did you do? As I understood it, you know, at this point now, I am the lightning rod for all hate of Harvard net that has ever been. I am getting phone calls and emails from people that's going, here's what they're doing today. Here's what they're up to, here's what they said. This letter went by, I couldn't print half the stuff. And I'm not gonna say it here because it may or may not be true, but horrible things were implied and horrible things happened and laws were broken and yada, yada, yada. There was, I was getting a lot of info. I was the gossip man, but I just couldn't print some of it because it was just impossible. I also did not have a message base. That's also a mistake to me. A message base is just an invitation for everybody else to go to the windows of your house and moon everybody that goes by. You know, they know where you are. You know, they don't know where Dark Ninja is. Or CEO sucks cock. You know, they don't know where he is. Which is why in a way I was kind of delighted about Fucked Company. Because Fucked Company had just put in a new feature where you could post messages. And they had got an average of 100 to 200 messages per fuck, as he puts it. 15 to 30, whatever. We got 3,000. It was enough where PUD came in at like 2,000. I went, holy shit, this thing's flying. And there was so much vitro. There was so much, you know, people were like, hey, you know, we didn't get our bonus checks this year. So better go to the CEO's house at this, you know, address, ask for your checks and call ahead. Here's his home phone number and his cell phone. And I'm like, I never posted on that board ever, ever. I thought it was just too much danger for me to do. But I took great delight in sometimes taking some of the classics and putting them up on my site. So I was kind of using it as a filter going, look what that guy's doing over there. But you know, I mean, PUD to me is just on the edge. The man is gonna get whacked. It's just a matter of when. Not whacked, bang, but you know, whacked letters. Letters from, I'm sure he does already. But they're usually cease and desist letters. Which by now hackers and web people are becoming so enured to, because they're just this pathetic little whatever. By the way, if somebody emails you a cease and desist, fuck them. Okay, so that's not, it's nothing real. I mean, it's really funny when you talk to a lawyer and you start presenting them the things that you know, they will like look at stuff that you were like, man, I'm really, you're like, where's the notary? Where's the signature? Did you have to sign for your email? No, fuck them. You got a random email from God knows who about, God knows what, delete it. So, you know, a lawyer who's on your side can give you a very good perspective. One other important thing, the lawyer on the other side under no circumstances in any situation is your friend. And people forget that. That the guy really, really, really wants to win his case under any circumstance whatsoever. Prosecute, public defenders are a whole other deal. That's a whole other weird wacky thing you're 12, you knocked over a headstone or whatever. The guy might go look, we'll, whatever, we'll negotiate it down. But lawyer hired by big company under no circumstance wants the other guy to feel good about anything. They wanted me, when they saw this $120,000 number to come crying into their little area and they go, you've been a bad little man. Together, I think we can work something out and make me sign everything, sign away the life of myself and everyone around me because that's what the CEO wanted. Now, when I was denied, now I'm still now technically sued. I'm just loose, free. And that's when my friends started trying to get different newspapers to interview me. The Boston Herald interviewed me, like I said, with my lawyer right next to me. And I'd be like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, that's not how that they suck. And she's like, don't say that. It's really weird, it's like having the angriest angel on your shoulder. No, no, no. You know, she's trying to do right by me, but you gotta kinda dig it or they're just gonna go, oh look, it's another bland lawyer filtered press conference. So it was this weird balance I had to stick in my own mind. The first article was finally published. All right in the book Harvard net suicide owner with a quote from my lawyer, which was kind of freaky wasn't it? You know, it's like here's a guy who's being sued. Here's what his lawyer has to say I always think that's kind of wacky. Um one aspect of this that did come out by the way was that I started becoming a Source they went he knows a lot about Harvard nets. They all started calling me up and going hey, what's going on over there? I wouldn't know. Oh, it's horrible. I think they're hot in the fire they And you know, they go sources said fire. I Was gonna get this big shirt says sources said I am the source and Then the real killer came in that's when it by the way. I found out nobody reads the goddamn Boston Herald. I Really thought that wasn't the case But nobody reads the Boston Herald no reaction. Nothing. Nobody gave a damn shit about the Boston Herald I was like who I'm in the paper, but no nobody nobody called and went. Oh my god. Oh my god. Now. You're at the big time You're in the Boston Herald So we were really trying for the globe who's like if you're not a well Boston Boston Newspaper set up, you know like every other place. There's the Boston Globe, which is now by the New York Times Boston Herald, which is the yeah, Southie kind of place and then there's everybody else Including like and every other one else has to give themselves away for free and stick themselves in doorway So you'll trip over them and maybe read the headline or something So it's it's basically globe the globe was hosted at Harvard net I'm not giving away any secret because they had made a deal with Harvard Harvard Net lost money on the globe because the the the globe they put ads for themselves They got to put free ads on the web pages that were being served by this newspaper Never on a story. It was a weird rule But when they showed a story you didn't see it But like, you know, here's the stories that are up here. We're hosted by Harvard net, you know So that was we were like we really want to get in that paper and we did I got a call from a guy named Alex beam who was a columnist and Alex beam called me up and I was in San Francisco on a business trip and We get the call like hey, he wants to talk to you So I'm talking to the guy on a cell phone in the hallway during a training session With my lawyer on the line Not a three-way call Who was like wait wait? He said and He was I talked no that was right. No, I'm wrong. I'm wrong. That's the one where I talked to him first then talked to her So what did you say when they said this? I said it was something like what exactly did you say? Jason you're going to destroy everything. I didn't go into that training session learn very much that day But let me tell you Alex beam printed the nastiest fucking column It was called stuck in the web of bad publicity And it was up on like the fourth fifth page and it was like how could you know like how could Harvard net be so Goddamn stupid as the sewer guy for nothing Because they think they want to shut him up. Haven't they heard of the First Amendment? Congratulations, you've turned Jason Scott into a First Amendment martyr, you know You know, what kind of place is this and it was of course hosted by Harvard net The next day they dropped the case next day we get a letter and The letter by the way the lawyers gave up nothing. They gave it they they they This is this is the in this is the entire letter. I got Whereas the defendant is no longer posting any firewall information on his website Harvard net incorporated hereby Voluntarily dismisses the above caption to action without prejudice pursuant to this law What they've said was they dismissed it without prejudice. What the fuck is that? I found out that without prejudice means we're just dropping it because we feel like it We're not admitting. We were wrong. We're not admitting. We were right. We were just we were doing it You know, we were dating and now we're not What it means is that they are allowed to start it up on a moment's notice anytime they want to Just this thing hanging over your head. They weren't going to as it turns out But they did this to you know, they basically they did this is hailing door. This is hailing door going no No, no, don't just give up give up kicking their ass all the way out the door So that's what the kind of places they work at so they dropped the case Immediately now the Boston Globe the way I found out that people read the Boston Globe was I got a call from my dad. I Hadn't told my parents about this shit I got two letters my parents are divorced one from my mother one for my father My father said hey someone wrote to me and said you're in the Boston Globe for something He said you were a chip off the old block. What's up with that? oops And my mother said I heard you were sued or something, but that you're a First Amendment martyr, so I guess that's okay complete different a thing so So then I finally it's nicer to be able to tell your parents about the lawsuit that just happened as opposed to the one That's about to happen. So that was nice now. They dropped it now. We're out by that time I think we're out nineteen thousand dollars For this action action all these sets of actions So, you know people like yeah, dude, you're wanting everything. It's like I didn't really win I bought a suburban minivan and drove it off a cliff You know, I mean it was hardly a great, you know a great wondrous thing A month later. Oh Two days later, they allow access to my site again They open it up the firewall because they had never changed the hostname since this happened They open it up The next day they also I use the thing called domain surfer type in a word and see every domain with that word I haven't type in Harvard net they had registered 36 anti Harvard net names Each net is a joke each net sucks each net blows each net whatever like they'd registered You know comnet org of everything they spent like three four grand registering every anti Harvard that name They could come up with it was kind of odd And Let's see Two weeks later They laid off 200 people Which we all knew was gonna happen. They were a DSL company and They did it laying everyone off going, you know, everything's gonna, you know, the DSL company is going downhill as opposed to everything sucks What's up, man? Gotta wrap it up. Okay? Basically When I came what I came away from this thing was bitter I came away from this not really enjoying the entire experience but one thing I did learn was Every action you do there is a certain group of people out there who Have no humor who are paid to make you unhappy who will do anything a large corporation tells them to So when you do in action, you're not just what's the word? You're not just working in a vacuum and isn't it funny and the other thing is you got to lose the myopia You got to go they're gonna know I'm just sending a few pings out through UDP who gives a shit You know, you know, they're gonna go. What are you talking about? Why are you not in jail now and the thing that really most bothered me was a couple people I'd say yeah, I ran Harvard net sucks calm and they go and I go I got sued and people go. Yeah, of course You know and on a certain level. It's like, you know that people just go well, of course you said they sucks Of course, they should sue you, you know And that kind of opinion was something I had to to heavily heavily fight against and one last thing I did want to mention because I didn't mention it during the thing my entire court case as a result of its technical Aspects was fought as a metaphor and that is the most frustrating aspect of my entire case I had to sit as two lawyers my lawyer and their lawyer talked in metaphors They never said the fire the firewall is like a Putting the home address of Harvard net up on a billboard for everyone to see as they drive by and My lawyer had to respond with her metaphor And then they would immediately respond in highly technical fashions to the metaphor You know well bulletin boards by their very nature are set to as advertising that no What we said was the fire. This is this was our defense in case you need it The firewall publishing the hosting of a firewall is like telling people where Fort Knox is rather you not know But you're not gonna get the gold bars based on that So just you know this isn't this was us sweating for hours trying to cope with how do you say it like that and You know The courts are nowhere near where we are in terms of like technical knowledge Which in fact is a good thing because if you ever one of the things you do when you're sitting in the court case Is you get to sit through a highly technical plumbing case? Give a shit about plumbing or contracting that was one there was one that was like this the fifth year of An accident this woman had been in her husband hadn't even shown up to this one He'd broken a leg five years ago. They were trying to get four grand They were settling for one After five years and of that no they had no it was they had 12 grand that was coming to them of which 11,000 was going to legal fees You know so this kind of crap is happening to everyone not just us anyway, so there's my there's my entire Legal narrative. Don't go to court with it. Just think about it. Anyway, they go