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Tonight, I received an email complaint from Elbox concerning this article in the Forum section. Read more below.
The posting in question included code allegedly taken from a disassembled Elbox usb.device. However, no sufficient proof could be provided that this code indeed exists. On the other hand, there is no firm proof that the accusations made in the thread are not true. While the act of publishing code that seems to be derived from copyrighted material could be considered abusive and unlawful in some countries, code such as the one described in the article would be more harmful to the end user, and also punishable by law.
Elbox requested that the entire posting and all comments be removed, mentioned one of my advertisers, cited my hosting provider's Terms of Service and a non-existent "ANN netiquette" in what I consider as an attempt to blackmail me into removing all traces of criticism about their company and products.
I am complying with their request to the extent that I removed the posted code, even if no sufficient proof was provided that this code is indeed copyrighted by Elbox, or that any allegations made in the post are not true.
I will, however, not comply with their requests to remove the rest of the posting, or all of the comments added to the posting.
This posting was moved into the Forum section that is not displayed on ANN's main page by default. Visitors who go there need to click an explicit link and are well aware that content in the Forum or Unmoderated sections might not have been verified for accuracy or abuse, or contain content that might for any other reason be questionable. I did not remove the article in question at the time it was posted, because it made a valid objection that until now was not proven to be untrue, and because I was hoping that somebody would come up with an explanation in the comments.
The fact that Elbox does not seem to want to discuss things in an open manner, and seems to prefer to refer to blackmailing techniques to hide all evidence of criticism on a website, is slightly disheartening, but I am not willing to just remove an entire posting with serious allegations about code that could lead to severe damage and money loss, without any further explanation.
Until now, I did not have any contact with Elbox, and am neither a Elbox customer nor an owner of a competing product; and do not have any business that is even remotely connected to Elbox, or benefits in any way from whatever is posted here. It is my opinion that I am handling this incident in the most straightforward and objective way. Please discuss.
PS. Note that Elbox did not claim that the posted code was owned by them, only that if this was the case, we would be looking at a copyright violation. While this is a thin line, one has to realize that this is not an admission of ownership, or guilt.
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