Eideard

An Ohio judge taken off a high-profile murder trial has dropped her $50 million lawsuit against a Cleveland newspaper and reached an undisclosed financial settlement with an affiliated company that runs the publication’s website.

Cuyahoga County Judge Common Pleas Judge Shirley Strickland Saffold and her adult daughter filed their lawsuit against The Plain Dealer, its parent company and the website operator in April over anonymous comments on the site that the newspaper said were traced to Saffold’s personal e-mail.

The inflammatory comments concerned the case of Anthony Sowell, a man who has pleaded not guilty to killing 11 women whose remains were found around his Cleveland home.

After the newspaper reported that the comments, including one critical of a Sowell attorney, had been connected to the judge, the defense team sought to have her removed from Sowell’s case. The Ohio Supreme Court agreed to do so, saying her removal was needed to avoid the appearance of bias.

The judge denied posting the comments and said they came from her daughter, Sydney Saffold, using a joint family account.

The Saffolds sued, claiming that the defendants released confidential information in violation of the website privacy policy. The suit was dismissed Thursday, said Brian Spitz, an attorney for the judge and her daughter. “We filed a suit that was for a very important cause and that my clients believed in very deeply and felt like fighting through until they got the resolution that they wanted,” Spitz told The Associated Press on Friday. “At the end of the day, my clients were very happy…”

An online editor decided to track down the e-mail address associated with the comments without consulting anyone, The Plain Dealer had said. Advance Internet later blocked editors’ access to the personal information of people who posted comments and said it never intended to make that information available to its affiliated newspapers.

Anyone here who comments regularly on the Web probably has a strong opinion about privacy rights – whether you avail yourself of them or not.

Site after site identifies email information as private. Violating that confidence is reasonably sleazy. An act for which the Plain Dealer has had to pony up an unpublished amount of money.

This week the media ignored a study looking at that exact question. It was also one of the most important papers to be published this year: only one in five trials on cancer treatment actually gets published; the rest are missing in action. And it gets worse: only 5.9% of industry-sponsored trials on cancer treatment get published. Later, it will get worse again.

For decades people have known that negative results tend not to get printed in academic journals, and it can happen for all kinds of reasons: they’re not newsworthy, they’re not much fun to write up, they don’t look good on your CV, and they might not flatter your idea or product.

One suggestion which I bang on about incessantly is that all clinical trials should be registered before they begin: then people stand a chance of noticing if and when a trial goes missing in action. This took about 20 years to be put into practice. But there is a problem: who will chase up the missing studies?
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Court cases are a wonderful thing because almost all the evidence and filings become public record. The Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority is suing MIT University and three students for hacking its fare system. The three students, Zack Anderson, 21, Alessandro Chiesa, 20 and Russell”RJ” Ryan, 22, were also hit with a temporary restraining order that forbids them from giving their scheduled speech at Defcon. But unfortunately for the MBTA, its attorneys included a confidential white paper about the hack … a paper that was supposed to be, well, confidential. [It's at the bottom of the article]

Electronic Frontier Foundation attorneys and the students held a press conference Saturday afternoon to inform attendees that the talk was canceled.

The injunction is specifically against the three students and MIT University, so someone else could give a talk about the hack. In addition, since the MBTA is the organization that was granted the injunction, the students could possibly talk about another subway system. Attendees laughed and cheered when Defcon officials announced that they are seeking some “creative” ways to fill the now empty Sunday afternoon slot.

Meanwhile, the ‘secret’ hack is now public. Someone could just stand there and read the court filing aloud.