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Contacting Scott's family
Oct. 09, 2011, 02:19 PM
Post: #1
Contacting Scott's family
Hi everyone,

I'm a film student and in the process of doing a video on privacy infringement. I know by law that I don't need to request permission to use a product that's no longer supported by its author, but I would like to seek permission from the family just the same. Does anyone know how I can contact them? Thanks.
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Oct. 12, 2011, 04:23 PM
Post: #2
RE: Contacting Scott's family
A 128 of you viewed this post but none of you know how to get in touch with his family? Well, I guess I'll have to go forward without their blessing and try to lift Proxomitron up in the best light.

Hopefully if Scott's family sees this post... that you know that I have high respect for what Scott did with Proxomitron. He will always be a legend among many people and never forgotten.
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Oct. 13, 2011, 12:02 AM
Post: #3
RE: Contacting Scott's family
i've no knowledge of Scott's family whereabouts or if they even know anything about his Proxomitron (if i passed on, i have zero doubt that any-and-all source code projects on any of my computers would simply be formatted over and have the operating systems reinstalled anew by their new owners)...

my hunch is that it is legal to "go forward", so to speak...
but i'm no lawyer, so your guess is as good as mine...
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Oct. 13, 2011, 10:13 AM (This post was last modified: Oct. 13, 2011 10:16 AM by Mele20.)
Post: #4
RE: Contacting Scott's family
Scott's sister contacted Paul Laudanski, owner of the defunct Computer Cops/Castle Cops website, about a month after Scott died to let Paul know. Scott's official Proxo forum was hosted at Castle Cops and they were friends also. In the aftermath of Scott's passing it became clear that his sister and the rest of the family had little to no knowledge regarding Proxo and the great legacy he left to all of us. There was some discussion regarding approaching his sister about possibly licensing the code to Paul as a representative of the Proxomitron community so that Proxo could be further developed in the future but that was never acted on. Scott's forum and several other Proxo forums hosted at Castle Cops continued to function and were all quite active until the moment Paul killed Castle Cops.

If anyone would know how to reach Scott's family I think it would be Paul who would have contact information. He closed Castlecops to go to work for Microsoft but he left there and currently is employed with Eset USA (NOD32 antivirus) as far as I know.

If you decide to contact Paul bear in mind that when he suddenly closed Castlecops, he refused to allow the Way Back Machine to make a copy of the website. Thus, Scott's forum, Sidki's and other Proxo forums there were gone forever. Kye-U would have mirrored Scott's forum here but Paul gave no one any warning that he was shutting down Castlecops. That has always puzzled me given that he and Scott were supposedly good friends why did he not allow someone to save his forum for posterity? I mention this because perhaps Paul would not be amenable to helping you contact Scott's family but then again maybe he would be.
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Oct. 13, 2011, 02:55 PM
Post: #5
RE: Contacting Scott's family
(Oct. 13, 2011 10:13 AM)Mele20 Wrote:  In the aftermath of Scott's passing it became clear that his sister and the rest of the family had little to no knowledge regarding Proxo and the great legacy he left to all of us.

that's about what i'd expect...
wouldn't the same occur for each and every one of us?

our computers would become "hand-me-downs" going to whichever relative needed one and the first thing they would do is reformat/reinstall, wiping out anything and everything... the hand-me-down recipient might look through the "My Documents" folder, but how much further than that would they go? with the size of hard drives, do we honestly expect "heirs" to go through every "byte" and see if there is something there that is "sellable"? not likely...
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Oct. 14, 2011, 12:44 AM
Post: #6
RE: Contacting Scott's family
Thank you, for all of your responces. If Paul was unwilling to share when CastleCops closed, he likely is unwilling now. With such a quick takedown of the site, it sure stirs some thoughts about his actions. Maybe one day he'll share what really happened behind those closed doors.

Someone told me something about a program called Proximodo to continue Scott's work. I checked the site but it looks dead (copyright to 2005). Does anyone have information about this?
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Oct. 14, 2011, 11:01 AM
Post: #7
RE: Contacting Scott's family
(Oct. 14, 2011 12:44 AM)Prox_2010 Wrote:  With such a quick takedown of the site, it sure stirs some thoughts about his actions. Maybe one day he'll share what really happened behind those closed doors.

i personally see no reason why he should share what happened behind closed doors - it was HIS web site, HIS decision to close it, not "ours"...

yes, it was abrupt and that seems unsettling to "us", but it was HIS to take down...

could be any number of reasons - from a condition of Microsoft employment, from the web site simply becoming an "addiction" and taking over his life to the point where "cold turkey" was the only way to "break free", from constant attacks/exploits from "hackers" trying to shut him down, et cetera...

it's really none of "our" business why he took the site down...
while disappointing, it was HIS...

Proxo was really only a very small part of CastleCops...
pretty much every "hacker" on the planet was against the CastleCops "agenda"...
fending "them" off was a full-time job in and of itself, no doubt in my mind...
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Oct. 14, 2011, 01:58 PM
Post: #8
RE: Contacting Scott's family
I was thinking of your first reason stated because MS hates anything they can't control (control goes to the user). That's why I said he might share in the future, should he ever leave - but it's really all speculation and subjective until (or IF) then.

Is there a way to know how many users still use Proxomitron? Someone said at one time there were thousands possibly more and now it's hard to find others who even heard about it.
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Oct. 14, 2011, 04:44 PM
Post: #9
RE: Contacting Scott's family
(Oct. 14, 2011 01:58 PM)Prox_2010 Wrote:  Is there a way to know how many users still use Proxomitron?

tough one to answer...
no clue...


i suspect there's many from the "old days" that still *USE* Proxo, but know it well enough to be "self-sufficient" and no longer need a forum for Q-and-A...
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Oct. 15, 2011, 10:01 AM (This post was last modified: Oct. 15, 2011 10:02 AM by Mele20.)
Post: #10
RE: Contacting Scott's family
Sidki said here before he left that we were down to about 1000 users and that each year he had observed fewer and fewer using Proxo but I don't know how he arrived at that number. I guess he was referring to the number of downloads from his site of the latest config set but, of course, not all Proxo users use Sidki's configs and many never come to this forum so it is hard to estimate how many users there are today. I promote Proxo any chance I get as I consider it the one program I would never want to be without.

As for Paul, I refreshed my memory. Paul was required by Microsoft to divulge himself of Castlecops and he and Robin tried to sell the site which spawned anxiety and resentment among its users as there was the fear that whoever bought it would sell our email addresses to spammers. There was also the fear that the money many of us sent to Paul (including myself) for purchase of new servers to help with the frequent DDoS of the site would just go into Paul's personal pocket and that our full names and addresses (I sent a check by snail mail as I refuse to ever again use PayPal..got burned by them years ago) would also get sold to the highest bidder.

What actually happened was that if there were interested buyers Paul didn't want to sell to them and he had no other recourse but to shut the site down after it ran for awhile without him but continued to have DDoS attacks. He refunded the money sent by users for new servers but only if it was sent via PayPal. For folks like me where he said he had not kept a record of our addresses he turned the money over to a web consortium that had helped during the DDoS attacks.

My only beef at the end was that he did not allow Kye-U to mirror the Proxo forums here before he shut down and because he also refused to allow the Way Back Machine to mirror the site everything was lost. That I still do not understand why and would love some day to know why. As I said earlier, Paul is no longer employed by Microsoft. In December 2010 he was appointed director of ESET’s Cyber Threat Analysis Center in San Diego.
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Oct. 16, 2011, 04:35 AM
Post: #11
RE: Contacting Scott's family
That's really interesting and not surprised by Microsoft’s requirement. But all that information… just gone, wow… and only a 1000 users. I guess people in general are under the false impression that they can’t use the software since it’s no longer being updated. Hmmm, interesting indeed.
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Oct. 16, 2011, 12:05 PM
Post: #12
RE: Contacting Scott's family
http://prxbx.com/forums/showthread.php?t...0#pid15220 Wink
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Oct. 17, 2011, 12:39 AM
Post: #13
RE: Contacting Scott's family
Ahh..so that's where I saw about Paul's latest job. But you don't expect me to remember a thread from a year ago do you? Not too likely at my age. Wink
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