Now although I have only superficial understanding of the case at stake I believe the author nonetheless (but with a weak certainty until I hear the other side).
> The authorship or control of these accounts has consistently been strenuously denied by Dr Garrett. I have no evidence from the Defendants to support it. Instead, they necessarily rely on an inferential case built on a limited number of pleaded facts, some of which are undisputed. I consider them in turn.
There were not _witness statements_ presented by the defense in support of myriad facts, but it's not like the case for the defense wasn't made at all.
I could do with £70,000 - I'm suing you for your comment of making me jealous of £70k.
Trying to bankrupt them with defamation lawsuits does not help.
As a side note, my organization FFII eV was sued for defamation for criticizing patent trolling companies in the past:
https://edri.org/our-work/edrigramnumber3-16ffii/
My position was always to correct the statements, stick to the facts, and avoid wasting money on lawyers.
The way English court costs work is that if someone offers a settlement that would be more favourable than the court eventually orders (ie, the defendant could have settled for less than the damages the court orders, or the claimant could have settled for more than the damages the court orders) and that settlement is refused, then additional damages and costs are due as a consequence of refusing the early settlement offer and costing everyone more money. But for this to work, the court cannot be told about the settlement offer until afterwards - otherwise the judge could be influenced. As a result, there won't be any discussion of settlement offers in the judgement.
(This does have an unfortunate consequence - a defendant who wants to keep a case out of court can make a settlement offer that's higher than the court is likely to offer, and if the claimant refuses then the entire exercise ends up being much more expensive)
He goes from, 11 seconds is a big gap to, anything within 90 seconds could be the same person.
The real question is, how often did the timeouts coincide.
But honestly, anyone who ever spent any amount of time on IRC is used to seeing 50 people drop from a channel at once. That was usually due to netsplits, which isn't the case here since there was only one IRC server involved, but that wasn't the only cause. "Uh-oh, the IRC server got too laggy and couldn't service all requests within the configured timeout. Time to disconnect everyone!"
The article also shows that there's a 40 second delta between the harassing account and the harassed person himself, further semonstrating this doesn't mean anything and can happen purely by chance
