Diablo fingered in offensive ASCII art trial doc shock

Editing an image of redacted document included in the Netlist-Diablo trial appears to show a raised middle finger ASCII graphic.

Michael Takefman is a chief architect for Diablo Technologies. In one redacted court document extract we have seen, a blacked-out graphic reveals a text representation of a middle-finger gesture when worked on with an image processing app.

The document concerns Netlist's opposition to a Diablo move to have certain items excluded from court hearings. One item is the "FUN DIMM" emails, in which Takefman referred to its TeraDIMM technology as the "FU/N DIMM". He explained in questioning that this meant Flash Unification DIMM. When the name TeraDIMM began to be used, Takefman sent an email about the FUN DIMM which contained the graphic.

Here’s the raw document image:

Page 21 of redacted document showing blacked out graphic in centre.

Page 21 of the document reads: "The graphic appears to depict a hand with the middle-finger upraised, a commonly recognized gesture which corroborates the 'F*** you' interpretation of 'FU'."

If we play around with a photo-editor and lighten the redacted graphic image in various cunning ways, this is what we get:

See the upraised middle finger in ASCII-like text?

It looks like ASCII characters. Making the image smaller makes it clearer. Here is an image of the whole page with the processed graphic in the centre:

Page with image-processed graphic. Certainly looks like a middle finger gesture.

Netlist alleges that this graphic indicates a Diablo view that they were giving the middle finger to Netlist. Diablo disputes this interpretation of the Takefman email and the FUN DIMM naming.

The case, number 4:2013-cv-05962 in the Northern District court in California, is ongoing. ®