crime
Unprecedented 25-Year Sentence Sought for TJX Hacker
Computer hacker Albert Gonzalez deserves a quarter-century behind bars for leading a gang of cyberthieves who stole tens of millions of credit and debit card numbers from a transaction processor and several giant retail chains, federal prosecutors argued in a court filing Thursday night. “[T]he sentences would be the longest ever imposed in an identity theft case and among the longest imposed for a financial crime, which is appropriate because Gonzalez was at the center of the largest and most costly series of identity thefts in the nation’s history,” wrote Boston-based Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Heymann.
Continue reading »Court: State Can Dump Non-Sex Offenders Into Registry
Georgia’s Supreme Court is upholding the government’s right to put non-sex offenders on the state’s sex-offender registry, highlighting a little-noticed (but growing) nationwide practice. Atlanta criminal defense attorney Ann Marie Fitz estimated that perhaps thousands of convicts convicted of non-sexual crimes have been placed in sex-offender databases. Fitz represents a convict who was charged with false imprisonment when he was 18 for briefly detaining a 17-year-old girl during a soured drug deal.
Continue reading »Sweden Probing Cisco, NASA Hacks
Swedish investigators are probing a hacker U.S. authorities accuse of unlawfully intruding into Cisco Systems, NASA’s Ames Research Center and NASA’s Advanced Supercomputing Division, the authorities said Monday. Philip Gabriel Pettersson, known in the hacking world as “ Stakkato ,” allegedly seized computer code that controls internet traffic.
Continue reading »Furious Copyright Holder Harasses Torrent Site Admins
Normally the issuing of a DMCA takedown request would hardly be newsworthy event, but every year a few surface that are worth mentioning. The Pirate Bay, for example, have published some of their most notable conversations with copyright holders on their site. These exchanges often started off politely but later turned into an email fight when it became clear that The Pirate Bay didn’t intend on removing any torrents from their site.
Continue reading »After The Pirate Bay, Web Sheriff Takes On Jamie Oliver
Early 2008, the Web Sheriff, aka John Giacobbi, launched an assault on the operators of The Pirate Bay. The Sheriff threatened legal action in both Sweden and the US, but despite all the bluster, that’s the last we heard of it. Now, nearly two years later, Giacobbi moves away from the Swedish torrent chefs, instead pointing the finger at the British cook Jamie Oliver.
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