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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 »Web-Lockers Next in Line on UK Politicians’ Black List
Engaged in an overwhelming battle against online piracy they are planning to win, the UK government has not been taking the best decisions lately as we already noted in a previous post this week. After the politicians’ intention to alter the Digital Economy Bill by introducing a regulation that empowered judges to block access to a specific website if suspected to promote copyright infringement caused a wave of public discontentment, the UK government tried to fix things but only managed to come up with yet another outrageous solution. In fact, the “reassessed” proposal announced by politicians may have an even more pronounced negative impact on perfectly legitimate online resources, as Cory Doctorow describes in his write up in The Guardian : “As our routine media files have increased in size – multi-megapixel images, home videos, audio recordings of meetings and so on – it's become increasingly difficult to use email to share data privately with family, friends and colleagues, because most email servers croak over really big files.
Continue reading »USTR on ACTA: “Not Seeking P2P Penalties Beyond US Law”
US Trade Representative Ron Kirk responds to written questions from Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), telling him that “we are not seeking any obligations that go beyond US law concerning termination of repeat infringers, monitoring of online behavior, or expeditious receipt by copyright holders of information concerning alleged infringers.” US Trade Representative Ron Kirk has responded to questions from Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) regarding the highly controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement in a letter recently published on the USTR’s site for public viewing. Senator Wyden, chair of the Senate Subcommittee on International Trade, Customs, and Global Competitiveness, had asked Kirk for details on variety of copyright infringement proposals currently being discussed. Specifically, he asked what sort of “legal incentives” he’s seeking to encourage ISPs to cooperate with copyright holders to deter illegal file-sharing.
Continue reading »Military Monitored Planned Parenthood, Supremacists
The U.S. military monitored Planned Parenthood and a white supremacist group as part of the government’s security preparations for the 2002 Olympics in Utah, according to new documents released by the Department of Defense. The U.S.
Continue reading »Piracy Isn’t Killing The Movie Industry, Greed Is
First off, we have to make it clear that the major movie studios are doing great at the box-office, despite movie piracy riding at an all-time high. Other parts of the movie industry, such as video rental outlets, do seem to struggle and they have the studios to thank for this, not piracy. In January of this year Warner Bros.
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