Congress is about to consider an entertainment industry proposal that would authorize copyright holders to
disable PCs used for illicit file trading. "The measure would permit copyright holders to perform nearly unchecked electronic hacking if they have a "reasonable basis" to believe that piracy is taking place."
posted by mathowie
on Jul 23, 2002 -
40 comments
This is some scary stuff.
Life in prison for malicious hacking? We can't keep rapists and murderers away from society for very long but now hackers & crackers could be jailed for life? And on top of that the FBI can monitor internet packets without a warrant?
If you enjoy your freedom from gov't surveillance, it looks like it's time to start using
PGP.
posted by mathowie
on Jul 16, 2002 -
21 comments
Not only can Kevin Mitnick not touch a computer, cell phone, or the Internet for three years, but
a judge is trying to bar him from the lecture circut because he's talking about hacking and technology. I wonder, if they get him to stop
talking about technology, are they going to bust him for
thinking about it too?
posted by mathowie
on Apr 28, 2000 -
4 comments
Last night
Kevin Mitnick was on 60 minutes (the gist of the interview is
quoted here), and I have to say he came off as an utterly harmless geek. He was an information junkie that enjoyed the challenge of cracking firewalls. He never profited from his activities and the affected companies made up their monetary losses. It's a shame he was forced to waste away in prison instead of offer his security expertise to the affected companies.
posted by mathowie
on Jan 24, 2000 -
1 comment
Kevin Mittnick is finally being released from prison today, but I wouldn't call what he's getting as being "free". Prohibiting Kevin from touching a computer for 3 years? This isn't like giving a toddler to a ex-con child molester, it's a computer. A person can do a lot of things besides hack into company servers. How does anyone expect Kevin to make the $125 restitution he owes each month, if he can't use a computer or get a job that requires a computer? Now that I think about it, what percentage of decent jobs are completely free of computers?
posted by mathowie
on Jan 21, 2000 -
5 comments
If you had problems reaching MetaFilter over the weekend,
this is why. Some script kiddies launched some gnarly smurf attacks against the regional ISP that provides bandwidth for this site. Oh well, it gave me time to code. I've added lots of little enhancements (like user pages, a working search engine), but still have to get the archives working and expand the preferences page.
posted by mathowie
on Jan 19, 2000 -
0 comments
