Science Addiction

A dormant blog by Devanshu Mehta

Tag: legal

October 20, 2008

FBI Fakes Cybercrime Forum, Nets 56 Arrests

This is pretty awesome. The FBI ran a cybercrime forum called DarkMarket for two years, silently watching hundreds of “cybercriminals” walk in to their trap.

DarkMarket allowed buyers and sellers of stolen identities and credit card data to meet and do business in an entrepreneurial, peer-reviewed environment. It had 2,500 users at its peak, according to the FBI.[…]

The leader of the site, know online as Master Splynter, was in fact FBI cybercrime agent J. Keith Mularski, part of an elite seven-agent cybercrime unit based at the National Cyber Forensics Training Alliance in Pittsburgh.  DarkMarket members believed the site was operated from Eastern Europe, despite a 2006 warning from uber-hacker Max Ray Butler, known then as Iceman and Aphex. Butler cracked the site’s server and announced that he’d caught Master Splynter logging in from the NCFTA’s office on the banks of the Monongahela River. […]

It remains unclear whether Mularski took over the identity of a real cyberscammer, or if Master Splynter was his invention from the start.

You can’t make this stuff up! The always brilliant Threat Level blog has many more details.

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October 18, 2008

The Intellectual Property Enforcement Bill

This is not a love song

Mickey Mouse politics

While (still) President Bush signed the sorry Intellectual Property Enforcement Bill in to law last week, EFF reminds us of a few victories we won over the past few months that stripped it of things like:

  • Higher damages for filesharing.
  • A vast government IP enforcement bureaucracy.
  • The Attorney General’s office will no longer become “pro bono lawyers for private copyright holders regardless of their resources.”

We should always celebrate the small victories (and, in this case, thank Public Knowledge for fighting the good fight). There will still be a “Copyright Czar”, but that position will be appointed by the President. And all indications are that we might get a President who takes a bit more nuanced position on these issues. Wired’s Threat Level blog is taking votes on who should be appointed to that position. My vote is with Lessig.

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October 15, 2008

White Spaces Update

Media and internet legal scholar Susan Crawford has an update on white spaces on her blog:

Today, with Congress in recess, leaving less room for last-minute-Lucy-with-the-football lobbying gambits, the FCC appears to be poised to release a report saying the white spaces can be used without necessarily causing interference to existing broadcasts.

Lucy pulls back the football

If you’re unfamiliar with the issue, she has a brief introduction to white spaces in the article. A few weeks ago, we also had a video from the People’s Production House that described the issue in non-technical terms. In short- there are a lot of frequencies that will become available when the digital television transition occurs next year and there is a lot of interest from certain entities with deep pockets in keeping them locked away. This report from the FCC is potentially a step in the right direction.

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