Free Republic

The fact is that Mitnick used his manipulative skills in an amoral attempt to defraud and steal from respected companies like Novell, Motorola, Nokia and Sun Microsystems for years until his capture in 1995. Mitnick has often claimed that he did nothing wrong and that the onus of the crimes was actually on the companies he stole from. For example, Mitnick firmly believes Novell’s stupid gullible employees shouldn’t have trusted him when he showed up to their offices wearing a stolen phone company technician’s uniform and asking for access to their company’s phone system. To Mitnick, the 20,000 credit card...

“A study commissioned by the University of Tennessee’s Institute of States Studies and trumpeted by the Internet taxation mafia projected a $45 billion per year loss of tax revenue by 2006. Maureen Riehl, a lawyer for the National Retail Federation, applauded the effort to tax all Internet purchases because of its detrimental effect on the competition of her group’s members. 'Our ultimate goal,' said Ms. Riehl 'is that everybody will have to play by the same rules.' There is one glaringly obvious problem with this scheme to tax Internet sales 'fairly' and in the interest of making sure states don’t...

“While at a local Best Buy superstore yesterday buying a replacement for my father-in-law’s ailing seven year-old computer monitor (I bought a MAG Innovision 771FS-s 17” monitor for an after-rebate price of $89. Contrary to the false belief held by so many of my vocal critics, I have never received any 'free stuff' or been paid money by big, evil telecommunications and/or software companies for my writing. I buy all my equipment from the store just like everybody else), I saw an end-cap of new video games. The one that stuck out amongst all others was the Law and Order-Dead...

“However, these small radio stations are often just people with an Internet connection, a computer and a bunch of CDs or pirated MP3s who would rather steal from the rightful copyright owner than adhere to the agreements of civilized society. The four years worth of back royalty payments from webcasters were due on Sunday October 20, 2002 but that was postponed by organizations representing the artists including the Recording Industry Association of America (the RIAA is normally considered the villain in these discussions) and Republican Senator Jesse Helms (who is normally always considered the villain to liberals/leftists) has postponed voting...

“EDS also found that the Navy’s computers were often purchased by different departments at the political whim of the department heads (Think: 'I’m a rear admiral, so I should have better computers than some captain.') Some PCs used by clerks were clunky old all-in-one Macs from 1984 while other clerks were using new Intel Pentium 4 systems with CD burners and 21” flat panel monitors.”

“It’s easy to see where TV network news-types can easily point the finger at [video games like] Counter-Strike: Players can choose to be 'terrorists' and a 'realistic' sniper rifle is one of the weapons gamers use to achieve their team’s goals. However, there’s quite a difference between 'realistic' gameplay on a video game by clicking a mouse and actually shouldering a sniper rifle. News readers for most TV network have often never held any type of gun in their lives and many are ardent advocates of disbanding the National Rifle Association. Few news readers have no idea the skill and...

“No business could survive in a free market by not cutting those relatively high-paying but now silly jobs created by many tech companies before the Silicon Valley dot-com bombs went off in 2000. However I have to wonder why it has taken two years and these CEOs still haven’t gotten rid of all that dead wood in their companies. Two years on the profit/loss rollercoaster and the CEOs are still pointing fingers at their rank and file workers as the problem? Nothing is more disheartening to hear than some clueless tech CEO spin on a cable news channel’s financial segment...

Shea O’Brien Foley is not just a fan of George Lucas’ movies; he qualifies as a Star Wars fanatic. You’ll agree that “fanatic” is not too strong a word when you learn that Foley was arrested at his new job at NBC Studios in Los Angeles recently for allegedly stealing almost half a million dollars from his former employer, LucasFilm, LTD. The stolen items, $450,000 worth of proprietary intellectual property (IP) owned by Foley’s former employer LucasFilm, were mostly digital images, sounds and video files found on Foley’s computers. Foley saw nothing wrong with the theft of his employer’s proprietary...

“In a bit of judicial activism, Judge Coughenour took Gorshkov’s family’s 'medical and financial problems' into account and rejected the federal prosecutor’s request that Gorshkov serve at least sixteen years for his numerous crimes [including twenty counts of computer crimes, fraud and conspiracy]. Coughenour, a so-called 'maverick' judge first appointed during the Reagan Administration, has made a habit in recent years of legislating from the bench...”

“While the News.com rear-end smooch session with [Apache “entrepreneur” Randy] Terbrush tries to paint a picture that companies like Covalent and Tribal that base their business on supporting open source software is a license to print money, the exact opposite is true. News.com muddies the waters by dropping names of profitable companies like Cisco and Merck into the story, but conveniently leaves out the fact that according to publicly available financial information Covalent has consistently lost millions for the past two years. For example from February 1, 2001 to January 31, 2002 Covalent’s annual sales reached $2,664,000 while their cost...

Rather than recycle the same security information that’s existed for over 15 years, the same information found in every computer security book on the shelves, I instead propose a solution, one that only the government can initiate because the solution needs to be mandatory. By “mandatory” I mean that it should be made into law. Legally compelling organizations to meet security requirements seems to be the only way to get them to take security seriously. I propose three basic laws that will stiffen cyber-security...

“Predictably, the media coverage surrounding the release of Kazaa 2.0 contained no such strong language as 'notorious file-stealing software' and most kept to carefully-worded reports saying only that the huge peer-to-peer network created by Kazaa thieves around the world is 'controversial.' While most noted that record companies were 'fighting an uphill battle against' file-stealing software like Kazaa (and its many clones, which are in turn clones of the failed granddaddy of all file-theft computer apps, Napster), the reports of Kazaa 2.0 lauded Sharman Networks for its development of an 'updated interface' and “integrated anti-virus software” for the program that has...

Shan Yan Ming, a Chinese citizen and employee of that nation’s state-run China National Petroleum Corporation (PetroChina) is being held a week after was arrested at San Francisco International Airport on September 17th by the FBI. Ming, a 32 year-old computer programmer for PetroChina, was in Mountain View, California as part of a contract his company has with 3DGeo Development, Inc., a Silicon Valley-based provider of 3D seismic imaging software and services used by the oil and gas industries. Ming was arrested as he tried to board a flight for China carrying his laptop computer containing stolen password-protected files and...

“IT workers are currently hurting for money in the free market because of the years of loose funding for Stanford-educated illusionists geeks making ridiculous promises that failed to deliver during the dot-com bust of the late 1990s. With those private funds dried up, those same illusionists have changed tactics, saying 'the government should do more for our nation’s cybersecurity' and looking to drink from the teat of big government; filled with what they consider an unending supply of taxpayer money from America’s citizens like you and I. During the 1940s, those taking advantage of government spending would be called nasty...

"The 13,800+ Linux servers infected by the Slapper worm have created a huge, intelligent P2P network that according to Symantec virus analysts can efficiently redirect network traffic, data and even router information from targeted networks back to the compromised Linux servers."

People on both sides of the political spectrum gave Florida voters a lot of grief about the 2000 presidential election – Democrats said that Republicans stole the election through a ridiculous conspiracy that made an episode of The X-Files seem plausible and Republicans said that Florida’s Democratic voters might not be the sharpest knives in the drawer. Yet, spending millions [of voter tax dollars] on equalizing and non-partisan technology for the 2002 Florida primary election has shone light on the real problem: the poll workers in the Democratically-controlled counties are the problem, not the voters.

By mid-2000, the free ride was officially over. The venture capitalists that once threw money at any Silicon Valley company with either “dot-com” or “Linux” at the end of their name (or a lowercase “E” or “I” in front) finally figured out their ROI was AWOL and they were all SOL. The same Clintonomics cheerleaders that derided Reaganomics and the “service economy” as tired, old and stupid were throwing billions of dollars down the dot-com/Linux rat holes based on phantom revenues directly tied to intangible services rather than tangible products. Venture capitalists turned off the money spigot for these New...

"From the day of its first draft was released in 1999, the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA) has come under attack by open source software makers and their lobbyists. Bowing to pressure from these companies and their lobbyists, the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws (NCCUSL) has revised the UCITA to exempt open source software makers from offering warranties, but only if the open source software makers are non-profit organizations. The NCCUSL’s new changes to the UCITA also broaden state’s rights by allowing for a state’s specific consumer protection laws to override the UCITA."

A clip from the story: “[Webmaster Eric] Eldred claim[s] to be against is the notion of 'perpetual copyrights' owned by big, evil corporations. Eldred, who hasn’t authored any books, claims that 'perpetual copyrights' do not allow for him to cut-and-paste the full text of The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne or Red Rabbit by Tom Clancy for everyone to read on his website. Apparently Eldred and his lawyers say that the Internet is different than the real world, because in the real world, reprinting a novel without the permission of the author is illegal (and immoral).”

A clip: “Regardless of what some leftist self-appointed libertarian Internet watchdogs and privacy advocates will try to say, the citizens living in the nineteenth century are nowhere close to being as 'free' as those fortunate enough to be alive now. The privacy advocates are right about Microsoft’s vision of Palladium; it is a technology that wants to turn the Internet from lawless Wild West into an orderly suburban neighborhood. You know, gated communities much like those hypocritical privacy advocates live in.”