Category: Legal
A piece of internet history has been lost but not forgotten. IO.COM has been sold to an undisclosed third party and all of its shell,email and hosted ftp and webserv services have been transferred. To those of you scratching your head trying to figure out what this means, well let me tell you, it is a big deal. You see, before we had the internet we had BBSs or bulletin board systems. BBSs were computers that ran special software that allowed users to dial in and connect to the computer via a hard telephone line. Once connected to the BBS, users had access to a host of services we are familiar with today like email, news feeds(Usenet), webspace for websites. The BBS also allowed other users dialing in to communicate with each other. BBSs were the cornerstone of the internet as they gave birth the first online communities. IO.COM was a domain name that was owned by Steve Jackson Games and it hosted services for the Illuminati Online BBS. Steve Jackson Games was a company that created tabletop games and offered customer support through their Illuminati Online BBS. After it went online in the mid 1980′s, it soon became a flourishing online community where users would chat about all kinds of things – Illuminati Online was a staple in the early internet. But the story and the intrigue does not end there for the IO.COM BBS. The Illuminati Online BBS earned international fame among the computer underground after Steve Jackson Games was raided by the U.S. Secret Service. As it was in those days, people who did not understand technology feared those that did, giving way to the non-tech-savey computer users vs. the hacker elite. The Secret Service was after one so called hacker elite, a member of the Legion of Doom, known as Loyd Blackenship, an employ who worked for Steve Jackson games. The Secret Service had targeted Blackenship after he published a Bell article about the emergency 911 phone system in the hacker magazine Phrack and because he ran a legal BBS from his house where members discussed the hacker underground. That alone put him on the Secret Service’s watch list. During the raid agents discovered GURPS Cyberpunk that Blackenship had been working on at SJG. GURPS Cyberpunk was actually a genre toolkit for cyber themed role playing games – table top ones. After the raid the Secret Service confiscated several computers including the one running the Illuminati BBS taking it offline. They also raided Blackenship’s home. History tells us now that the Secret Service was really on a phishing expedition and did not have anything solid on Blackenship. They siezed the SJG computers because of Cyberpunk that he had been working for the company, but Cyberpunk had nothing to do with the hacker BBS Blackenship was running from his home, that was what the Secret Service was really after. SJG and the Illuminati Online BBS just got caught in the crossfire. In fact, as fate would have it Steve Jackson Games was awarded damages from the Secret Service in the 1990s for the use of what the judge called sloppy police work. The decision in the case led to some of the electronic information protections we now enjoy under the law today – it gave email and electric content the same protections under the law as mail – SJG was represented by the then new Electronic Frontier Foundation and SJG’s case proved to be a landmark case in the establishment of some of the online freedoms we enjoy today. Bye Bye IO.COM…oh how you will be missed. Hackers and non-geeks alike salute you Illuminati Online BBS!
They are still going to hold the NFL Draft – at least that’s what they are saying now.
Who knows if they will though, now that only a month after the Superbowl, the only real action is in a courtroom. The players are all bringing anti-trust suits against the NFL. Big names are involved like Peyton and Eli Manning and Tom Brady.
Is it another case of greedy management trying to take advantage of the workers? Or over-paid prima donnas pushing to garner even more millions on top of the millions they already have? My opinion is both. They all take the fan’s money for granted. But who will stop watching in protest? Sadly, not even I, because I love NFL Football.
In the end, they’ll work something out. There is just too much money to lose all around. Billions of dollars will get shared somehow. It would be great if we, the fans, could take them to court for high priced tickets even for lousy teams.
More to say? Head over to alt.sports.football.pro to react.
Torrent Freak had an article over the weekend that helps to highlight the insanity that is the current state of IP law enforcement. They bring up the excellent point that law should not arbitrarily cease simply because it becomes easier and cheaper to infringe upon your rights.
“When I write a letter to somebody, I and I alone choose whether I identify myself in the letter inside the envelope, on the outside of the envelope, both, or neither. It is my prerogative completely whether I choose to communicate anonymously or not. This is a right we have in analog communications and in law; it is perfectly reasonable to demand that the law applies online as well.”
The author is correct of course. Why should our rights end simply because where real world infringement of our rights could be costly and time consuming computer based right infringement can often be done cheaply and quickly. In fact it is worse with online infringement as it can easily be harder to detect. If one wanted they could easily push the argument further to bandwidth throttling on a port by port basis. If I wanted to send mail I can send letters and packages of all sorts of sizes. Increasingly we’re seeing ISPs throttling certain ports and claiming that this is their right to do so. If you have an account that grants you a certain bit rate should you not be the one to choose how to use that bandwidth?
While the USPS may be having financial difficulties directly due to online communications it is still the gold standard in terms of privacy rights for communications. We would all be well advised to not let the rights we have online be stripped away. The right to privacy is one that many people have fought and died to protect and to simply let it fade away would be a disservice to everyone that has ever struggled to make it a reality.
BREIN head Tim Kuik claims that FTD supporters are behind the DDOS attack on the BREIN website. He claims that the timing between the FTD takedown and the attack make the culprits obvious. Does it really? Certainly the timing is close but suspicions and conjecture do not equate to facts and BREIN hasn’t been all that good at making friends lately. Not only have they gone after FTD, but also the Swan website and a number of other Usenet sites recently.
DDOS attacks are not the answer however. Arnoud Engelfriet the legal council of FTD in the recent BREIN case states that “Executing DDoS attacks only strengthens the image that filesharing or downloading is a criminal activity, which does not help the cause.” He is right of course. Mixing a legitimate debate of intellectual property laws and an illegitimate attack on a website can easily and quite quickly taint the worthy topic at hand.
There is another possibility for the source of the DDOS of course, BREIN itself. With the history of their heavy handed tactics in the past would it be out of the realm of possibility that they have done this to themselves to continue to muddy the waters between reasonable debate and illegal activity? I would argue that it is not only within the realm of possibility but within the style of their playbook. To look back and find their most recent illegal activity on shutting down a service one only needs to go back to an incident in January. Where they took down sites who’s legitimacy and legality were beyond reproach even by BREIN’s standards. Either way it’s high time BREIN begins acting like the legitimate organization it claims to be.
