Optus has moved to play down the implications of the copyright ruling on its 'TV Now' service for lucrative deals covering exclusive rights to deliver popular free-to-air content to mobile devices
You know a government is really getting serious about spam when courts hand out sentences to cyber crooks normally reserved for violent criminals. However, few of the victims who have had to contend with overflowing spam baskets and compromised computer systems would argue with the sentence handed down to Jeanson James Ancheta this week.
The 21 year old Ancheta has not only received a 57 month jail term for
turning 400,000 PCs on the internet into his own personal spam and
adware servers, he has also been given an additional three years of
restricted access to the internet. That makes nearly eight years of a
computerless life for the errant young hacker.
By the time Ancheta is allowed to get near a computer again Apple and
Microsoft may have merged to become the world's largest online
entertainment provider running its system on Linux servers. Or, perish
the thought, computers as we know them today, may no longer exist.
Don't laugh - it could happen!
In recent years, the US Government has become progressively tougher
with openly defiant spammers imposing increasingly hefty fines.
However, imposing billion dollar fines would appear to be fairly
useless unless the criminal happened to be Bill Gates, who happens to
be vehemently opposed to spam anyway.
In the case of Ancheta, he made a tidy sum out of his stolen network of
zombie computers. However, being young and seemingly possessed with the
feeling of invicibility that sometimes comes with people of his age,
Ancheta took a foolhardy step he could well have avoided. He tried to
hack into the systems of two US Government Defence agencies. As he
grows older in his particular correctional facility, he will probably
come to realise that this was not a particularly good idea in
retrospect.
If Ancheta still wants to play with computers when his eight years of
no internet are completed, he may consider redeeming himself by
emulating the famous ex-fraudster Frank Abignail, who crossed over to
the other side and helped the authorities catch the bad guys. Who
knows, he may even get a movie made about his life. However, before
Hollywood gets any ideas, 2014 is a long way off.
Dieneke Koster
| Until recently, having employees using their personal smartphones or tablets for work could have landed CIOs in hot water, but with what is bel…
How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business
Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
Try an easy-to-use set of web-enabled
tools for business-class productivity services. Office 365 provides
anywhere-access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars
on almost any device.
You know a government is really getting serious about spam when courts hand out sentences to cyber crooks normally reserved for violent criminals. However, few of the victims who have had to contend with overflowing spam baskets and compromised computer systems would argue with the sentence handed down to Jeanson James Ancheta this week.
LATEST HEADLINES FROM YOUR IT
