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IsoNews Ostensibly Shut Down By The DOJ
According to Yahoo News and also Cyber Crime The longest running news site for Piracy has been turned over to the Department of Justice. Stating David Rocci AKA krazy8, has recently plead guilty to selling modchips via his website http://www.isonews.com with profit of $48,000. Now the domain has been linked to the Cybercrime Site warning all pirates all there that modchipping is not a game. [chrisd] In case you needed a reminder...you don't own your hardware. Eff? That said, this is not 100% positive, and there are rumors of the old site floating around on other ip addresses out there.
In related DOJ web hijinks..joemite writes "Cannabis News released this article about how the DEA is seeking to redirect indicted businesses that sell glass bongs and pipes to the DEA's website. "If the court orders the sites to be redirected, Ashcroft said, they will point to a DEA.gov Web page that says: "By application of the United States Drug Enforcement Administration, the Web site you are attempting to visit has been restrained by the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania pursuant to Title 21, United States Code, Section 853 (e)(1)(a)."" Also check out an analysis of the entire situation by Richard Cowan"
- a carrot
- a can of coke
- a 2l pop bottle
Or just eat the weed.
Or smoke it in a joint.
I mean, poor american taxpayers, how much are you paying a year now to try and keep those dangerous stoners from running amok?
"Old man yells at systemd"
You can access the site and it's forums (that have information on the takeover) here:
ISONews
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How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?
From the DoJ-defaced website:
The Department of Justice and federal law enforcement will continue to investigate and prosecute individuals and groups that violate the federal criminal copyright laws at home and abroad.
Eh... abroad? Isn't that the Department of Infinite Justice?
My next comment will be ready soon, but moderators can beat the rush and mod it up early.
As much as I dislike the console pirating scene, this is a really bad turn of events.
I have my PS2 chipped, and I'm going to do the same to my XBox. Not so I can pirate games, but so I can play imports, access savegame files on the hard drive, and so on. If I *can't* add that capability to a console with a mod chip, I'm much less likely to buy them in the first place.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Ok here is the official word straight from one of the ISOnews staff
"Yes its true. The DOJ has taken control of the isonews.com DNS which now points to 149.101.1.91
If you link directly to http://66.201.243.170 you can still reach the site. This is a good interim solution as the official DNS may be gone for good.
If you can still reach isonews.com from the old dns its only because your ISP has not updated its cache. Take note of the ip now if you still want to be able to reach isonews
Http://66.201.243.170
Hop into efnet #isonews for updates as they arrive. We'll try to keep things running here until the situation becomes clearer.
in the meantime , i wanna make some things clear.
1.theres about 8 isonews servers.
2.they are currently not being touched by anyone except isonews staff.
3.theres no need to back anything up.
In the meantime theres little need to specualte as we will keep you updated , in the meantime just use the forum as normal and pass the ip on to any friends who use the site till we sort this out."
krazy8 got busted because he tried to do something that the elite of the scene rightfully frown upon: making money off of the scene. At one point iSONEWS (formerly orm.nu, after it's founder) was basically run and hosted by DEVIANCE (a game release group) and offered analysis of group's releases each month. However, when orm began to step back from the site and krazy8 took over it more, it became more commercialized and the real scene members backed away from it. There were popup ads, special deals with businesses, and worst of all... increased traffic. The elite of the scene stopped visiting and posting on isonews and it degenerated into a place for newbies to flame each other and talk about how elite they were.
krazy8 got busted because he tried to make the site more popular and profit off of it. Instead of catering to the elite of the scene, taking security precautions, and keeping the site 100% legal he appealed to the lowest common demonenator and payed the price. Sites like checkpoint cater to the elite of the scene, deny access to the public, and take security precautions.
The lesson? Don't try to make money off of piracy and don't try to expose the scene to the public.
some of you may know me from there.
all i can confirm that, krazy8 has not been seen in a long, long time... and that he was busted FOR selling modchips.
the details of his plea bargain are not out, and nobody is speaking about anything.
i would suspect anyone not speaking openly about it, to be part of the plea bargain.
Runnin' On Empty
Why on earth did this guy plead guilty? It seems to me he is accused of a non-crime, at least the way the web-site reads. He should appeal and the EFF should help him.
This is extremely revolting that the selling of mod chips would be viewed in and of itself as illegal. All you people out there who think the DMCA covers this are very confused. The DMCA violation occurs when you strip a client game program of its authentication key (and this is copyright infringement anyway). All this guy did was sell parts that turned the game console into a general purpose computer. This is NO different than selling general purpose computer parts.
Conservatives fucking take care of business.
Please dont confuse conservatives with republicans. As a conservative, my concern is the strict interpretation of the constitution. what Ashcroft is doing is not, by any standard, a scrict interpretation of the constitution.
REAL conservative believe that you should be able to do anything you want as long as it doesnt adversely affect others.
Republicanism is not the same as conservatism. No matter what the media tells you.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
you are all criminals.
Over the years, I've run across a number of articles explaining why, in most of the country, this is quite literally true. It turns out that in most of the US, it isn't logically possible to follow all the laws simultaneously. There are almost always logical contradictions in the various laws, so that following one law means breaking another.
Some of the examples get downright silly. For example, in one place that I lived, the law students dug out the anti-gambling laws, and verified that, under a literal interpretation, carrying cash was "being in posession of gambling devices". You know the various penny-matching games or serial-number games that can be played with money? They make money itself a gambling device.
OTOH, if you weren't carrying money, that was ipse facto evidence of vagrancy, for which you could be arrested and held in jail.
Then, of course, there are all the laws that you could follow if you knew about them, but you'd never suspect that such stupid laws exist. There are supposedly several states in which the legal speed limit is still 10 or 15 mph, dating from 100 years ago when that was fast enough to scare the horses.
Granted, such laws would probably be overturned, but first you have to be arrested and charged, so that you can defend yourself in court. This gives you an arrest record, which can be used against you.
This isn't entirely frivolous. Almost all urban black males have arrest records by age 18. The reason is that they can be and are routinely arrested on just this sort of violation. They have little or no defense, since they are in fact always in violation of some law, even if they're just standing on the corner watching the world go by. This arrest record is then used to deny them access to education and jobs. So much for decades of "equal opportunity" legislation.
Back to frivolity: I lived in Florida for a few years, and one of the fun laws there turns out to outlaw "nude bathing". The wording does not exclude a bath in the bathtub in your own bathroom. But if you shower nude (with or without a friend), you are apparently legal.
All in all, if you're in the US, you are usually in violation of some law at any time. You are at least a criminal part of the day, no matter what you do or don't do.
(I'd guess that this is also true in much of the rest of the world, but I've only read about it in US terms.)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
They must have been terrorists. I'm sure they are in Cuba by now. Houses sold, assets frozen and confiscated. Or they violated the DMCA. Can that land you in Guantanamo these days? Or is violating the DMCA now the same as being a terrorist? It's so confusing, really. I guess I probably should not be writing this. I think they're coming for me now...
In Soviet Russia (no, this is not one of those jokes) they had a name for the person who turned you in. They called them a Stukatch (bad transcription from the Cyrillic, sorry). It was an offtake on the word Stuk, or "knock". If your neighbor did not like you, or disagreed with your "morals" they would turn you in, and soon enough you would get that knock.
Yes, I am an agent of Satan, but my duties are largely ceremonial.
So please, keep your ideas to yourself.
[don't be afraid to say what you want
I look at the two lines above, one right after the other, shake head, blink eyes and conclude: it's just, utterly bizarre.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }