Slashdot Mirror
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"
All your base are belong to us!
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
you are all criminals.
- 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"
Registrant:
The iSO News (ISONEWS-DOM)
Jacobus van 't Hoffstraat 69
Nijmegen, MR 6533
NL
Domain Name: ISONEWS.COM
Post article
TheRegister story
Quote:
---
Two Justice Department attorneys said Internet users would eventually be steered to the government's address as name servers across the Internet are updated over the next several hours.
"There is going to be some lag time between the domain-name switch-over," one attorney said. "But the domain name isonews.com now belongs to the federal government."
---
Enjoy...
GameTab
More info HERE This links to the ISOnews forum Will prolly be Slashdotted soon.
In these grave times of war, all freedom thinking Americans should stand behind our President. These America-hating criticisms only help Bin Laden and his Communist and Democrat and Woman allies. I hope John Ashcroft shuts down Slash-dot and imprisons the lot of you in cuba!
They're going to make an example out of David Rocci.
----------
Check out my blackbox styles
Their 'competitor', NFOrce is seemingly still alive and kicking. I suppose the difference is in their strategy for collecting funds. As a note, both removed serial numbers from all posted NFO files.
(Score:-1, Wrong)
You can access the site and it's forums (that have information on the takeover) here:
ISONews
-----
How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?
Let's change this law. I think I DO own my hardware, no matter how many lobbyists some corp, or the entertainment industry has.
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.
I thought you guys (people living in the USA) could buy radar detectors to scan for speed traps, but some guy sells mod-chips for Xbox and he's done for it?! (I'm not familiar with this aspect of US law)
Seems to me that this is quite unfair - in what way does the mod chip help pirates? I thought it:
A) Allowed Linux to boot and run
or
B) Allowed to machine to play games from another region.
I see no piracy on either count here. Have I got this wrong? (Help me out - I don't own an Xbox so I'm a little lost)
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
"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."
At first, I thought this was sarcastic. Doesn't sound like it is. Is it illegal to have a bong? Can they really do that?
This comment really bothered me:
"In effect, the defunct Web sites become electronic flypaper for those looking for illegal drug paraphernalia, reporters covering the story, and people who have trouble spelling in Google."
There's absolutely no way that they know anybody's intentions when they go to a site like that. The internet is a source of INFORMATION. At some point, information's going to be accessed. It's not like you can call me a pirate just for visiting a site about piracy. Heck, you can't even call me a pirate if I download an ISO. How do they know I'm not replacing a scratched disk?
Blah blah blah I know, it's all been said before by lots of people. The difference for me today is that I now understand why privacy nuts are so fanatical about it. Out of context, data can be used in horrible ways.
Since shutting down 8 servers at once (some of them being out of the US) is hard, the DOJ took control of the DNS for the isonews.com domain and pointed it to their own site, which is what many people get when they go to http://www.isonews.com now.
Some people still get redirected to the existing servers, but this will happen less and less as the DNS changes propagate out to leaf nodes.
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."
http://66.201.243.170/
the real isonews.com with working forums
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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.
You can read more info about the plea bargain and case at: http://www.cybercrime.gov/rocciPlea.htm
-OctaneZ
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
I never voted on the DMCA. Why can't I vote with my votes?
The DMCA is a good example of representative democracy at its worst: the public should be voting on things like this, not a group of old, white, men who are told by their party to vote a certain way. That isn't democracy, that's two parties vying for campaign dollars from special interests.
I'd like to take a step back from the specifics of who was selling mod chips for which game system and look at the big picture of what's happening here.
Microsoft doesn't want mod-chips to be sold for probably one basic reason: they lose money on the sale of the X-Box unit itself. If someone uses a mod-chip to use the box to run, for example, Linux, then they get a very cheap PC and Microsoft doesn't make any money back on game sales. If someone uses the mod chip to play pirated/burned games, then, again, they lose money on pirated game sales. This is *why* they don't want people using mod-chips. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, I'm just giving their motivation.
If all anyone ever did with mod chips was to run linux, then I doubt Microsoft/DoJ would really care; the small number of people that do this wouldn't make it worth their time to track them down.
However, probably the majority of people using mod chips are also playing pirated games, and this is worth Microsoft/DoJ trying to stop. Everyone knows that it's really not possible to do this. Someone overseas can sell the mod chips and there's not much that Microsoft/DoJ can do about it.
In the long run, I think most games are going to move to more a subscription-based architechture (like Everquest or something similar) where you pay a small fee (or nothing at all) to get the game itself, but you have to pay to actually play it by connecting to a company's servers. I think this is actually a good model because it would encourage companies to constantly provide new content (new quests in role-playing games, new race tracks in racing games, new landscape flight games, etc.). It would also save consumers from paying $70 for the latest uber-game only to play it for 10 hours and put it aside, never to be touched again. If you got bored with a game, you could just cancel your subscription.
This is actually a trend caused by software/music/movie piracy in general. When all music becomes trivial to copy for free, then the producers of music will have to charge for services (i.e. rock concerts). Movie producers will have to provide movie theatres with large screens and great sound systems (they already do this). Game producers will have to provide a live and changing gamescape.
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.
Are you for real? pull you head out of the sand. I love these naysayers that try to pull something down without even offering any alternatives, examples or evidence to support their opinion, other than 'oh please...'.
The EFF has been one of the most high profile and active organizations out there. See the list of cases below, easily available from their website and newsletter, though I'm sure you are aware of these since you've been following them since the early 90's.
Recent cases
Active cases
At worst, at the very worst, they have made an extremely large number of people aware of these issues, which in turn has led to many more people getting involved. And even if they dont have the same clout(meaning cash to burn) as the tobacco lobbyists or hollywood, your suggestion is to stop supporting them now so they never do? sh'yeah.
P.S. their address is in San Francisco, they left DC sometime ago.
The honeymoon is over, people. Unfortunately, I am coming to the realization that the battle is lost already. I now understand that I will never again enjoy privacy on the Net. Mega-corporations have got there first, and the piecemeal approach of fire walls, anonymizers, proxy server kludges, and spam eliminators is just not going to protect me.
... particularly the enhancement that the Justice Department is planning to shortly introduce to the Patriot Act.
I foresee that I have to plan for the fact that I will not be able to use the Internet ever again unrestrictedly, and have been preparing for a complete break of private Internet use for about a year now. Shortly, I will be discontinuing my cable modem service forever, and will only use the Internet in a public forum such as at work, in a college, or in a Cybercafe, wherein I will obey every single law applicable (and will refrain from doing ANYTHING that may potentially break some law). However paranoid that may make me, it is worth it. We haven't even seen the beginning of how savage the witch hunts are about to become.
Yes, this is a boycot. Boycotting the Internet in this fashion may sound extreme, but then again I think the Patriot Act is a bit extreme
http://www.public-i.org/dtaweb/home.asp
Look for the icon the reads, "Patriot Act II"
One way to fight such rabid facism is to disconnect from the system. (This works because the Internet is a closed system. Without Internet users, there will be no commercial use for the Interent and no inherent need for vigorous policing of it.) I believe alternative networks will spring up out of the void so created, and, if those information avenues appears safe, I will surely take advantage of them. In the meantime, I plan to concentrate on fully utilizing the plentiful software already available which computing has afforded me.
I was a fairly well-paid computer professional from 1994 through 2000. But a sickness overtook the computer industry. It is a sickness imposed by forces which during the same time period tried to impose similar types of maladies on the health care and legal professions. Unfortunately, the computer industry (being in its infancy) was more susceptible than the others. Without strong professional organization and fraught by endemic sabotage by mega-corporations from within, the computer industry was doomed to succumb.
Currently, I am enrolled in a mathematics course of study which will degree me in Statistics, and am changing my profession out of the computer technology field altogether. For those still brave enough to tough it out under the current conditions:
May God have mercy on your souls.
I've decided that no "legalization" or "decriminialization" effort will ever work.
Why not? Because the people don't want it, or because the Imperial Federal Government won't allow it?
Our society does not tolerate the use of dangerous drugs.
False! Alcohol use and abuse is tolerated. Furthermore, marijuana is not a dangerous drug.
Federal enforcement of drug control regulations is a success.
False! The government can't keep drugs out of prisons. What makes you think they do a good job keeping it out of the hands of non-inamtes?
Alcohol is a dangerous drug, and the people have consistently shown an inability to use it without causing death and destruction.
True for some people. I'll point out here that "the people" have consistently shown a stellar ability to use marijuana with no ill side effects.
If you have a medical reason for using alcohol, then you should be able to get a prescription for it. Otherwise, possession and sale should be treated exactly like the other dangerous drugs.
The purpose of this is to persecute people who use alcohol and tobacco, for there is no evidence that anything outside of education is any more than marginally effective at getting people to not use some drugs.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
The press release is right here.
They probably just made an A record change to the DNS.
This buys them time to go seize the server physically, or copy all the user records off if it's a virtual colo.
If leaving the IP alone for a while prompts some clueless users to continue to log in or attempt to order more stuff, it's a smart move.
Get off my launchpad!
I can't believe you just made a racial thing out of that...
Take a look at those arrest records on those urban black males you state are frivolously arrested. I'm going to go out on a limb here, and say that there'd be a variety of different crimes, including a few violent felonies, not just BS speeding tickets based on 100-year-old laws.
Now, I'm not implying that crime is genetic in black males or any of that National Alliance racist crap... it has a lot to do with being young urban males, making poor choices (as we all tend to do when young and stupid), and being surrounded by criminal subcultures, which young people tend to emulate. For instance, the "Gansta" style of dress... that whole thing simply escapes me. Why would anyone emulate a bunch of thugs, who largely prey on their own people? Boggles the mind...
OK... sorry, end of tangent. What I was trying to say is that people often get arrest records BECAUSE they commit crimes, not because "the man" is keeping them down.
I can see your point if we are simply talking about public nuisance-type crimes... but an armed robbery rap usually requires active participation.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
I agree with your analysis about the motivations behind this move. I also mostly agree on the subscription model for games. I am still mulling over the movie and music thing mostly because I believe that subscriptions lessen the incentive to produce quality content instead of just new content, but that is another discussion.
The problem I have with the whole thing is simple.
I don't like being treated like a 5 year old kid. It is totally ok to know how to pick locks, copy media and modify hardware. What one does with that information has consequences of course, but the sharing of this type of knowledge is not the source of the problems.
As a kid, I was shown how locks worked and was given some old locks to open for a challenge. The intent at the time was to keep an eager brain busy and learn some basic mechanical skills at the same time, plus it was fun!
Later I took apart almost everything I have ever owned. Why? To understand how it worked and to learn how it could work better for me. The good karma I have earned from this is hard not to notice. Opening locked cars, fixing broken electronics, building creative solutions to solve problems all have earned me many favors in return. Who have I harmed exactly? Maybe a few local locksmiths have lost some revenue along with the electronics shops, but the people I helped sure found something to do with their money. Maybe they purchased a coupla more movies and music titles. heh heh...
The technology I sell and service today benefits those who produce it. Maybe a few schools lost some revenue because I actually bothered to pick up a book and learn something without having someone hold my hand. Isn't this what we are supposed to be doing anyway? Helping ourselves as much as possible?
80 percent of what I know today comes from this sort of learning. Those that mentored me early on were also teaching right from wrong. It also happens to be how I continue to make my living.
Today, my very nature is being slowly criminalized for no good reason and I resent it! This is wrong no matter what the motivation and everyone here knows it. It is also not good for society in general. Don't you want to see what the upcoming talent will create in their garage when you get old. Wouldn't it be nice to say, "Wow! Nobody saw that coming!" The way things are now, you can plot your future on the corporate roadmaps.
What we don't know is what to do about it (yet).
IsoNews is a source of a lot of hard to find information that can be put to as many good uses as bad. There are many other sites that provide the same forum. Will Asscroft shut them all down? Why?
I can understand the legal reason why some mod chips are illegal along with distributing pirated media, but I cannot understand the action against this site in general because it does not address the problem.
The problem is behaviour, not knowing how or why one would bother to use or construct modchips or copy media. These things are legal and ethical no matter what anyone says. If you cannot learn how, who does that really benefit?
The problem, as I see it, is the combination of education and maturity being modeled by many technically inclined people today. I can't say I blame them. It sucks to know you are being wronged.
Understanding this is a part of the big picture that also needs to be considered if we are ever to come to any sort of humane solutions.
Back to when I was young for a moment. Hacking things was encouraged! You could go to the supermarket and get magazines that actually documented this process in some detail. Teachers encouraged the activity as well. I remember a group of us changing one of the instructional disks to tell jokes. We learned a lot and harmed nobody because THE SCHOOL COULD EASILY MAKE BACKUPS! Know what the teacher did? He had us pick something we wanted to do and helped us do it. Guess what? WE LEARNED A LOT MORE!
Having an opinion was valued and encouraged. Many a teacher challenged me as to why I believed something instead of just telling me it was not politically correct. Some of these same teachers had the freedom to nurture and channel this into good constructive growth.
I might add that the schools had more flexibility in how they dealt with problem kids and a lot fewer lawyers. Maybe this was not as bad as we make it out to be today.
I had considerable freedom in school provided that I towed the line on the basics; namely, maturity, ethics and citizenship.
Today, things are very different. We are encouraged to know what to buy to solve our problems. I know that is a very general statement, but look around. You will see it in just about everything. In my state (oregon) education is being standardized and achievment is valued over creativity. Schools are sharply limited in what they can do to correct and control kids. They also exert far more subtle control than they used to because of this.
At the same time, that standardized education does not include strong citizenship and ethics material probably because of the additional lawyers on staff today combined with their strain on the budget and the stiff education requirements leave little room. Of course the lawyers will say this material just might offend somebody as well. (Too f-ing bad I say.) Could the state find a generation of task oriented citizens easier to control as well? Hmmm...
A lot of the technical education I see my kids getting is focused on performing tasks within the technology. Big mistake because understanding the ideas behind the tech is where the better tech comes from.
Kids today have less freedom and higher demands all at the same time while teachers have less room to do what they should be doing; namely, building society one kid at a time.
The level of control our society is experiencing is at an all time high. Is it any wonder that people are acting out?
Consider our precious Xbox. (Other products have similar problems, I just want to use the Xbox as an example.) The money god says make as much as you can. That means keeping people paying which means control and limited device function designed to facillitate payment. Instead of paying a ton of lawyers, who consume a fair chunk of the profit themselves, why not actually understand what people want to do and encourage it?
They could try marketing the Xbox Plus pack. Bundle it with a free game and code book! Sell the imports at a premium to those that want them. Funny, the 'Imports' are actually made here in Microsofts case so they just get to make more money.
Go ahead and run Linux, but pay 50.00 first and remember that you still can play all the online games with no worries.
Seems to me lots of kids would enjoy a home computer that could also play hot games. Why not let them do it? You just might find your next game developer that way.
Dump some of those legal dollars into some marketing designed to distinguish and reward the right kinds of creativity from blatent self-serving piracy.
Use the law to bust those doing real damage.
Sure the hardcore crowd will see all of that for what it is and will continue to go against the business model, but lots of people will just buy the thing because it does what they want. Price it right and mix in a couple of nice features and you can make money off the whole thing and look reasonably cool at the same time.
The rest of them will be numbered too small to worry about. Besides, you can spend what you want and the hardcore crowd will still do what they want. You just make less that way.
As it stands now, the stigma of the Xbox is so great for me, I will never ever own one and I make sure and tell others why. Wonder how much annuity revenue that will end up costing?
The core of the problem here is control. Here in the land of the free, we are increasingly under the thumb of large corporations driven by shareholder demand to make money every single quarter or cease to exist. Our free market has taught us the fewer options people have, the easier it is to make money. This same market makes it hard for companies to actually try new things. Invest in a new business model, but lose money for a quarter or two? Watch your stock become worthless. Better to not even try it, it is cheaper to pay the lawyers to beat away your potential competition while limiting your customers options in ways that maximize revenue.
Is this really American? Is this sort of power what our founders intended? Will these actions and others like them really benefit society, or will they benefit governments and corporations who seek control?
I for one see this for what it is. A lame attempt to drive information underground because it does not align well with some business model and that sucks and is wrong.
For anyone that actually gets to the bottom of this comment, take note this year and next of who does what and why. Remember that when it comes time to buy something, or vote. Be sure and tell them why and tell them often.
It matters.
Blogging because I can...
You know we'll be seeing commercials now saying "Use mod chips and your daughter will become pregnant and your son will run over a kid on a trike." It's the logical next step, right?
Want Slashdot headlines on your site? Try SlashHead
Many people like to mod their consoles, allowing them to make "fair use" copies of games they have purchased, in case their children destroy or scratch the disk, or allow them to play import games from other countries (that they purchase online) that are unplayable in their own country. Many people also make their own games for consoles or handhelds, especially the Game Boy Advance, which has hundreds of cool demos and games, free, for people who have moded, or "flashable" cartridges. Last Christmas, siting the DMCA, Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony filed against Lik-Sang.com (my favorite game hardware site) for selling such mod chips, because they could also be used to play downloaded copies of games, which would be an illegal use under the DMCA. One of the largest issues at hand with the mod chip craze, is that most consoles are now sold at a loss, and the companies have locked themselves into a dangerous game where they primarily make money off of game sales, and these mega corporations only want you to be playing (and buying) their games, not freely downloadable games online, or booting LINUX.
A console that plays MP3s or DIVX over a network (or off its 100gb drive) as an entertainment center, or runs LINUX, is USELESS monetarily to Microsoft. This, like everything in the world, is about money.
The edited BIOS of the mod chip is the illegal thing under the DMCA. Almost all mod chip sites do *NOT SELL CHIPS WITH A BIOS*, you must download the bios from someone online. This is perfectly LEGAL (buying the mod with no BIOS), though it is illegal (under the DMCA) to download that BIOS. If he's being prosecuted and plead guilty, it was because he was selling mods preflashed with a bios. There are hundreds of MOD chip sites online, and they aren't being taken over by the DMCA.
CE