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T-Moblile Cracker Pleads Guilty
hackajar writes "The Register is reporting Nicholas Lee Jacobsen plead guilty to cracking into T-Mobile's phones. He was picked up in mid October of last year in the "Operation Firewall" sweep by the FBI. He faces "maximum five years' prison and a $250,000 fine" according to the site."
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living."
- Seneca
As I recall, he wasn't picked up in the Operation Firewall sweep (although he would have been), instead, he turned himself in several days before the arrests.
Secondly, the maximum five year/$250,000 fine thing is standard for a single felony. In all likelyhood he will get MUCH less, especially because he cooperated and plead guilty.
Why the hell are the secret service sending unencrypted emails (!!!) other a PUBLIC, wireless phone system. I don't like our president or anything, but he deserves more than some hack jobs practically advertising themselves to the world.
Here is an article about Operation Firewall. Interesting that wikipedia does not yet have an entry on it... http://www.viruslist.com/en/news?id=154205192
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/01/12/hacker_pen etrates_t-mobile/
Sorry if this sounds a little naive, but how would you prevent prisoner rape, short of placing everyone into solitary confinement? Isn't it kind of unavoidable in that kind of environment? How do other countries handle the problem?
Make him work unpaid with only room and board as a slave for T-Mobile as a security technician.
Oh yeah..slavery...
I guess it's not such a good idea, but without the bad past of slavery, but incarceration is just a waste of money, when he could be using his "talent" positively. By forcing them to atone for their crimes perhaps they will learn the error of their ways by dealing with (in this case) people trying to crack the same security network he is now trying to secure.
Monitor him, which will probably cost less than the prison fees. He is not a danger to society, he is just simply someone who overstepped their legal boundary. I believe prison should be for violent criminals. Not that he will go to a real tough prison.
But if he screws up in the program outside of prison as rehabilitation, then he would be sent to a maximum security prison to serve the sentence to the end.
[cx]
Maximum of five years and a $250,000 fine is the maximum for a single felony. From the previous article:
:(
The same source also offers an explanation for the secrecy surrounding the case: the Secret Service, the source says, has offered to put the hacker to work, pleading him out to a single felony, then enlisting him to catch other computer criminals in the same manner in which he himself was caught. The source says that Jacobsen, facing the prospect of prison time, is favorably considering the offer.
It seems that a surefire way to get a job tracking down criminals for the government is to get arrested for committing crimes, a bummer for us regular folk
Hi, Is it just me, or does somebody at Slashdot have a personal vendeta against The Society for Correct Spelling? *rolls eyes* It's happened so many times in the past few weeks that I was starting to think it was intentional, some clever attempt to subvert the Establishment and show how progressive they are....or, maybe I'm over-analysing it.... Anyway, back to the topic - I wonder if the FBI will cut a spill-the-beans deal with him? I mean, breaking into a major telco...that's gotta be worth at least a couple of hacker brownie points... bye, Victor
...will we be seeing the 'candid' photos? It's not like Paris Hilton and her ilk could embarrass themselves any further.
I thought I was accessing my WiFi AP. Its SSID was T-Moblile!"
The difference between spam and poop is that you don't have to dig through septic tanks looking for real food. -- Me
This story was already covered in more detail on Slashdot before. The funny thing about the other article is it details the political implications of such prosecution. The government is using it as justification to whittle away at our rights one at at time. Before too long there will be nothing left for us to defend. The Constitution will be a vague memory.
Well, it is going to happen to some extent anywhere, but the thing is that there seems to be a culture of tolerance and acceptance of it in the States. It's expected. I can never believe that rape is something that is just casually joked about in the US. Also, many states have severe overcrowding with understaffed and undertrained security. That certainly doesn't help.
better yet, pass a law that says anyone convicted of a computer crime can't work with computers. something like what they do with criminals who harm children. laws make it illegal for them to work or be around children.
even with driving privliges, after so many tickets, they will take a drivers license away.
oh, about your statement that incarceration is a waste of money, no it is not. it keeps these animals out of mainstream society, and after their sentance is done, they will still be in databases so we know who they are. that is the real value. employers can weed them out. better colleges can make admissions more difficult. neighborhoods can make living there difficult. it is all about punishment. no more three strikes and you're out. i say, fuck up once, and that is it.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
i think i saved that kids life.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
... and hope nobody realises that if this guy can read secret service emails by himself, foreign government intelligence agencies (ie. whatever the KGB is called these days) with more resources and more staff must be finding it laughably easy.
-1, spelling flame
"Scott Peterson may have killed his wife, but I hear he just got a new one in jail"
If my dollars are worthless why are you going to give me gold for them?
*buzzer* Wrong.
Sorry you fail at finace.
http://wfhummel.cnchost.com/banklending.html
Basically the bank lends money out of the money deposited in it. It has to keep a certain amount of liquid cash availible, but it can actually have less on hand cash then it has money in its accounts. This is done by having the banks borrow money from the FED. If you were to try your scheme you would quickly find yourself out luck when the Fed refused to loan you any more money and called in your debt plus interest.
Banking like anything else in a market economy a giant balancing act between supply and demand. The money "made out of thin air" is called profit. Its this wonderful concept of when you have something worth less to you than someone else is willing to pay you for it, both of you make money. Since the other guy would have paid more somewhere else and you would have taken less somewhere else.
In this case it is refered to as "interest on funds loaned". You make a loan in expectance of it being paid back with interest, and people loan you money expecting you to pay them back with interest.
At least you are right on your last point. To scam involves gaining money at someone else's expense. If everybody gains then there is no scam. Just as there is none here.
by offering them a chance to wank off instead of turning into raping each other? by making it less accepted, making the prisons less overcrowed? with that attitude, why do you mind about rapes outside of prison?
you know, it's not really civil to punish one from selling crack by few years in prison and 88 assrapes - it would be considered quite uncivilised if it was said out loud like that in court(it would be torture! or death sentence if you manage to get hiv). for a country that prides on having standard freedom and rights for all it's quite backwards to be thinking that you lose them the second someone deems you guilty.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
$250,000? That's nothing! At least he wasn't caught sharing four or five songs...
The only real reason why hackers get caught is because they always have to boast about what they have done.
88 assrapes? You'd never eat Chicken Kiev again, that's for sure.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
Even Soviet GULAGs allowed them (albeit, very rarely and only to spouses).
They should be a privilege, of course, to be -- like all other privileges -- denied as a punishment, when warranted...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
From the Jargon File:
hacker (n): 1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. RFC1392, the Internet Users' Glossary, usefully amplifies this as: A person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a system, computers and computer networks in particular.
8. [deprecated] A malicious meddler who tries to discover sensitive information by poking around. Hence password hacker, network hacker. The correct term for this sense is cracker.
cracker (n): One who breaks security on a system. Coined ca. 1985 by hackers in defense against journalistic misuse of hacker (q.v., sense 8 [above]).
"Sources say the hacker was also able to download candid photos taken by Sidekick users, including Hollywood celebrities, which were shared within the hacking community."
Where are these photos?
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make install -not war
Assuming his Cayman "Your Banks R Us" website really does produce Fed-recognized banks on demand (for a $50K deposit), couldn't I just create one of those banks, and borrow money from the Fed at the Prime Rate, and use it to, say, buy a house? Paying my mortgage at the Prime Rate, instead of the marked-up rate? If so... does that website really deliver?
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make install -not war
It's about practical living in our society. We spend $30-40K:y average on incarceration. Afterwards, especially with the detailed and thoroughly used recordkeeping you're talking about, the ex-con has little alternative but to steal or otherwise commit crime to survive. Even with alternatives, keeping them in jail, punishing them, with only other criminals to turn to for society, cranks out more and harder criminals. They're people, not animals, so they can always be made worse by abusing them.
I say, encourage "good behavior" by giving every kid who graduates high school on time a $1000 bonus, no strings attached. Give every kid who graduates in the top 50% of their class an extra $1000. If it keeps an extra 1% out of jail, it pays for itself. Not to mention the savings in spared damage from skipped crime, and the extra production from educated noncriminals. The actual numbers probably just have to be something like 0.1% fewer criminals to pay for itself.
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make install -not war
I tend to get pissy with people who are too anal about spelling (particularly in people's posts) -- but in the article itself, it's pretty unprofessional. Would it be that difficult to have articles run through ispell before they can be posted?
Great Read - Scroll straight to Page 20. http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:DVOASBgoZ8EJ: www.4law.co.il/jacob2.pdf+Peter+Cavicchia&hl=en
Its just a scam. He will grab your money and run.
The Fed does tons of research on banks before they approve them. If they don't like the structure of your charter or if you don't do enough business they will simply deny you out of hand.
People forget that our country was based on the idea that a thousand guilty should go free rather than one innocent be sacrificed.
Somewhere along the way "think of the kids" and media hysteria took over our better moral instincts.
It seems fine to say that those thousand guilty will hurt 10,000 MORE innocent people and the 1 innocent is a worthy cost of a working system.
That is until YOU'RE the innocent.
It would seem that being sodomized in prison would be a bit more than "cruel and unusual". I wonder why the prison system has never been sued into oblivion...
One more bleeding heart liberal comment and I'm done. The fact that we (by we I mean it's an accepted fact in our culture) all think people get abused in prison and we send a crap load of non-violent offenders there is a damn tragedy.
Why, to buy more gold of course.
Yes, that's the problem -- the jokes are being used to mask a very serious problem. There is a tacitly accepted culture of prisoner abuse in the US. I can't help but think that this encourages abuses like those seen at Abu Ghraib.
Something along the lines of a death sentence for or mandatory castration of the offender might go a long way to curb the problem. Not sure that I'd completely advocate either but since you were soliciting suggestions, there you go.