Slashdot Mirror
UK Anonymous Hacktivists Get Jail Time
twoheadedboy writes "Two members of the Anonymous hacking collective have been handed a total of 25 months in prison. Christopher Weatherhead, a 22-year-old who went under the pseudonym Nerdo, received the most severe punishment — 18 months in prison. Another member, Ashley Rhodes, was handed seven months, whilst Peter Gibson was given a six-month suspended sentence. They were convicted for hitting a variety of websites, including those belonging to PayPal and MasterCard."
FTFA, the attack on Paypal was said to have cost them 3.6 m pounds, I doubt that.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Stupid Script kiddies
Peter Gibson was given a six-month suspended sentence.
He has lived a trite and meaningless life. Oh, wait. No. That's Gibbons, not Gibson.
I have zero sympathy for this kind of hacker, but that's a lot of time for a DDOS that apparently they didn't even execute if I read the charges right.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
The only law that matters anymore.
I am being serious about this when I ask. What is so great about Anonymous? I have read plenty about them, but don't get why so many people I know go on about how great of hackers they supposedly are. Furthermore just so you know, the people I know who do this obviously know nothing about computers and they say they really want to join them. Also forgive me if I am missing something, but they just seem like a bunch of hacker wannabe script kiddies. I don't think any self respecting group of hackers would go around parading about how amazing they are and what they have done.
I believe you're half right. Yes, you do get more time when you mess with a corporation as opposed to hacking someone's pc. But then, when you hack one persons pc you take down one person. When you hack master card and visa you affect a lot more people. I think it might be a good thing to discourge that sort of behavior.
When multiple people are convicted of different things, listing their punishment as a "total" serves purely to make the story more lurid and, thus, to make whatever possibly reasonable point the author intended seem more likely to be incorrect. "Two of the three people credited with hacking financial networks received jail sentences, the longest for 18 months" would still be silly wording but at least not a blatent attempt to exaggerate.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
Hacktivist? Is that the term we're going to keep using? Really?
They attacked because they stopped giving Assange his money. Now who is the bad guy here?
That's the way the Marxist scum media in the U.K. try to fool the public into thinking that criminals are getting longer sentences.
Stuff like "Jewellery gang get a total of 25 years" and then you find out there are five of them, so the average sentence they got was only five years.
If the government wanted to get rid of crime, they could do it in a couple of months tops - just massively increase the length of sentences, and put all the new criminals into prison camps. Tent cities. The bare minimum of food, no heating, no T.V., just selected books and that's it. Twenty years for burglary, twenty years for mugging, execution for murder, etc. Crime would drop by 99% as soon as the criminal scum realised they couldn't get away with it any more.
Anonymous and goes by a pseudonym.
Am I the only one who sees the problem here?
Although I actually think it's a long sentance personnally (if it was up to me I'd leave it at a sentance with no jail time since not being able to get a job and turning to crime might be enough for a first time)... I think it's short for the political setup we're seeing come through; Daily Mail readers who say lock them up and throw away the key. As such I'd rather this sentence length than life sentances or whatever's going round in the USA.
Am I dickless for settling for that?
A blog I run for the wealth
Cue the slashdotters who'll defend them. They're *fucking thieves*. They deserve jail time.
This is screwed up. Even the worst dictators in history have served less time. In 1923 Hitler attempted a coup with something like 600 men. He served just 9 months in jail. This was before coming to power legally (though what came later was contrary to the law of the land from my understanding of what happened). You would think threatening a countries leaders would get you more time than some minor protesting. Yes- this is protesting. It might be criminal although it is no worse than blocking traffic.
"People who break the law get punished accordingly. Film at 11."
They should have gotten another 6 months for being stupid and careless enough to get caught. Criminal negligence? Lol. It's reeeeeeally not hard these days to not get caught if you're a hacker. Just don't go around bragging, telling your little hacker friends your real name and where you live, or connecting to stuff through non-proxy or TOR means or letting anyone else use your computer. But of course Anonymous is like 100 copies of Kim Dotcom coming off a photocopier so ego comes before anonymity. Ironic, since their name is Anonymous.
...Gibson hacks you!
These people didn't have the same sort of contacts.
Attacking services is not acceptable.
People have died over blocked traffic and you want to raise it to that bar? Ok, you win.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
... for a much lesser "crime" of interfering with business models based on "artificial scarcity"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
BTW, something Martin Luther King said:
http://simple.wikiquote.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr.
"Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
. "Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal."
That does not mean that every illegal thing is right.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it