Tag archive: Holland

Albert Gonzales of Miami might never have thought it, but he’s making history. The 38-year-old, along with two unnamed Russians, has been charged with the largest identity theft in history – stealing data from 130 million credit and debit cards. The Department of Justice alleges that Gonzales used an SQL injection attack to breach firewalls and steal the information. His targets included 7-Eleven, Hannaford Brothers, and card… Read More

Once the kicking starts, everyone wants a piece, or so it seems. After being found guilty of copyright violation in Sweden, now file-sharing site Pirate Bay is under fire in Holland, too, according to the Guardian. A judge there has given Pirate Bay 10 days to block Dutch users, or the founders will face fines of $43,000 a day, up to a maximum of $4.3 million. But as the court said, quite how it would enforce this is another question,… Read More

Italian authorities have been investigating The Pirate Bay file-sharing site, with a view to bringing charges of assisting copyright infringement. This comes just weeks after the four men behind the site were found guilty of the same charge in their native Sweden, where they were sentenced to a year in jail and a fine of over $3 million. However, it raises interesting questions of jurisdiction, according to the Guardian. Although Pirate… Read More

Hacker Gary McKinnon is facing extradition from the UK to the US for breaking into a number of US military networks – NASA, the US Army, Navy, Air Force, and Department of Defense. He’s exhausted a number of appeals, including the European Court of Human Rights, and is currently awaiting a decision by the Home Secretary on when the extradition process will begin. If he’s convicted in the US, he potentially faces decades… Read More

In both Japan and Holland, courts have come to decisions, imposing real life penalties on those who have committed crimes in virtual worlds. In Japan, a woman who hacked into a man’s account and killed his avatar after he ended their virtual marriage in the role-playing game Maple Story, faces charges of illegally accessing a computer and manipulating electronic data. She hasn’t yet been charged, but if found guilty, it… Read More

You can get excitement at trade shows, but usually nothing like this. As the CeBIT Expo was getting ready to close on Sunday, it was raided by German police, according to AP. With 180 officers in the building, 51 exhibitors were targeted. Police claimed the raid was in response to the "number of criminal complaints by the holders ofpatent rights in the run-up to CeBIT has been rising for years". AP reported that 24 of the raided stands… Read More

CDs sales are down and major labels complain that digital sales haven’t made up the shortfall. EMI, now in the hands off an equity company, is laying off2,000 people and artists are threatening to go elsewhere.   The old guard is crumbling, and the way business is done needs to change. That seems to be ably demonstrated by the fact thatnew-style music labels like Sellaband and Sliceofthepie are doing so well.   Both operate… Read More

You’ve heard of lawsuits to close illegal download sites. But in raids in England and Holland, police arrested the man believed to be behind the file-sharing site site OiNK and closed down its servers.   Don’t be surprised if you haven’t heard of Oink. You needed an invitation to become one of its 180,000 members, and that invitation was only forthcoming if you had a “donation” of music to share – as… Read More

A new study has examined online usage and penetration in Europe, revealing that the average European spends 24 hours a month surfing the Web, and goes online 16 and a half days during the month. More than 122 million Europeans over the age of 15 go online every day.   The survey was carried out by comScore to examine the online habits of people across the continent, and reveals just how pervasive online usage has become. Leading the pack… Read More

The lawsuits, filed in federal courts around the country, targeted people who make songs on their computers available to others online — making a distinction between people who download and those who distribute. The suits did not name Internet file-sharing services like Kazaa, Gnutella and Grokster, which enable the downloading of millions of songs. By late Monday, no suits had been filed in Sacramento, but about 20 were filed in… Read More