By David Kravets
wired.com
Sony is accusing alleged PlayStation 3 hacker George Hotz of surrendering two “non-functional” hard drives in violation of a court order, and then taking off to South America.
But Hotz’s lawyer said Wednesday that Sony is “crying alligator tears” over the issue.
Sony is suing the 21-year-old Glen Rock, New Jersey, man on charges he violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by publishing an encryption key and software tools in January that allow PlayStation 3 owners to gain complete control of their consoles. As part of the litigation, a San Francisco federal magistrate ordered Hotz to surrender his hard drives to Sony, so files connected to the hack can be extracted and used as evidence in the case.
But Sony notified the judge that, when it got the drives from Hotz, they were no longer working. “Hotz had removed integral components from his impounded hard drives, rendering them completely non-functional.” (.pdf), the company claimed in a filing.
Stewart Kellar, Hotz’s attorney, said the issue is overblown.
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Posted on April 6th 2011 in
Internet
By Chloe Albanesius
PCMag.com
Net neutrality is in the headlines again, but what does it mean for you? Is this just some wonky, inside-the-Beltway chatter that won’t have an impact on our daily lives or an issue that will affect how we access the Web in the future? The short answer is: both.
The basic news is that the Federal Communications Commission approved net neutrality rules yesterday and those rules give the commission the authority to step into disputes about how Internet service providers are managing their networks or initiate their own investigations if they think ISPs are violating its rules.
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Posted on April 5th 2011 in
Internet
Sanders Calls for Shared Sacrifice from Giant Corporations
http://sanders.senate.gov
BURLINGTON, Vt., While hard working Americans fill out their income tax returns this tax season, General Electric and other giant profitable corporations are avoiding U.S. taxes altogether.
With Congress returning to Capitol Hill on Monday to debate steep spending cuts, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said the wealthiest Americans and most profitable corporations must do their share to help bring down our record-breaking deficit.
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Posted on April 5th 2011 in
Government,
Politics
Katrina vanden Heuvel
The Nation
The lunatics are running the asylum that is Congress
At a moment when nearly two-thirds of US corporations don’t pay any federal income taxes, and companies are sitting on trillions in cash while refusing to hire new workers, the only thing we hear when it comes to tax reform is that we need to cut the corporate tax rate.
You just can’t make this stuff up.
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By David Kravets
wired.com
On March 7, Camelot Distribution Group, an obscure film company in Los Angeles, unveiled its latest and potentially most profitable release: a federal lawsuit against BitTorrent users who allegedly downloaded the company’s 2010 B-movie revenge flick Nude Nuns With Big Guns between January and March of this year. The single lawsuit targets 5,865 downloaders, making it theoretically worth as much as $879,750,000 — more money than the U.S. box-office gross for Avatar.
At the moment, the targets of the litigation are unknown, even to Camelot. The mass lawsuit lists the internet IP addresses of the downloaders (.pdf), and asks a federal judge to order ISPs around the country to dig into their records for each customer’s name.
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