Posted 10/17/09 at 11:40:06 PM by Justin Kerr

What do pacifistic mailmen do when they “go postal”? Well, if we limit our sample group to a single mail handler from Philadelphia, then you turn to a life of crime by stealing the easily identifiable video games shipped by online rental service GameFly. The disks come in an easy to spot bright orange package, and Reginald Johnson stole every envelope that he could get his hands on, a tally which would add up to more than 2,200 disks over a six month period. After jacking the disks, he would turn around and sell them to a local Gamestop for a tidy profit.

After being confronted by Police, Johnson led local authorities on a high-speed chase which ended with him crashing his SUV, and being tracked down on foot. When he was finally apprehended, police found 81 stolen games in a duffel bag he was carrying with him. For his crimes, Johnson is likely to receive 12 to 18 months of jail time, and will likely be in search of a new career upon release.

2,200 video games would fetch a tidy sum, but he is still pretty far from beating the record for disks stolen. That honor falls to Myles Weathers, a mail handler from Springfield Massachusetts who managed to swipe over 3,000 DVDs before he was caught.

Did these guys actually think they could get away with this?

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Posted 08/23/09 at 08:06:44 PM by Justin Kerr

Making a high profile hacker arrest is respectable accomplishment, but bragging about it to his friends on the community forums is clearly a bad idea. I’m sure you didn’t need to be told this, but apparently it’s a lesson the Australian Police Department had to learn the hard way. In a recently televised take down broadcast on ABC’s Four Corners, Australian investigators raided, and sized computer equipment belonging to the administrator of an underground hacking forum located at r00t.y0u.org. Following the arrest, interrogators were able to obtain passwords, and began using the site as a honey pot to try and expose other potential suspects.

Unfortunately for Police word of the arrest leaked out quickly, and it didn’t take long for the community to discover something was up. Matters were further complicated when the police agency began taunting the forums visitors by saying “all member IP addresses have been logged, and arrests are being made”. Enraged by the comments, members of the hacker community broke into the system police were using during the investigation and supposedly gained access to intelligence contained within the federal police mainframe.

The hacker posted his own retort to the Australian police on pastebin.com mocking them for busting a couple of “script kiddies” and posted pictures of fake IDs and stolen credit card numbers lifted from police servers. The hacker continued by claiming “I couldn’t stop laughing on seeing that the federal police server was running Windows”. Apparently the MYSQL password was also left blank (opps!). Apparently this 30 minute long hack could have been faster if he “didn’t stop to laugh so much”.

Police claim the files were intentionally planted on the compromised system. Anyone buy that?

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Posted 03/09/09 at 07:46:35 PM by Pulkit Chandna

Swedish cops seized a server containing 16,000 pirated movies in a raid they conducted last month. It is claimed that the server belonged to a file-sharing ring called Sunnydale and was being operated furtively at a location outside Stockholm from where it was seized.

Antpiratbyrån, a private copyright advocacy group, claims that the entire Sunnydale file-sharing ring, which consists of 10 servers, has been rendered ineffective due to the raid.

Anti-piracy lawyer Henrik Pontén even made a very lofty claim to underscore the importance of the raid. He said that the Sunnydale ring was the source of all illegal content on The Pirate Bay.

But The Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde refuted Pontén’s tall claim. "More than 800,000 people have uploaded to The Pirate Bay, so I don't believe it's the source of everything. But it is possible that it's a major source," he told Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet.

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Posted 02/25/09 at 05:01:03 PM by Pulkit Chandna

Joseph Kohl, a 75-year-old Floridian, proved to be more than a match for a much younger thief. With his life’s very first laptop at stake, Kohl decided to give chase to the 29-year-old thief. Kohl was joined by an off-duty cop - who fortuitously happened to be at the scene - in the pursuit.

Kohl was waiting for his wife outside a Best Buy store after having bought a laptop and a printer, but Samuel Dallas Jarvis showed up instead. Jarvis then proceeded to grab Kohl’s laptop and set out on a run. But, apparently, his pickup was not anything to write home about as he could not really bolt out of the blocks as he would have liked; his elderly victim had to merely run about 8 feet to nab the crook.

When the off-duty cop showed up, it was game, set, match, and laptop to Jarvis. “I have no idea what computers are about, but I didn’t want him taking my first one,” Kohl said after the incident.

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Posted 01/08/09 at 07:19:15 PM by Pulkit Chandna

Google Street View has been on the radar of privacy advocates and has had its fair share of legal run-ins with them. But many of them might just undergo a change of heart after being told that cops in Massachussetes solved a kidnapping case using Google Street View. Although it is too early to say whether it will remain an isolated incident or become a precedent, the story is truly amazing.

When cops were trying to find the whereabouts of a 9-year old girl, who had been abducted by her granny, they were able to trace the coordinates of her phone to a location in Virginia. They then came up with an ingenious plan of identifying possible hideouts in that area using Google Street View.

Local cops were soon dispatched to a suspected hideout, where they found that technology had not disappointed them.

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Posted 07/17/08 at 09:23:28 PM by Paul Lilly

Usually when a company releases a product containing with a worm, it's not a good thing. But when that WORM comes in all caps, the nomenclature takes a whole different meaning. In this case, SanDisk has developed a card that can be written to only one time, after which it becomes a read-only card. That's not something that will appeal to home users, but SanDisk's WORM (Write Once Read Many) media means police and courtrooms no longer need to reject SD cards as evidence for fear of tampering.

Potential uses for WORM cards include police witness and suspect interviews, cash registers, electronic voting, security cameras, in-flight 'black boxes,' medical devices containing patient information, and anything else where a permanent one-time write would be desirable. Once written to, SanDisk claims the new cards will retain the data for up to 100 years. "As digital media volume has grown and surpassed traditional analogue media such as film and audio cassettes in the consumer market, law enforcement agencies and other professionals are facing rising costs and lack of supply," said Christopher Moore, director of product marketing for OEM memory cards at SanDisk.

The SD cards currently come in 128MB versions, but beefier WORMs are expected later this year. Yummy. 

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