Someone should make a small, remote controlled rover with an IR light and an IR sensitive video camera, and a robotic arm. The arm is not tipped with a manipulator, but with a Cat5 plug. This rover will be paired with a quad-copter with enough power to deliver and retrieve the rover.
Rogue Academic Downloader Busted by MIT Webcam Stakeout, Arrest Report Says
91–95 of 95 posts
Re: Rogue Academic Downloader Busted by MIT Webcam Stakeout, Arrest Report Says
#92Re: Rogue Academic Downloader Busted by MIT Webcam Stakeout, Arrest Report Says
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Physical books impose a natural limit on the number of simultaneous checkouts. If a book is very popular, the library will buy more copies to accommodate demand. If a PDF is popular, the publisher expects the library to buy more copies. It's artificial scarcity, but this is hardly new. The number of books in a library was never limited by the cost of paper.
Artificial scarcity is possibly one of the most perverse things to come out capitalism.
The particular 1 bits he took were of unusually high quality.
Re: Rogue Academic Downloader Busted by MIT Webcam Stakeout, Arrest Report Says
#9435 Years seems a little over the top. Gilbert Bland Jr traveled to university libraries around the country for years, stealing maps from irreplaceable antique books, by physically removing them with a razor blade. The total value of the maps that the FBI was eventually able to recover was over $500,000. In the end he paid $70,000 and served 17 months in prison.
35 years is the maximum possible sentence according to the law assuming he were found guilty on all counts and given the maximum sentence for each. For comparison, Bland was facing a maximum sentence of 120 years. (Six charges of up to twenty years each.) http://dukechronicle.com/node/107961
Spy magazine once did an article, where the reporter documented himself committing dozens of innocuous looking acts in public, all designed to accrue ridiculous amounts of jail time.
Re: Rogue Academic Downloader Busted by MIT Webcam Stakeout, Arrest Report Says
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed. They're almost solely responsible for protecting us from the hacker scourge of role playing and card game vendors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jackson_Games,_Inc._v._Un...
That, and (in the same raid) a bunch of people who had owned up and were reconfiguring telco switches as pranks.
Not sure about the details there, and wikipedia is silent. Certainly SJG employees were active in the phreaking community. But AFAIK none were ever charged with anything. And I know with certainty no charges resulted from this raid in particular.
The whole thing was a terribly botched job, the "facts" in the warrant were a mash of giant whoppers of technobabble. It was a mess.
Did the SS have the best interests of society at heart, and might they have reasonably been fooled into thinking something was up at SJG? Yeah, probably. Did they actually do the right thing? No way.