Law and Order

The virus writer responsible for infecting 27,000 computers worldwide has lost his appeal to have his two-year prison sentence cut.

Web designer Simon Vallor was sentenced at Southwark Crown Court in January for releasing three viruses but at the London Court of Appeal this week he claimed not to realise how much damage his malware would cause.

Judge Justice Aitkens dismissed Vallor's youth, previous good character and co-operation with police and said his crimes were deliberate and destructive.

The music industry has won at least 871 federal subpoenas against computer users suspected of illegally sharing music files on the Internet, with roughly 75 new subpoenas being approved each day, U.S. court officials said Friday.

The effort represents early steps in the music industry's contentious plan to file civil lawsuits aimed at crippling online piracy.

If you used a computer at a Kinko's in New York City last year, or the year before, there's a good chance that JuJu Jiang was watching.

The 25-year-old Queens resident pleaded guilty in federal court in New York last week to two counts of computer fraud and one charge of unauthorized possession of access codes for a scheme in which he planted a copy of the commercial keyboard sniffing program Invisible KeyLogger Stealth on computers at thirteen Kinko's stores sprinkled around Manhattan.

A software bootlegger has been jailed for three years in Germany. We don't know his name - the BSA simply calls him "Mr M.,", its coyness attributable to legal reasons we infer, as investigations are continuing into other members of Mr M.'s gang.

Mr M., 42, was sentenced to three years jail without parole, after pleading guilty to offences under the German Copyright Act.

A key legislator in the U.S. House of Representatives said Tuesday that he would release the first "Intellectual Property Crime Index" next week. Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, the chairman of the House subcommittee that oversees copyright law, said the index would accomplish what he said the U.S. Department of Justice statistics currently don't do well: track intellectual property crimes and analyze trends over time.

Source: SF Gate

A Fremont man has been sentenced to more than two years in prison for selling illegally reproduced Microsoft software.

Lawrence Jou, 53, was sentenced Monday to two years and nine months in prison by U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken in Oakland.

Source: ZDNet

The Recording Industry Association of American said Wednesday that it had sued the parent company of Puretunes, a Spanish site that briefly offered inexpensive music downloads.
Puretunes emerged in May, claiming that it had won rights from several Spanish licensing agencies that gave it the ability to distribute major label music legally online. Label representatives said the site was operating illegally because Puretunes had not acquired the permission of labels, artists or song publishers.

Source: Boston.com

A Kazakh man convicted of threatening Mayor Michael Bloomberg after hacking into his computer account was sentenced Tuesday to four years and three months in prison.

Oleg Zezev, 29, also was ordered to pay nearly $1 million in restitution.

Source: Silicon Valley

California consumers will learn next month whether their favorite shopping sites are steeled against computer fraud -- or haunts of hackers and identity thieves.

Starting July 1, companies must warn California customers of security holes in their corporate computer networks. When a retailer discovers its credit card numbers have been stolen, it must e-mail customers, essentially saying, ``We've been hacked, and the hacker may have your credit card number.''

Source: news.com.au

AN American web designer has agreed to plead guilty to intercepting email and content from Arabic TV station al-Jazeera's internet site and rerouting it to the "Let Freedom Ring" page he devised.

John William Racine, 24, of California, will plead guilty to felony charges of wire fraud and unlawful interception of an electronic communication, prosecutors said.

He will be arraigned on Monday in federal court in Los Angeles.