Law and Order

A South Australian man is awaiting sentencing after hacking an ISP’s servers and threatening the owner with an axe.

Bryce Kingsley Quilley, 29, of Tailem Bend, appeared in the District Court today.

He pleaded guilty to three counts of unlawful modification of computer data, one aggravated count of threatening to cause harm and one aggravated count of threatening to damage property. Court documents show the offences occurred at Tailem Bend on June 14 last year.

In a workshop Friday at the Hackers On Planet Earth conference in New York, a German hacker and security consultant who goes by the name “Ray” demonstrated a looming problem for handcuff makers hoping to restrict the distribution of the keys that open their cuffs: With plastic copies he cheaply produced with a laser-cutter and a 3D printer, he was able to open handcuffs built by the German firm Bonowi and the English manufacturer Chubb, both of which attempt to control the distribution of their keys to keep them exclusively in the hands of authorized buyers such as law enforcement.

The United States government has told a Virginia judge that a long list of American connections makes Megaupload subject to US criminal law. The Friday court filing was a response to the company's argument that its lack of a US mailing address makes it immune to criminal prosecution in the United States.

Megaupload points to federal law requiring that notice of a corporate indictment be served on an officer of the corporation and sent to the corporation's last known US address. It has argued that since it doesn't have a US address, it cannot be indicted.

The world has known for 18 months that a grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia has been exploring the potential to indict anyone associated with the secret-spilling group WikiLeaks. But as with all things WikiLeaks-related, the truth gets more interesting when documents start to emerge.

Late Friday, a Northern California District judge ruled that Canada-based Research in Motion infringed on a patent held by Mformation, a company that specializes in mobile device management. The patent in question relates to the software that runs on RIM’s BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

The FBI has launched an investigation into allegations that a top Chinese maker of phone equipment supplied Iran with U.S.-made hardware and software, including a powerful surveillance system, in violation of federal laws and a trade embargo, according to The Smoking Gun.

Investigators, who began their probe earlier this year, have also found evidence that the company planned to obstruct a Department of Commerce inquiry into the contract behind the sales.

Even though he has been busy accusing Vice President Joe Biden of orchestrating the raid on his home (a charge since denied), having pool parties, and producing ridiculous rap videos, Kim Dotcom now says he’s ready to come to the United States, rather than be extradited, as a way of speeding up the entire judicial process in his international copyright case.

The United States’ court case against Megaupload founders Kim Dotcom, Mathias Ortmann, Finn Batato and Bram van der Kolk for alleged copyright infringement was dealt another setback Tuesday, after the New Zealand extradition hearing for the four was moved to March 2013.

Originally, the hearing was scheduled for August 6 this year, about six months after Dotcom’s home was raided in January, but a series of legal complications have pushed that date forward.

Two men have been jailed for their part in a cleverly-targeted phishing scam that managed to steal a total of £1.5 million ($2.3 million) from UK students by impersonating the official loans company.

Timed to coincide with the award of loans last August, the men - Britons Damola Clement Olatunji and Amos Njoroge Mwangi  - were found to have separately sent out large numbers of emails asking students to confirm their bank account details via a bogus website.

The European Parliament voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to reject the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. The vote blocks the treaty from taking effect in EU member states, and is likely to make the treaty a dead letter around the world.