Torture on US soil

CNN.com reports that two immigrants, who were deported from the United States, are suing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) with the help of ACLU.

It appears that ICE decided it’d be a good idea to forcefully inject the detainees with powerful anti-psychotic drugs to make the detainees easier to handle. The detainees medical condition was not assessed before the injections, so the drugs could’ve had severe side effects with other medication the detainees might have taken.

I know ICE really doesn’t think immigrants, especially the illegal ones, have any rights and that they can do whatever they please to these people, but this is going way over the line. It is, according to all international (and likely domestic) laws, torture, plain and simple.

Let’s see what becomes of this. Will some higher ups get a slap on the wrist, or is there going to be an appropriate punishment for all involved for torturing another human being?

-TPP

War on Piracy is effective?

Chris Israel, the Copyright Czar of the Bush Administration is hailing the guilty verdict of a music pirate as a major victory in the fight against piracy.

Surely he’s referring to a conviction of a ringleader of a major international piracy ring that prints CDs in China and hauls them over the Pacific to the United States to make millions of dollars in profit? Naah, Mr. Israel is referring to a guilty verdict and $222K fine of Jammie Thomas, a single mom with two kids. She was convicted of sharing 24 songs on p2p network Kazaa.

That’s kinda like celebrating busting a teenager with one roll of pot in his mouth as a major victory in the war on drugs, and then fining him $100K for it.

-TPP

Congratulations RIAA

RIAA has won its lawsuit against Jammie Thomas, a single-mom of two kids. RIAA accused Ms. Thomas of sharing music on p2p networks. RIAA could only claim copyright ownership of 24 songs.

The jury awarded RIAA $222,000 in damages. That’s $9,250 per song. That sure sounds fair to me.

You could buy over 8,000 CDs with $222K.

I’m sure the RIAA is busy celebrating its victory over this single-mom. I hope bankrupting her was worth it.

-TPP

George Bush doesn’t care about children

It’s one thing to play the idelogical chess game while jousting for power in Washington, but to do that with the lifes of children is a whole another thing.

George Bush has vetoed a bill that would’ve expanded healthcare coverage on children predominanently from poor families. You know, maybe Kanye West was onto something after all with his juvenile commentary on live TV.

George Bush’es neo-con bullshit, however, has attracted the ire from several Governors of US States. They are sueing him because of it. It seems as if simply refusing the sign bills supported by both parties is not enough, he’s also introduced several new restrictions that disallow the states to come up with their own plans to expand healthcare options of children.

I continue to wonder why poor people in this country continue to support George Bush and the ideology of the Republicans when, again, it’s hitting the poorest people in the country the hardest.

-TPP

Jack Thompson pisses his miserable law career goodbye

It appears our favorite lawyer has finally done something so stupendous that he might’ve just as well just rip his bar association membership card in half.

It seems he got the bright idea to include hardcore gay pornographic images in a court filing having nothing to do with gay pornography. As any reasonable person might expect, the judge reading the filing was not pleased. In fact, he was so displeased that he’s called a hearing for the court’s Ad Hoc Committee on Attorney Admissions, Peer Review, and Attorney Grievance to decide on appropriate action.

Me thinks Mr. Thompson should start planning on reworking his business cards. The Esq. or Attorney at Law trailing his name will shortly be incorrect.

-TPP

Speaking of crime

We had a bit of excitement tonight.

My wife and I came home around 9:20pm tonight after a dinner date in the city. I try and unlock the door, and find out that it’s locked from the inside. I’m a little puzzled, but I’m thinking maybe my wife’s parents did that, because they had called earlier that they are coming over to drop something off. I unlock the security lock and open the door, but it doesn’t open all the way, because the chain is on.

Now it’s definitely getting weird. Nobody is answering and the lights are on. I take another look through the crack and see that drawers have been opened. Allrighty. Time to call 911.

I call 911 at 9:32pm. The cops show up after 10pm about 10 minutes after we break the chain and get inside the apartment.

We’d been burglarized. All my video game systems are gone, except the XBox 180, which apparently isn’t quite hip enough any more. Both of our laptops are missing, as is my GPS receiver and video player. Thieves scored big, it seems. The place is a complete mess. All the bedroom closets have been turned upside down, the jewelry box is open, and every drawer on our computer desk and TV stand have been opened.

Sir William Gibson, the youngest of our two cats, is scared shitless. He’s hiding under the bed, the sofa and is running away from everyone, including my wife and I. At first we thought he’d jumped out of the bedroom window left wide open by the thieves, but it was a relief to find him shivering under the sofa.

The cops take down our information including a preliminary list of things stolen, and they leave after about 30 minutes. The Evidence Collection Team (fingerprinting) is going to arrive later they say, and we’re not to touch anything while we’re waiting.

The Evidence Collection Team arrives at around 1:30am, and the two officers start collecting fingerprints. They find one fingerprint in a place there shouldn’t really be any prints. They leave soon after 2am, and we start cleaning up the place.

That’s when we find a surprise. It seems that the thieves had left something behind. They had stuffed a laundry bag of ours (yes, ours) with both of our laptops, the GPS receiver, an old camera and a video player, and they had left the bag on our bed under a whole lot of crap they’d gone through. They had left the most valuable, moneywise, things they were stealing behind. Of course the two laptops were also the most valuable to us in other ways. They have a lot of irreplaceable files on them. Family photos, Emails going back several years, personal finances, etc. Who needs backups, right? We are really lucky to have them back. Gotta think about that backup strategy next…

At this point I’m getting kinda curious. I have my laptop on 24/7, and so it would’ve been turned off by the thieves. I know there’s gotta be some information on the laptop to pinpoint the time of day they broke in. I turn on the computer and immediately check the Windows event log information.

The information contained in the logs startles me. Reading the logs I know for a fact the computer was on at 8:41pm, 40 minutes before we came home. There are entries in the system log that seems to suggest that the time the computer was shut down was 9:20pm. Approximately the same time we turned the key in the lock of our door. It looks like the thieves might still have been inside our apartment at the time we arrived home. Good thing I didn’t kick the door in like I thought and instead called the cops. Who knows what might’ve happened.

-TPP

Cybercrime brings in more revenue than illegal drug trade

Speaking at the 2007 InformationWeek 500 conference McAfee CEO David DeWalt told the audience that revenue made by criminals in cybercrime now exceed the revenue of the worldwide illegal drug trade.

Pretty cool. I wonder when the authorities start taking these things seriously.

Meanwhile nerds in Romania were seen celebrating by drinking Cristal from bathtubs inside their MB limos.

-TPP

All around douchebag Jack Thompson goes after GTA IV. Again.

Rockstar Games is busy working on the next installment of their hugely popular Grand Theft Auto (GTA) video game franchise. GTA IV is scheduled for release sometime early 2008. The GTA franchise has been, unfairly so, I believe, in the news for quite for a while for being too violent. Some people are going even so far as to claim that the game is a murder simulator training otherwise healthy human beings to be murderers.

One of the most vocal critics of the GTA games is one Jack “Jackhole” Thompson, all around douchebag. To fully explain his douchebaggery would take far too long, so I’m just going to refer anyone interested to Google. The evidence is everywhere. For kicks start by reading up on Janet Reno and Jack Thompson. If nothing, you’ll get a good laugh out of it.

Jackhole’s latest crusade against GTA and Take Two Interactive, the publisher of the game, takes him to yet another threat of a lawsuit or as if Jachole puts it “govern yourself accordingly, or else”. Yes, that does sound exactly like a schoolyard threat. Kinda makes you wonder who gets to call themselves a lawyer in this country, doesn’t it?

Jackhole is claiming that a character in the game is actually him, and since the game has the player kill this character in one of the missions of the game, Rockstar Games is “targeting” him for murder.

As usual, Jackhole’s arguments are full of holes.

It appears that the only resemblance to Jackhole this fictional in-game character has is that they both are lawyers. Well, in as much as a fictional character can be a lawyer. But I suppose since Jackhole is about to lose his bar association membership, he’s also soon going to be a fictional lawyer. So I guess there is some similarity here.

The in-game character doesn’t bear any physical resemblance to Jackhole, is named Goldberg (not Thompson), lives in New York (not Miami) and is a Second Amendment expert (not a First Amendment idiot like Jackhole). There simply isn’t any similarities between the in-game character and Jackhole anywhere else than in Jackhole’s delusional mind.

That has never, of course, stopped Jackhole from going after anyone. So he’s threatening Take Two Interactive with an unspecified legal threat unless the scenes of this in-game character’s killing are removed from the game. Take Two has until 5pm September 21st 2007 to remove the scenes. Or else.

Yes. He really says “or else”.

Anyway, the absolute best part of Jackhole’s little hissy fit is that he’s done the exact same thing he’s accusing Rockstar Games for. Except that he actually referred to a real person. Pot, meet kettle, he’s black.

In October 10th 2005 Jackhole wrote a video game script he called a Modest Video Game Proposal. In the “script” he’s depicting a murder of a person named Paula Eibel, a CEO for a video game company “Take This”. In 2005 Take Two Interactive had Paul Eibeler as the CEO.

So, if he gets to sue Take Two over a fictional character that has no resemblance to him, he should really talk to a real lawyer because his ass should be in a court room for the same reason sometime soon after he “wins” against Take Two. His “script”, after all, leaves absolutely no doubt whatsoever whom he’s murdering in it.

-TPP

TD Ameritrade owned by spammers for years

The anti-spam community has been long suspecting something’s not right with TD Ameritrade. It seems email addresses of new customers of TD Ameritrade leak to spammers very soon after they were used to create TD Ameritrade accounts. This has been going on for at least 2 – 3 years.

The leading theories for the cause of the data leaks has been either unauthorized access to TD Ameritrade customer information or a marketing partner of TD Ameritrade’s selling mailing lists to third parties.

Today the suspicions have been proven true, as TD Ameritrade published information that they have uncovered “unauthorized code” on their system allowing spammers access to their customer records. And that’s pretty much all TD Ameritrade said.

It took TD Ameritrade far too long to react to customer complaints regarding their leaking customer information. It also took them far too long to find this backdoor on their computer system. It’s incredible a leading brokerage company in the United States can operate for years without knowing spammers are tapping into their customer information in real-time.

-TPP

Breaking News: McLaren Formula One team stripped of its 2007 points. Driver points spared.

The ongoing espionage scandal in Formula One reached a conclusion today when FIA made a decision to disqualify the McLaren Formula One team from the competition for the remainder of the 2007 season as well as the whole 2008 season for stealing and using information from the Ferrari team.

This is incredible. The McLaren drivers, Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton, are currently one and two in the season standings and one of them was bound to win the 2007 championship.

This has to be one of the biggest scandals to hit ANY sport in history.

And there seems to be more coming as rumors are circulating that the Renault F1 team had the same information and also used it in their cars.

Update: BBC is now reporting that instead of disqualification, the McLaren F1 team is going to lose its 2007 points and be hit with a $100M fine. The McLaren drivers will retain their points, and the 2008 car is subject to a special inspection before it’s allowed to participate in the 2008 season.

-TPP