Addicted Gamer Sues Game-Maker, Says He is ‘Unable to Function’

A federal judge is allowing a negligence lawsuit to proceed against the publisher of the online virtual-world game Lineage II, amid allegations that a Hawaii man became so addicted he is “unable to function independently in usual daily activities such as getting up, getting dressed, bathing or communicating with family and friends.”

Craig Smallwood, the plaintiff, claims NCsoft of South Korea should pay unspecified monetary damages because of the addictive nature of the game. Smallwood claims to have played Lineage II for 20,000 hours between 2004 and 2009. Among other things, he alleges he would not have begun playing if he was aware “that he would become addicted to the game.”

Smallwood, who did not immediately respond for comment, alleged that the company “acted negligently in failing to warn or instruct or adequately warn or instruct plaintiff and other players of Lineage II of its dangerous and defective characteristics, and of the safe and proper method of using the game.”

Released in 2003 as a sequel to the original Lineage game, which was a national phenomenon in South Korea,  Lineage II is an immersion 3-D MMORPG that gained a reported 600,000 users within a few years, and is still being regularly expanded and updated six years later — all the better to turn more vulnerable Americans into bleary-eyed shut-ins.

U.S. District Judge Alan Kay refused to dismiss parts of Smallwood’s complaint this month, possibly clearing the way for a trial.  ”In light of plaintiff’s allegations, the court finds that plaintiff has stated a claim for both negligence and gross negligence,” Kay ruled (.pdf).

An attorney for the company was not immediately prepared to comment on Kay’s August 4 decision. But in a Tuesday court filing, NCsoft again urged the judge to dismiss the case.

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Mississippi Lawyer Drawn Into WikiLeaks Intrigue

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and spokesman Daniel Schmitt in Germany, 2009. Photo: Jacob Appelbaum/Flickr

A civil litigation attorney in Mississippi who has lent advice to WikiLeaks on occasion has found himself embroiled in intrigue and headlines after initiating conversation with the government over the secret-spilling site.

Timothy Matusheski, who specializes in litigation around False Claims Act violations, landed in the middle of a he said-he said fight Wednesday after WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange claimed that the U.S. military had reached out to WikiLeaks. Assange told the Associated Press that the Pentagon wanted to discuss the possibility of working with WikiLeaks to help redact sensitive information from the remaining 15,000 records from the Afghan war logs that WikiLeaks plans to publish soon.

The Defense Department immediately disputed the claim, and asserted it had neither contacted WikiLeaks nor had any intention of working with the organization. A Defense Department spokesman later revised that statement slightly saying the DoD had come across someone “purporting” to be an attorney for WikiLeaks and had scheduled a phone conversation with him for last Sunday morning, but the attorney was a no-show for the call. The Pentagon released a letter sent to the attorney, Matusheski, discussing the missed call.

The spokesman and the letter re-asserted that the Defense Department has no plans, nor did it ever have plans, to work with WikiLeaks to redact information.

Matusheski confirmed to Threat Level on Wednesday that the military had indeed approached him, but not about the Afghan documents and only after he had contacted authorities first, several weeks ago.

Matusheski said that he received a call last week from Chuck Ames, an investigator with the Army’s Criminal Investigations Division, which is working on the case of Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old Army private suspected of having leaked classified information to WikiLeaks.

Ames was interested in setting up a meeting with Assange, Matusheski said. But he never mentioned any documents WikiLeaks possessed, or suggested the government would be interested in working with WikiLeaks to redact sensitive information. That suggestion came from Matusheski himself, who thought it would be a good idea for the Army to view the documents “so that if anything gets published, they would have advance notice of it and could do some damage-control,” Matusheski said.

Matusheski said Assange had told him previously that he had already set up a network interface where the government could access all of the documents and make comments on them and suggest redactions. When Matusheski suggested to Ames that the government might be given access to the documents, Ames told him he didn’t have authority to discuss or consider the offer and would have to get back to him. Matusheski said he made the suggestion without consulting with WikiLeaks first.

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Court OKs Covert iPhone Audio Recording

Using an iPhone to secretly record a conversation is not a violation of the Wiretap Act if done for legitimate purposes, a federal appeals court has ruled.

“The defendant must have the intent to use the illicit recording to commit a tort of crime beyond the act of recording itself,” (.pdf) the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled.

Friday’s decision by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which involves a civil lawsuit over a secret audio recording produced from the 99-cent Recorder app, mirrors decisions in at least three other federal appeals courts.

The lawsuit concerns a family dispute over the making of a dying mother’s will. Days before the Connecticut woman died, her son secretly recorded a kitchen conversation between the son, mother, stepfather and others over how to handle her estate after her death.

The son, in a probate dispute, turned over the audio file to the court in 2008 to bolster his position concerning the estate of his late mother, who died without a will. The stepfather sued him, alleging a privacy breach under the Wiretap Act. A federal judge dismissed the case, and the stepfather appealed.

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Prosecutor: No Charges in Webcam Spy Scandal

Federal authorities announced Tuesday they will not prosecute administrators connected to a webcam spying scandal at a suburban Philadelphia school district.

Prosecutors and the FBI opened an inquiry following a February privacy lawsuit accusing Lower Merion School District officials of spying on students with webcams on the 2,300 district-issued MacBooks. The lawyers who filed the lawsuit claim the district secretly snapped thousands of webcam images of students, including images of youths at home, in bed or even “partially dressed.”

Zane David Memeger, the United States attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, said he found no criminal intent in the alleged surveillance.

“I have concluded that bringing criminal charges is not warranted in this matter,” Memeger said in a statement. “For the government to prosecute a criminal case, it must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the person charged acted with criminal intent. We have not found evidence that would establish beyond a reasonable doubt that anyone involved had criminal intent.”

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Army Spy Planes Not Used to Track New York Bomb Suspect

The U.S. did not use military surveillance planes to siphon the cell phone calls of the Times Square car bomb suspect earlier this year, according to responses to FOIA requests by Threat Level.

In May, Faisal Shahzad was arrested for allegedly attempting to set off a car bomb in Times Square. The local CBS affiliate in New York reported that U.S. Army intelligence planes had been used to spy on Shahzad and help authorities capture him.

“In the end, it was secret Army intelligence planes that did [Shahzad] in,” wrote WCBS correspondent Marcia Kramer. “Armed with his cell phone number, they circled the skies over the New York area, intercepting a call to Emirates Airlines reservations, before scrambling to catch him at John F. Kennedy International Airport.”

The detail intrigued Threat Level, as it did a number of other people who raised questions about the spy tactic and the source for the news story — WCBS didn’t attribute the information to anyone.

But within an hour of posting its story, WCBS mysteriously revised the piece and posted a new version that was missing any mention of spy planes, as well as any indication that the story had been altered. The headline was changed from “Army Intelligence Planes Led To Suspect’s Arrest” to “Total Time Of Investigation: 53 Hours, 20 Minutes: Faisal Shahzad In Custody After Nearly Fleeing United States.” The story has since disappeared from the WCBS site entirely.
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Hate Blogger Convicted of Threats After Three Trials

Three trials later, authorities have finally won a criminal conviction against Hal Turner, the New Jersey hate blogger charged with threatening to kill federal appeals court judges.

Turner was convicted in federal court in Brooklyn on Friday of threatening to assault or murder a federal official or judge, and faces a maximum 10-year prison term under the law, with a likely 10 to 16 months under federal sentencing guidelines. His sentencing date has not been set.

He blogged at turnerradionetwork.blogspot.com that the three judges of the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit of Appeals should be “killed” for upholding a Chicago handgun ban last year.

“Let me be the first to say this plainly: These judges deserve to be killed. Their blood will replenish the tree of liberty. A small price to pay to assure freedom for millions,” the 47-year-old blogger wrote.

He also posted addresses, photos, maps and other identifying information about Chief Judge Frank Easterbrook and Judges Richard Posner and William Bauer.

The first mistrial was in December and the other in March after jurors were hopelessly deadlocked. Juries in the second and third trial heard testimony from the judges who said they felt threatened by Turner’s writings.

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Cyberwar Against Wikileaks? Good Luck With That


View WikiLeaks insurance seeders in a larger map

Should the U.S. government declare a cyberwar against WikiLeaks?

On Thursday, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told a gathering in London that the secret-spilling website is moving ahead with plans to publish the remaining 15,000 records from the Afghan war logs, despite a demand from the Pentagon that WikiLeaks “return” its entire cache of published and unpublished classified U.S. documents.

Last month, WikiLeaks released 77,000 documents out of 92,000, temporarily holding back 15,000 records at the urging of newspapers that had been provided an advance copy of the entire database. On Thursday, Assange said his organization has now gone through about half of the remaining records, redacting the names of Afghan informants. That suggests the final release could still be weeks away.

Pundits, though, are clamoring for preemptive action. “The United States has the cyber capabilities to prevent WikiLeaks from disseminating those materials,” wrote Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen on Friday. “Will President Obama order the military to deploy those capabilities? … If Assange remains free and the documents he possesses are released, Obama will have no one to blame but himself.”

But a previous U.S.-based effort to wipe WikiLeaks off the internet did not go well. In 2008, federal judge Jeffrey White in San Francisco ordered the WikiLeaks.org domain name seized as part of a lawsuit filed by Julius Baer Bank and Trust, a Swiss bank that suffered a leak of some of its internal documents. Two weeks later the judge admitted he’d acted hastily, and he had the site restored. “There are serious questions of prior restraint, possible violations of the First Amendment,” he said.

Even while the order was in effect, WikiLeaks lived on: supporters and free speech advocates distributed the internet IP address of the site, so it could be reached directly. Mirrors of the site were unaffected by the court order, and a copy of the entire WikiLeaks archive of leaked documents circulated freely on the Pirate Bay.

The U.S. government has other, less legal, options, of course — the “cyber” capabilities Thiessen alludes to. The Pentagon probably has the ability to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks against WikiLeaks’ public-facing servers. If it doesn’t, the Army could rent a formidable botnet from Russian hackers for less than the cost of a Humvee.

But that wouldn’t do much good either. WikiLeaks wrote its own insurance policy two weeks ago, when it posted a 1.4 GB file called insurance.aes256.

The file’s contents are encrypted, so there’s no way to know what’s in it. But, as we’ve previously reported, it’s more than 19 times the size of the Afghan war log — large enough to contain the entire Afghan database, as well as the other, larger classified databases said to be in WikiLeaks’ possession. Accused Army leaker Bradley Manning claimed to have provided WikiLeaks with a log of events in the Iraq war containing 500,000 entries from 2004 through 2009, as well as a database of 260,000 State Department cables to and from diplomatic posts around the globe.

Whatever the insurance file contains, Assange — appearing via Skype on a panel at the Frontline Club — reminded everyone Thursday that he could make it public at any time. “All we have to do is release the password to that material and it’s instantly available,” he said.

WikiLeaks is encouraging supporters to download the insurance file through the BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay. “Keep it safe,” reads a message greeting visitors to the WikiLeaks chat room. After two weeks, the insurance file is doubtless in the hands of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of netizens already.

We dipped into the torrent Friday to get a sense of WikiLeaks’ support in that effort. In a few minutes of downloading, we pulled bits and piece of insurance.aes256 from 61 seeders around the world. We ran the IP addresses through a geolocation service and turned it into a KML file to produce the Google Map at the top of this page. The seeders are everywhere, from the U.S., to Iceland, Australia, Canada and Europe. They had all already grabbed the entire file, and are now just donating bandwidth to help WikiLeaks survive.*

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Oracle-Google Suit Attacks Open Source Software

Oracle’s suit against Google over its Android mobile operating system signals a major reversal in the stewardship of Java under new management, and will likely be the first of many battles over the ubiquitous web programming language.

Java was created by Sun Microsystems in 1995, where it was conceived as a lingua franca for the web, and it quickly won broad acceptance among developers as a powerful platform for adding features that could not be handled by HTML. It was purchased by Oracle as part of its acquisition of Sun in January — a transition that may have planted the seeds of the coming fracas from the start.

“During the integration meetings between Sun and Oracle where we were being grilled about the patent situation between Sun and Google, we could see the Oracle lawyer’s eyes sparkle,” Java co-creator James Gosling wrote on his blog Friday. “Filing patent suits was never in Sun’s genetic code.”

Gosling quit his job as an Oracle VP in April after his job transferred from Sun.

Oracle filed a federal lawsuit (.pdf) Thursday in San Jose, California, charging that Android breaches Java’s open source license. The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages, and demands a federal judge immediately block distribution of Android, the No. 3 mobile operating platform.

“Google will continue to realize unjust profits, gains and advantages as a proximate result of its infringement as long as such infringement is permitted to continue,” the lawsuit said.

“We are disappointed Oracle has chosen to attack both Google and the open source Java community with this baseless lawsuit,” Google fired back in a statement. “The open source Java community goes beyond any one corporation and works every day to make the web a better place. We will strongly defend open source standards and will continue to work with the industry to develop the Android platform.”

No hearing date has been set.

Many questions about the prospects of the suit remain unanswered, and the long-term impact of the suit is very much up in the air. Nevertheless, the suit drew a fearful response from the open source community on Friday.

Sun had been selling Java under paid licensing agreements, and also giving it away as open source. Java was moved to the Free Software Foundation’s GNU General Public License in 2006.

“I consider this a patent attack on free software and open source,” said Florian Mueller, who founded the NoSoftwarePatents campaign.

The suit is complicated by the deep involvement of Google staff in the original development of Java. Google CEO Eric Schmidt once led Java development at Sun.

Open source guru Bruce Perens says Google may have compromised its license to use Java ME, the mobile version of the language, by dropping the language’s Swing widget toolkit and AWT graphical user interface class, replacing it with Google’s own GUI. “My question is why would Google have made technical decisions that lost them the patent grant? It would have been easy enough to keep it,” said Perens. “So, I guess they weren’t worried about being sued by Sun…. I think Android handset implementers will want to see a patent agreement in place or they’ll want to see Google comply with the terms of the patent grant.”

Bernard Harzog summed up what he thought the legal flap was about on The Virtualization Practice blog:

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Alleged Carder ‘BadB’ Busted in France — Watch His Cartoon

An alleged old-timer in the international carding community and one of the top sellers of stolen bank card data has been arrested in France, and faces extradition to the United States on an indictment unsealed Wednesday in Washington, D.C.

Vladislav Anatolievich Horohorin, 27, aka BadB, holds dual-citizenship in Ukraine and Israel and was one of the earliest members of CarderPlanet, a first of its kind Russian-language carding forum that was launched around 2002 by a group of East Europeans. CarderPlanet was shuttered in 2004, and BadB had more recently been selling his stolen goods at carder.su and on his own websites, dumps.name and badb.biz, where he promoted his product in lighthearted Flash cartoons like the one above.

Authorities say the network created by Horohorin and other CarderPlanet veterans is linked to “nearly every major intrusion of financial information reported to the international law enforcement community.”

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Prior Restraint Lives: Newspaper Blocked From Publishing Photo of Murder Suspect

An LAPD handout of murder defendant Alberd Tersargyan

We’re not sure what’s more alarming: that a local California judge has barred the Los Angeles Times from publishing lawfully obtained photos of a murder defendant, or that an appeals court has just decided not to immediately reverse this clear exercise of prior restraint.

Prior restraint smacks at the heart of the First Amendment. The U.S. Supreme Court has never tolerated it, even in the 1971 “Pentagon Papers” case. Then, the justices refused to block The New York Times from publishing sensitive documents concerning the nation’s involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967.

At the time, Justice William Douglas said in a concurring opinion that to win a prior restraint motion the government must show that a material’s publication would “inevitably, directly and immediately cause the occurrence of an event kindred to imperiling the safety of a transport already at sea.”

That’s not even close to what’s happening in the case of quadruple slaying suspect Alberd Tersargyan. Superior Court Judge Hilleri Merritt’s decision last week threatens frightening precedent, and could undermine the rights of journalists, pajama-clad bloggers and the public’s right to know in future cases.

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