People of Interest

An interesting story was brought to my attention by Shawn... this involves a gentleman that lives in Buffalo, NY who wishes to remain anonymous. The morning of March 7 the police raided his house. It appears that someone from his IP address was using a peer-to-peer file sharing program to download and share child porn. With IP addresses, they are all unique and he is the only one in the world with that specific IP. Extremely easy to trace. During the arrest, they treat him like the scum he is, a pedophile. What makes this a worthwhile story is he swore his innocence. The police confiscated his computer and spent the day looking for evidence of pornography... but they found none. A couple days later the police came to the conclusion that he was telling the truth. How could this be? They tracked it to his IP address. The only one in the world. It's has to be him.

This gentleman just purchased a wireless router. Statistics say there are 200 million in use in the US. When he set it up, he failed to turn on any type of wireless security, password or encryption. It was wide open for anyone to link up to and use. His next door neighbor, seeing he can get free internet off his neighbor's wireless router, linked right up to it and started downloading child pornography. Sharing his wireless router would have shown the same IP address. A week later the police arrested the 25 year old neighbor after an investigation of his PC found what they were looking for.

This could happen to anyone. This HAS happened many times already. This guy's life was ruined because he simply didn't take the time to set his wireless router up securely. I see it all the time. Even at home, I pick up 7 wireless access points and 3 are wide open. DON'T LET THIS HAPPEN TO YOU. If you have a wireless router make sure it is secured. If you don't know how to do it, find or pay someone who does. Not only could this happen, but you could be allowing anyone that links to your wireless router access to the files on your PC. Not a good thing if you have, like most people do, private and personal information and passwords stored on it.

The next person of interest I'll talk about is George Hotz. George is a very smart and tech savvy 21 year old. He's had the gift since he was young and has attended the best of tech schools throughout his young career. George's notoriety came about because he was the person that successfully hacked the iPhone. They call it jail breaking. After he got tired of hacking the iPhone, he moved onto hacking the Play Station 3. He made all this information public. George's logic was that you bought the device and you should be allowed to do whatever you want with it. Not what Apple or Sony limits you to. Sony sued him.

On April 17th, Sony's Play Station network was hacked. Their network has been down while they investigated the intrusion. On April 28th, Sony emailed all Play Station network users that the user information was compromised. This is the single largest database of user information taken so far with over 70 million, far surpassing the millions take from Epsilon in March. They stop short of saying whether credit card info was taken. Now, back to George... rumor has it that the people responsible (the group Anonymous from the wikileaks fame) did it in retaliation for Sony taking legal action against George.