Category: Hackers

MPAA hacker interview

Paul

Wired has an interview with Robert Anderson, a hacker-for-hire who went to work for the MPAA, illegally breaking into BitTorrent trackers and snooping on their email:


According to Anderson, the MPAA told him: “We would need somebody like you. We would give you a nice paying job, a house, a car, anything you needed…. if you save Hollywood for us you can become rich and powerful…”

But once Anderson turned over the data and cashed the MPAA’s check, he quickly realized that Garfield had no further use for him. “He lost interest in me,” he says. Anderson felt abandoned: During negotiations with Garfield, the hacker had become convinced he was starting a long-term, lucrative relationship with the motion picture industry. “He was stringing me along personally.”

Hollywood’s cold shoulder put Anderson’s allegiance back up for grabs, and about a year later he came clean with TorrentSpy’s Bunnell in an online chat. “‘I sold you out to the MPAA,'” Anderson says he told Bunnell. “I felt guilty (for) what happened and I kinda also thought at that point the MPAA wasn’t going to do anything.”

Link

I thought people would like to read the interview also!! Enjoy

Teenager claims to have easy iPod Touch jailbreak

Paul

A 13-year-old hacker claims to have developed code that would let you put third-party applications on an iPod Touch without having to take a computer science class.

AriX sent us a press release Sunday promoting iJailbreak, an automated program that allows third-party applications to run on the iPod Touch. It doesn’t work for the iPhone, and it’s only available for iPod Touch owners that are using Intel-based Macs. I don’t have an iPod Touch at my disposal right now, so I’m unable to test whether it actually works, but some users on MacRumors.com reported that it worked.

Ever since Apple released the 1.1.1 software update for both the iPhone and the iPod Touch in late September that broke older third-party application installers, hackers have been hard at work searching for a new way to bypass the restrictions. A preliminary jailbreaking application was released last week, but it required a great deal of expertise to get up and running. Erica Sadun, a writer for The Unofficial Apple Weblog, installed that iPod Touch jailbreak Friday evening but warned, “This is not ready for prime time, kids. Don’t do this at home.”

If a 13 year old can do it why can’t the dev team do it?