Mega-man: The fast, fabulous, and fraudulent life of Kim Dotcom
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
(I believe justice will be served more fairly here... no $250,000 per download crap - but that's just my opinion)
It was interesting to see it "on the ground" as it were - I had not idea he was NZ based.
Looks like the US Grand Jury is trying to set an example, and it does so in their usual heavy-handed, cowboy fashion. Wilful copyright infringement (so far, alleged) is not a crime worth 50 years in the oven. As I read somewhere, killing Michael Jackson cannot be a 4y offence while allowing someone to put his songs for download is a 50y one. Not in a civilised country like New Zealand.
How is seizing his property even legal before trial? not talking about servers, but cars, houses, etc. I could go on for a long time because the list is long, but to sum it up it looks like they are doing their best to damage the guy as much as possible before trial.
But what's even sadder is the cavalier attitude Germany has shown towards him: after his first set of crimes, during the extradition from Thailand he should have got a more severe punishment it seems (what good that would have served with a guy like that is another question altogether). Insider trading was not a crime until 1995? It was banned around 1930s in the US I think.
I was actually (digitally) in touch with kimble and his BBS in my own BBS-days and feel a need to set straight that, to my knowledge, he was never very tech-savvy, and never a "hacker" by any standard. Instead he quickly made a name for himself for being a full-on fraudster of the sociopath kind.
Here's a (german) article that sheds some light on his earliest endeavours:
http://www.gulli.com/news/12565-nachruf-guenter-freiherr-von...
The gist is:
Kimble started out by running a warez-bbs and dealing calling cards (which was quite common back in that day). Things turned nasty when his BBS got busted. He did not only cooperate with the cops but there-after partnered with an infamous german lawyer to set up traps for other BBS operators and sell them (literally) to the authorities. This went on for years in an organized fashion. From all accounts that I've heard he was not strong-armed into it but rather made money that way and even bragged about it.
From there I think the ars article is mostly correct. But I wouldn't like to see him get away with his self-proclaimed "hacker"-image.
In the german BBS-scene of the 90s the hate for him was unrivaled. There were quite a few graphic kimble-related ascii-banners on some post-login screens.
He would take 'hacks' from others and then claim them in the media for himself. The first time he did this with one of the groups was when he went to the media with the NASA hack. What happen was somebody on the channel had dumped shell accounts on a few jpl.nasa.gov boxes, and a day later the story was in the media that Kimble had done it.
I then watched him get kicked from other groups when he would do the same thing - either claiming hacks as his own or taking exploits, ripping out the attribution and putting his own name in.
He became a subject of derision with these groups so he then setup his own group and bought in some fans - claiming he was going to 'hack' all of us. Nothing ended up happening.
There is truth to most of his claims - for eg. the 'military secrets' claim comes from a hack where some Indian and Iraqi military networks where hacked and documents leaked. Around 20 people on IRC had access to them, and Kimble claimed that one as well (one of the other guys ended up getting arrested for it because he tried to sell the documents to an undercover agent).
Funnily the media attention that Kimble bought to himself bought a lot of attention to Undernet and the groups that were on there at the time. It ended up driving us to private SIRC servers and renaming most of the groups as a large number of newbies (and probably federal agents) flooded onto the servers and tried to gain access to the group channels.
A couple of years later he re-appeared with his security company and then racing videos. We would be in conflict with him continuously - he would email us with taunts and we would return them. The website of his security company was defaced numerous times and his home directory dumped. He then tried to call a 'truce' and to hire a few of us, I was on a few conference calls that Kimble was on.
I then bumped into him again a little later on, after he started MegaUpload. I wasn't surprised at all that he was behind the site. What we did back then and with him was a bit childish and we grew out of it - but Kimble definitely isn't a hacker in that old regard. He does have skills in promoting himself and getting people to believe in his ideas.
A sad reminder that the "online persona" will often say more about you than one is willing to admit.
I won't deny that you have to give him some respect for being able to pull all these stunts and acquiring the money from investors, however as it seems most if not all projects where at least partly illegal.
Capital allocation in Germany revolves around raising money for the Mittelstand, which are medium-sized business where the executives usually own more than half the business, equity investors are connected to the company, and it is only the debt investors who have distance from the company.
There are bigger companies in Germany, but liquid equity is still not as important to the Germany economy as it is in the US, so it should not be surprising that the needs of non-insider equity holders has not been as important in Germany.
It makes me wonder what the start-up scene here in Germany is really hoping for: I don't see Germany having a straightforward "young IPO" market any time soon.
There was an Economist article a couple of months back that might be interesting: http://www.economist.com/node/21535175
Maybe that's why all the "names" on the German internet scene are so "dodgy" with limited share holder protection the is much less incentive for normal start ups. You just get the edgy barrow boy types - all the real engineers want to go an design the next 3/4 light sub system for Audi
That is the really important part: NO, he never was. He was always all smoke and mirrors, show and PR stunts. And from his BBS days all the way to megaupload, he has never done anything but shady, borderline-illegal or downright criminal activities.
Here have a read:
http://blogs.ajc.com/political-insider-jim-galloway/2011/11/...
"In September 2008, Bachus and other congressional leaders were privately briefed by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on the economy’s imminent meltdown.
The next day, Bachus was buying option funds that would increase in value if the economy tanked.It did."
http://money.cnn.com/2004/03/05/news/companies/martha_verdic...
"The conviction came exactly a week after U.S. District Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum threw out the most serious charge against Stewart -- securities fraud -- which carried a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a $1 million fine.
The charge -- which the judge had called "novel" during the trial -- accused Stewart of using her own statements that she was innocent as a ploy to mislead investors in her company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia."
Applying this logic would mean that no one, say, in the 1980s Soviet Union had anything insightful to say about political oppression in the UK.
- Is it retribution? Then corporal punishment is an easier and cheaper solution. It's also arguably more humane than jail/prison.
- Is it to protect society? A thief has to steal a lot to do more damage than he'd cost as a prisoner.
- Is the goal to deterrence? That's fine, but prison sentences only really work as deterrence for premeditated crimes, and thieves are typically addicts of some sort.
The whole justice problem isn't that easy, and just throwing everybody in jail is a pretty bad idea. They do that in the USA and the results are horrific.
See also comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3513015
Sorry, why were we losing weight again?
Somebody tell Kim Schmitz...
If I was super rich like that, I wouldn't spend it on cars and yachts. I would spend it on coaches, tutors, trainers, personal chefs, training courses, seminars, gym equipment, stuff like that. Use the money improve myself, since that's the only true wealth there is anyway (that and relationships).
No? Well then we had no right to extradite him.
Law enforcement is created by society to protect PEOPLE not corporations.
So, are you arguing that corporations should not be protected or that law should protect him or both?
See specifically sections 7 and 11 of the Extradition Act 1999 (http://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1999/0055/latest/w...).
Further, the Extradition Treaty between NZ and the US ( http://newzealand.usembassy.gov/uploads/images/o16y8MOyHW2l-...), Article V, which states:
"Neither of the Contracting Parties shall be bound to deliver up its own citizens under this Treaty, but the executive authority of each shall have the power to deliver them up, if, in its discretion, it be deemed proper to do so."
So there's a bilateral opt-out for both parties, at least in the case where their own citizens are involved.
I hope New Zealand deals with this case and does so fairly and ignoring external pressure. Sadly, this looks unlikely.
*I personally don't classify downloading other people's work as stealing, but building a huge business from it is totally different matter.
And it's totally not the point of the article, anyway.
You should though, because the two are just different shades of the same color. Downloading other people's work = benefiting from their work without their permission. Building a huge business = benefiting from their work without their permission on a larger scale.
You just have to draw the line somewhere and I think that pirating for personal use is fine.
I think it's reasonable to say that pirating for personal, non-commercial use (even when "non-commercial" is always vaguely defined) is fine.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/30/kimble_rally/
Post 9/11 he also claimed to have the details of Bin Laden's bank accounts in Sudan without offering a shred of evidence
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/01/18/bin_laden_hackmeiste...
Best served with a dose of parenting.
Your certainly correct he is no role model, but as long as making a million bucks is the ideal of a good life, the problem goes deeper than this one man.
FTFY
While reading the article, did anyone else wonder whether Ars got the permission of the rightsholders to the images hosted on kimble.com?
Maybe Kim should commence proceedings to have Sean Gallagher extradited for copyright infringement.
For those of you not familiar with the early 90's phreaking scene, calling card fraud came to the fore as a timely replacement to blueboxing (which the telcos had recently killed off). Calling cards also had a inherent transferable value, so they had the added attraction that you could use them as a means of barter.
A large number of people were busted at the same time (late 1994)(worldwide) for trading calling card numbers that cost MCI, GTE and AT&T millions in the early 90's. I've heard numbers up to $50 million quoted as combined losses. My guess is that Kimble has been on the US Secret Service watch/hit list since 1994 when they failed to have him extradited to the US to face the calling card fraud (conspiracy) charges.
Many of those busted in the USA went to prison. James Lay was the guy that wrote the software to intercept the card numbers at the switch level and then went on to sell on an estimated 60,000 card numbers through a worldwide network of dealers. I think Kimble was one of those card dealers in Germany.
A large number of the accused were barely 18 years old when they were busted and US extradition requests were denied due to their age. The Secret Service busts were well organised and had to be executed and coordinated quickly worldwide (no mean feat). This took a great deal of negotiation with foreign governments and cost a great deal of effort and money. They then had to watch as one by one those accused abroad were given hand slaps, charges were dropped, deals were done, and court cases collapsed or never even made it as far as a court room. That must have been very frustrating after all of that effort.
Many of those busted were thought to have been 'turned'. It was also reported that Kimble 'put himself forward' and allegedly 'offered' to help crack a pirate software BBS group.
Also worth noting is that many of the cards that came into Europe went directly east to the mafias in those new border countries that had previously been the other side of the iron curtain before the Berlin wall fell. Being in Germany (at this time being a EU external border country) meant that Kimble may well have had some contacts in those countries that the BND (German Federal Intelligence Service) might have been very interested in.
tl;dr The Secret Service never forgets!
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+ring+leader.-a019474647 http://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/05/business/calling-card-frau... http://articles.latimes.com/1994-11-01/business/fi-57359_1_b... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_enlargement_of_the_Europea... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EU_Enlargement_2004.png
I smell so much bullshit in this. How can you be number 1 when matches are 5 vs 5?
edit: Okay it's on Xbox live (hahahahaha), on FFA (hahahahaha) and for a few minutes at most. This is just a big joke, the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=l...!
edit2: I know it's a very tiny part of the article, but I just bugged me that you could write something like "Kim is also the number 1 player in Call of Duty", it's just plain false and sensationalism.
Not saying it is legitimately held, nor do I care, but ars wasn't being false or sensational.