FTC Shuts Down Calif. ISP For Botnets, Child Porn 224
An anonymous reader writes "The Federal Trade Commission has convinced a federal judge to pull the plug on a 3FN.net, a.k.a. 'Pricewert LLC,' a Northern California based hosting provider. The FTC alleges that 3FN/Pricewert was directly involved in setting up spam-spewing botnets, among other illegal activities, the Washington Post's Security Fix Blog writes. From the story: 'Pricewert hosts very little legitimate content and vast quantities of illegal, malicious, and harmful content, including child pornography, botnet command and control servers, spyware, viruses, trojans, phishing related sites, illegal online pharmacies, investment and other Web-based scams, and pornography featuring violence, bestiality, and incest.' The story quotes a former Justice Dept. expert saying the FTC action may be a smoke screen for a larger criminal investigation by the federal government in 3FN's activities."
Only diff this will make is in some DA's resume. (Score:3, Interesting)
Props to NASA too, for this! (Score:5, Interesting)
Yet another thing that NASA has done to help society, that people don't know. NASA's Inspector General (IG) played a large role in helping shut this den of crap down.
Re:"including child pornography..." (Score:3, Interesting)
You think this might be one of those "sending a message" things?
Y'know, shut down one ISP under a justification that could, potentially, target any ISP in the Untied States? Start with a small one that nobody has ever heard of, and won't ruffle many feathers. Then, whenever an ISP is getting too uppity, politely bring up the topic of 3FN, and oh, wouldn't it be a tragedy if that happened to a larger ISP?
Re:OT: Which browser is slashdot supposed to work (Score:5, Interesting)
Slashdot doesn't render properly on ANY browser.
The reason for this is because slashdot doesn't have a proper webdev writing their site. The may have a webdev, but obviously the person they have is not capable of meeting their needs.
Since the corporate overlords are cutting back on expenses, there is no room in the budget to hire a proper webdev. So the slashdot team has decided to purposely bork the site, keeping it just-good-enough-for-content-to-be-available, in the hope that some skilled webdev will offer their services for free to fix the site.
Or, possibly, the slashdot editors are playing passive-aggressive with the corporate overlord's demands that slashdot become more like a social networking site, and less like a news aggregator with comments. I think this has been hinted at by Rob & Jamie in the past.
Finally, the third possibility -- it's summer, which is kind of like the Septembers of yore on usenet. Maybe they're hoping to preserve the community by driving off the shambling hordes of idiots who belong on Fark or 4chan instead of here, while the slashdot core sticks around, knowing that things will simmer down in October. But that's probably wishful thinking.
Re:Hand It Over to Someone More Capable (Score:5, Interesting)
Or is this a bit like the Environmental Protection Agency investigating a murder because... they feel like it....
Funnily enough, for crimes like negligent homicide committed by a corporation, they usually face insignificant penalties. So instead, the government might use the EPA and those various laws to go after the company. Frontline had a great episode on this with regards to a foundry that was polluting like crazy, and also killed a few employees by having extremely lax safety standards and negligent management. The death of the employee? Punishable by like a $7000 fine. Dumping crap in the nearby river? Millions.
Watch the program online: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/workplace/ [pbs.org]
Re:Quite a list (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm pretty sure Verizon, Time Warner, AT&T, Comcast, Cablevision, Cox, Suddenlink, just to name a few ISPs, aren't directly involved in any illegal activities on their network.
Except spying on their customers for the government... though I guess that's not illegal any more.
Re:It's about gathering evidence. (Score:3, Interesting)
At least that's how it was before the new rules allowed Federal agencies to just say "terrorism" and skip past the middleman.
The old rules allowed Federal agencies to just say "dru dealer" and skip past the middleman. The PATRIOT act continaed almost no new ploice powers - it was effectively just s/drug dealer/terrorist/.
We gave up the 4th amendment a lng whil eback, for drunk driving checkpoints. It's sad how little people actually care about their rights.
No decrease volume of spam. (Score:4, Interesting)
Unlike the take down of McColo, I see no decrease of volume of spam at all. In fact, since April 2009, my spam level has gone back to and within the last week, above the level of spam since the before McColo and my mail server statistics follow Spamcop.net statistics.
http://www.spamcop.net/spamgraph.shtml?spamyear [spamcop.net]
IMHO, the botnets masters have dispersed themselves to multiple locations around the world so now taking down on an ISP will not affect them like McColo. On my mail server, most my spam comes from the Central and South America IP addresses and I think those systems are controlled by some bot master somewhere else.
However, IMHO, creating and hosting child porn is punishable by torture like waterboarding or worst. Dying is too good for those people.
Re:Only diff this will make is in some DA's resume (Score:3, Interesting)
Gas station at a well lit corner? No problem.
Dark corner inside a hole in the wall pizza joint? Out, sometimes along with the liquor license.