Former AMer WB4AIO busted

[wa1knx]

hee,
     well Don, I havn't heard of police scanning computers, not that they would
know how to. but my spy scanners have pulled out porn stuff from sites
I never heard of. I hear linux is much harder to break, may get there some
day.

[W1ATR]

It's all Bush's fault. So is the weather, and the band conditions.

[k4kyv]

Band condx excellent tonight.  Lightning storm map completely silent.  On 75, with no station transmitting all I could hear was a steady background hiss - like 10m or vhf.  AM QSO on about 3670, another one on 3695 and a couple in the old AM window.  Very few slopbuckets in between.  I briefly worked a station about 250 miles away; he was running 5 watts AM to an Argonaut. Too bad I have to get up early in the morning.

Maybe Bush's speech tonight made the band condx good.

[WB3JOK]

It's all Bush's fault. So is the weather, and the band conditions.

Strange, I thought I was browsing AMfone.net, not qrz.com 
-Charles

[Todd, KA1KAQ]

Strange, I thought I was browsing AMfone.net, not qrz.com 
-Charles

Actually Charles. it's conspiracy.com.

All of you guys complaining about this are now on the government's list. Better watch out! The black helicopters are coming for you even as your mind is being controlled by the cell phone towers.

Cell phone towers?!?? No one told me about that! 

Steve makes a good point, though: helicopters require two hands to fly, so it couldn't have been... the one-armed man!

Seriously though, did anyone ever think that perhaps, just perhaps, the guy could actually be guilty? I obviously don't know one way or the other, but who here does? It's probably a good thing that none of use are judges, although I do think Deano would look like a badass in one of those white wigs they use in the UK.

[k4kyv]

Seriously though, did anyone ever think that perhaps, just perhaps, the guy could actually be guilty?

Possibly so, but a $500,000 fine for four images on a computer hard drive?

[Pete, WA2CWA]

4 images, 2 images, 10,000 images; there's no difference between slightly guilty, real guilty, and guilty.

[John K5PRO]

Paul (VJB), Yes, I do remember Morgan, but not in first person. My roommate at Va Tech knew him well. He also worked (or played) at WUVT in Blacksburg before I did, and left a reputation. We had a rack in the engineering room, which was labeled the Orgasmitron, for the Woody Allen device. I think it was something to do with Morgan. I heard stories about his busted radar jammer. He could have been associated with one of the incidents where WUVT AM 640 KHz carrier current 'accidentally' was heard many miles away, due to some leaky feeder mistake.....

I alerted some other VA broadcast/RF engineers who knew Kevin, of the news. They were stunned - but no one is totally surprised, that boy was pretty bright, and did whatever he wanted to do. Sort of inspirational as someone who got things done right. Well - sort of.

Speaking of red and blue, I remember patching a 2600 Hz tone over AT&T from the WUVT engineering room, via our HP 200 oscillator, and hearing the relays clicking down the network. I turned it off. My XYLs cell # is xxx-2600 and I remember it easily due to this. Fun stuff.

I still have a complete collection of 1970s newsletters devoted to early Phreakers. With the technical library at VA Tech, we had the entire AT&T/Bell journals. 

[W1RKW]

On the subject of conspiracy theories:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070111/ap_on_hi_te/spy_coins

I wonder if they do full fidelity AM?

[WB3JOK]

4 images, 2 images, 10,000 images; there's no difference between slightly guilty, real guilty, and guilty.

You wouldn't happen to be a fan of Draco, would you?
(The ancient Greek from whose name the term "draconian" derives)
 

-Charles

[Bacon, WA3WDR]

4 images, 2 images, 10,000 images; there's no difference between slightly guilty, real guilty, and guilty.

We haven't seen these images; we have no idea if they are beach photos, porn or whatever.

[w1guh]

Well, there was that other paragraph that said, in part...

"Neighbors say federal authorities raided Strom's house in December, seizing boxes full of evidence. They arrested Strom Thursday afternoon at that same house."

Did they say what was in those boxes?

But, yea, four images?  Depends, of course on the context, but it's true that any of us could have four images that we are totally unaware of.  I'd like to think that the law is cognizant of that fact and those were, in fact, obviously willful downloads or whatever.

This reminds me of N1BTT (fake, bootleg call).  Did he wind up in the hoosegow for "being with a minor?"

[Bill, KD0HG]

http://abcnews.go.com/2020/LegalCenter/story?id=2785054&page=1

[wa1knx]

i'm glad i wasn't born today, we all used to steal our dads nudy rags and
swap em.  i wonder who dropped the dime on
the kid anyway.  AZ is tough, real tough sentences are handed out
here, and hard time in the az sun. in some places in the country smokers are lower
than child molesters, so glad I don't smoke either.

[k4kyv]

http://abcnews.go.com/2020/LegalCenter/story?id=2785054&page=1

Makes the days of the Scarlet Letter look like an era of enlightenment.

Except maybe for obvious pix of 6-10 years olds, how can they tell from computer pictures the age of a person anyway?  I have seen 12-years olds who could pass for 18, and it would be easy to apply a little make-up so that someone 18 or 19 would look like a pre-teen, and have them pose for "kiddie porn" pix or movies.  I don't think anyone has ever figured out a way to extract DNA from a photo!

At the rate we're going, it will be like during the reign of terror following the French revolution, when a person could be hauled into a kangaroo court and then assigned a date with the guillotine for mere suspicion of "plotting" or "subversion."  Only now, the justification is to protect the "children."

Sex offender status for sharing a Playboy magazine?  Gimme a break!

I suppose when we get on the air, we better not piss off too many slopbuckets, if we happen to have a computer connected to the internet.

Maybe my paranoid friend is right.  He won't have a computer in his house because he is afraid someone will snoop into his personal and financial records, and he stores his cell phone in a metal lockbox when not in use.

[W1RKW]

The problem with the court system (prosecution) is they're not interested in the truth but just a conviction. Innocent until proven guilty. Hah!  Sue Microsoft

OK, so this begs a question, Let's say you maintain a computer on a yearly basis by reloading the OS and software by using the reinstallation utilities (that reload the OS image) that comes with modern day computer, would all this garbage be permanently deleted from the HD? Something tells me no on an ATA or EIDE type drive.  I having a network in my household and all the PC's have ATA or EIDE drives there's no telling what the hell is on the HD.  How can one ensure illegal stuff doesn't exist on an HD if it's put there surreptitiously via the net without actually looking at over 50,000+ files on the HD? 

[w1guh]

Then there's the possibility that files can be put on you hard drive without your knowledge.  There's no technological reason that can't happen, even with the latest and greatest protection, spyware, firewalls, etc.  Over-zealous prosecutors seem to be capable of all sorts of stuff.

[Bacon, WA3WDR]

The problem with the court system (prosecution) is they're not interested in the truth but just a conviction. Innocent until proven guilty. Hah!  Sue Microsoft

OK, so this begs a question, Let's say you maintain a computer on a yearly basis by reloading the OS and software by using the reinstallation utilities (that reload the OS image) that comes with modern day computer, would all this garbage be permanently deleted from the HD? Something tells me no on an ATA or EIDE type drive.  I having a network in my household and all the PC's have ATA or EIDE drives there's no telling what the hell is on the HD.  How can one ensure illegal stuff doesn't exist on an HD if it's put there surreptitiously via the net without actually looking at over 50,000+ files on the HD? 

I've heard that modern drives are wiped pretty well by a reformat these days.  In the past, three full reformats were recommended to ensure complete erasure.  But unless you back up your files, you will lose everything.  And what are you backing up?

Who knows what is on a drive or what someone will make of it.  Police sometimes overstate their cases to pressure suspects into spilling lots of beans.  Prosecutors often are ambitious politicians.  I suspect that Kevin isn't going to cave, though, and I believe that the one square inch retraction will indeed appear on page 39 behind the lingeree ads in six months to a year.

[k4kyv]

Then there's the possibility that files can be put on you hard drive without your knowledge.  There's no technological reason that can't happen, even with the latest and greatest protection, spyware, firewalls, etc.  Over-zealous prosecutors seem to be capable of all sorts of stuff.

How often do you get a notice from Micro$oft announcing a critical update, to patch a hole in Windows that would "allow an attacker to take complete control of your computer"?

[n3lrx]

Hard drives don't really delete anything!
When you delete a file you actually change the filename in the directory table and flag it as deleted. The file is still there! But since the file is no longer mapped in the directory the OS is free to write to the sectors that file once occupied. So, if you delete a file and then by chance nothing gets written to those sectors you could come back a year later and recover that file!

The only way to truly delete a file is to shred it. What this does is modifies the filename, finds the sectors that the file occupied then fills them with 0's or empty bits. There are programs out there, many of them free that will do this. Only problem is, again with the right software the file can be recovered! To prevent anyone from ever recovering the file you need to repeat the process a dozen times or so. Again, there are software apps that will do this as well. You select files to delete, and it runs a batch and repeats the process several times.

Even if you format a hard drive all you do is wipe the directory table clean and mark all sectors free. The data is STILL there! Even though they say 'Warning! This will erase all data!'.

When you initialize a drive it clears the directory table and remaps the drive, again flagging all sectors open but the data is still there!

The only sure fire way to actually wipe a drive clean is to fill every sector with nulls '0's. That way every scrap of data is overwritten. Otherwise you never know how long the data will sit there until the OS decides to use that sector. Most drives have a TTL (Time To Live) on deleted files, I forget what it is tho.. What this does OS prevent any file from being overwritten in case it's been deleted accidentally. A useful safety feature, but it can also be a problem too.

And yes, there are virus' called trojens that sit in the background and some can be made to distribute porn without your knowledge. There are also what is called 'Browser Hijackers' that take control over your browser and won't let you close it, or choose what address to visit. Each time you try to close it, it reloads, you try to leave the site, it goes back.. Nasty stuff out there folks!

[WB2EMS]

w1guh said "Then there's the possibility that files  can be put on you hard drive without your knowledge.  There's no technological reason that can't happen, even with the latest and greatest protection, spyware, firewalls, etc.  Over-zealous prosecutors seem to be capable of all sorts of stuff."

That's exactly what I was getting at about a page ago - not hard to put something 'evil' on a computer these days, and with the low legal threshold and public attitude towards child porn, it's a perfect tool to take someone down by putting something nasty on their machine without their knowledge.

There was some mention in another thread about microsoft getting 'assistance' from NSA on some security features on Vista. As I recall, there was some government help on XP also, and of course there was some big legal case against microsoft which sorta faded away at some point back then. Wanna bet there isn't a back door or two in XP for the right alphabet agency to use? Especially with the new rules in the patriot act that allow agents to enter your house, do a 'black bag' job on your computer including installing keyloggers and other software, and exit without ever serving a warrant. I find it totally believable that someone that might be a thorn in someones side could be targeted and taken down by putting stuff on their machine without their knowledge, then triggering a search with a informant call.

As far as the FBI not turning over evidence in my comments earlier in the thread, the classic case I recall was from Waco, where the ATF asserted the original raid was because the Davidians were converting firearms to full auto, which they were licensed to do, without paying the requisite tax. However they flat out refused to make the seized firearms available to any other investigators, including the defense, to examine and verify the claim.

[n3lrx]

Wanna bet there isn't a back door or two in XP for the right alphabet agency to use?

That's a fact! M$ admitted long ago there are secret back doors for the Alphabet Police, and themselves to use. Most routers are also programmed with secret back doors so they can bypass the firewall. Windows XP and M$ Office can be disabled from M$ offices 1000 miles away. Windows has so much Phone Home stuff in it that it's pathetic.

Allot of people are going to be seriously disappointed with Vista once it's in full cycle. With Digital Rights Management it can tell you that you cannot use a CD, file, or device because it's not licensed to you, or the hardware is not certified DRM approved. If you install Windows and change any hardware or add a hardware device it can force you to reinstall to register that new device and if it's not approved it won't let you use it. Mac users aren't safe either! Because Mac is going the same route! Bottom line is the future of the big two OS's doesn't look bright! I'm glad I got familiar with Linux many years ago.

Windows XP will be the last M$ based operating system I will use. And I've owned   and used every one of them since MSDOS 3. I even had a copy of Windows 2.0 on 5-1/4" Floppies!

[w1guh]

It's all Bush's fault. So is the weather, and the band conditions.

Strange, I thought I was browsing AMfone.net, not qrz.com 
-Charles

Thanks for the plug!   

[W1RKW]

Does low level formatting a drive reinitialize the drive?  Is it true that a SCSI drive is easier to fully clean of data than an EIDE/ATA drive?

[Bill, KD0HG]

Run an old-timey tape bulk eraser across the drive case several times.