Enquanto isso nos ESTADOS UNIDOS DA AMÉRICA...

[vegetous]

MIT Students Battle State’s Demand for Their Bitcoin Miner’s Source Code

BY KIM ZETTER 09.22.14 | 6:30 AM | PERMALINK

 

Four MIT students behind an award-winning Bitcoin mining tool will face off against New Jersey state authorities in court today when they attempt to fight back against a subpoena demanding their source code.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is representing 19-year-old MIT student Jeremy Rubin and three classmates in a remarkable case that stands out for the measure of aggression the state is using to obtain the code and identify anyone who might have tested the mining tool.

The case is reminiscent of a federal one that targeted Aaron Swartz after he was arrested by MIT police in 2011 for downloading more than 4 million scholarly journal articles from the JSTOR digital library, offered to MIT students, to make them more widely available. Swartz faced multiple charges for his activity and killed himself as he was preparing for trial. Although there is currently no indictment or pending criminal charges against Rubin and his friends, state authorities have indicated that they believe the researchers may have violated state laws. The case marks a disturbing trend among authorities to go after researchers, innovators, tinkerers and others who try to do cutting-edge projects to help the tech community, says EFF staff attorney Hanni Fakhoury.

“It’s a very broad subpoena that hints at criminal liability and civil liability,” he says. “For a bunch of college kids who put something together for a hackathon—they didn’t make any money, the project never got off the ground and now is completely disbanded—there are some very serious implications.”

The mining tool, known as Tidbit, was developed in late 2013 by Rubin and his classmates for the Node Knockout hackathon—only Rubin is identified on the subpoena but his three classmates are identified on the hackathon web site as Oliver Song, Kevin King and Carolyn Zhang. The now defunct tool was designed to offer web site visitors an alternative way to support the sites they visited by using their computers to mine Bitcoins for them in exchange for having online ads removed.

“We believe our utility for the end user comes in freeing up real estate on web pages,” King wrote about their program on the Node Knockout site. “Imagine a web where your amazon shopping cart doesn’t follow you around to every website you visit. We believe there should be more options than advertising for monetizing a website, and we believe we have a novel and non-intrusive solution. In this way, we provide utility to developers who can now include higher quality content on their websites, and utility to end users who are spared the wasted time in looking at ads.”

The clever design won the award for innovation in the programming competition.

“This is a very intriguing idea that could really transform online economics if it works,” one supporter wrote on the hackathon site. “There is a much broader discussion to have about mining bitcoins vs doing other useful tasks (e.g. a friendly form of mechanical turk).”

But the program never got beyond the proof-of-concept stage before Rubin and Tidbit, as an entity, were hit with subpoenas from the New Jersey

Division of Consumer Affairs just weeks after winning the award.
The state’s attorney general claims Rubin and his classmates violated New Jersey computer crime laws and demanded they hand over source code for their creation and any documentation related to the tool. Rubin was the only one named in the subpoena, Fakhoury says, because he registered the web site for Tidbit.

The authorities also demanded the names and addresses of any Bitcoin wallets used in association with Tidbit, the names of anyone whose computer was used for mining in the project and a list of web sites that may have run the code.

Fakhoury says that although Tidbit made the code available to download and embed on web sites, it wasn’t fully functional and no Bitcoins actually got mined through the Tidbit server.

Indeed, one person on the hackathon site said that although he embedded the code on a website and it looked like Tidbit was successfully mining Bitcoins, “the coins did not seem to show up in the account info dashboard,” he wrote. “Maybe there is a bug? (or is the dashboard not real time?)”

Rubin responded that they had not been able to finish implementing the dashboard before the hackathon ended, but they would eventually complete it.

The MIT community has rallied behind the Tidbit students in support of them and their efforts, in stark contrast to the school’s silence when Swartz was arrested.

MIT sent a letter to the New Jersey attorney general asking his office to withdraw the subpoenas, noting that such actions would have a “chilling effect on MIT teaching and research.” More than 800 people—students and faculty—have also signed letters of support in vain.

The EFF’s Fakhoury will argue in court that the attempt by New Jersey state authorities to target a Massachusetts resident like Rubin is unconstitutional and that the out-of-state authorities have no jurisdiction over him.

“While the state certainly has a right to investigate consumer fraud, threatening out of state college students with subpoenas isn’t the way to do it,” Fakhoury noted in a statement about the case. “As MIT students and faculty have warned, the fear that any state can issue broad subpoenas to any student anywhere in the country will have a chilling effect on campus technological innovation beyond Tidbit.”

He is also arguing that if the court does demand the students hand over any data, they should be given immunity. If not, the court would be forcing the students to relinquish their Fifth Amendment protection against incriminating themselves, since the documentation they provide may contain information that authorities could use to charge them under New Jersey’s anti-hacking law or under the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

http://www.wired.com/2014/09/mit-stu...mbid=social_fb

A terra da liberdade, onde você pode ser preso por escrever um programa pra uma "maratona de programação"! oO

[MdKBooM]

E se na maratona de programação você hackear um banco e roubar milhões de dólares? Aí não tem problema de prender alguém na terra da liberdade?

Mas fiquei curioso sobre como vão lidar com o fato do cara estar em outro estado.

[Buwem]

[vitorueda]

http://g1.globo.com/planeta-bizarro/...inossauro.html

Acho que tem coisa pior!

[Hobbes]

Não entendi, do que eles estão sendo acusados?
É proibido minerar bitcoins nos EUA por acaso?

[vegetous]

Postado por vitorueda

http://g1.globo.com/planeta-bizarro/...inossauro.html

Acho que tem coisa pior!

Sua mãe, Karen Gray, criticou a prisão do filho, destacando que ele não conseguiria comprar uma arma, já que ele é menor de idade.

Ou quem sabe, que dinossauros já estão extintos há um cadinho de tempo!

[SuN WaR]

Olha que idéia massa!
Quando vc visita um site, ao inves de ser bombardeado por ads, vc ajuda a minerar bitcoins pra conta do criador do site.

Bora fazer uma força-tarefa de programadores aqui da ds e bolar o dsminer? A gente se comunica pelo temp pra não ser preso! ahehaehahe

[vegetous]

aê quando o obama ler este tópico, que fique registrado eu não tenho nada com isso, podem me retirar da lista de próximos assassinatos!

[vegetous]

Teen prosecuted as adult for having naked images – of himself – on phone

North Carolina high schooler and his girlfriend face legal proceedings over selfies as both the adult perpetrators and minor victims

A teenage boy in North Carolina has been prosecuted for having nude pictures of himself on his own mobile phone. The young man, who is now 17 but was 16 at the time the photos were discovered, had to strike a plea deal to avoid potentially going to jail and being registered as a sex offender.

Experts condemned the case as ludicrous. The boy was, however, punished by the courts, and had to agree to be subject to warrantless searches by law enforcement for a year, in addition to other penalties.

The young man was also named in the media and suffered a suspension as quarterback of his high school football team while the case was being resolved.

Cormega Copening, of Fayetteville, North Carolina, was prosecuted as an adult under federal child pornography felony laws, for sexually exploiting a minor. The minor was himself.

“It’s dysfunctional to be charged with possession of your own image,” said Justin Patchin, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Wisconsin and co-founder of the research website cyberbullying.org.

Copening was charged with four counts of making and possessing images of himself and one count of possessing a naked image of his 16-year-old girlfriend.

His girlfriend, Brianna Denson, took a plea deal after being prosecuted on similar charges for having naked, suggestive pictures of herself on her cellphone.

While the pictures were technically illegal, actual sex would not be – the age of consent for sexual intercourse in North Carolina is 16.

The pictures were discovered on Copening’s phone when authorities were investigating a wider problem of sexual images allegedly being shared at school without the permission of the subjects involved. Copening turned out not to be involved in that case.

He was prosecuted for having his own and his girlfriend’s image, despite them not having been shared further.

Copening and Denson’s court cases were ostensibly about “sexting” – the sending of sexually explicit material by text message – but the main charges related to them making and keeping their own images.

In most states, these crimes are technically on the books but are not typically used to prosecute similarly aged teenage lovers under 18 who have shared images only with each other consensually, Patchin said.

Patchin said he and other experts in the field had discussed this case and had heard of “zero examples” of under-18s being charged for having their own naked selfie in their phone.

“Kids should not be charged for that,” he said. “And you don’t want kids to be sending such pictures to their significant others, but I don’t think it should be a criminal offense where there is no victim.”

The legal bind came because the two were over 16 and so could be charged as adults in North Carolina, as is common with some felonies – but the crimes they were being charged with related to laws against sexually exploiting minors.

Each was therefore simultaneously the adult perpetrator who is considered a predator and the minor victim who needs protecting by the law.

“It’s ludicrous,” said Fred Lane, a computer security and privacy expert and author of the book Cybertraps for Educators, based in New York. “It’s crazy. It’s an overreach.

“This goes back to the supreme court making child pornography unconstitutional in 1983 and each state legislating in line with that for the public good – in order to protect children from adults producing, possessing or distributing nude images of them.

“But that was before anyone thought kids would be making and sending nude photos of themselves with publicly available digital technology.”

The federal child abuse image felony laws apply to every state. But 20 states have enacted legislation, often nicknamed Romeo and Juliet laws, to avoid prosecuting teenagers who exchange naked pictures with each other as a couple where there is no exploitation.

Even so, in many states it is still a misdemeanor offence; in others it is a so-called informal offense, where the teens are obliged to submit to “diversion” education about making responsible choices.

In the other 30 states there is no “sexting” rule to mitigate the child abuse image laws as they apply to teenage lovers consensually exchanging images purely within their relationship, or possessing nude selfies individually. In Fayetteville, the authorities decided to lay down the law.

“There are about 10 or 12 mostly conservative states where they will prosecute kids for this,” said Lane, “and it’s a kind of moral values thing – they are trying to make an example of them because it’s believed to be inappropriate behaviour.

“There is a streak of moralizing that runs through this country that is disturbing sometimes.”

In July, Denson took a plea deal and admitted a misdemeanour. Felony charges were dropped. She was put on probation for a year, technically for exploiting herself by making and having a naked image of herself.

She was ordered to pay $200 in court costs, stay in school, refrain from using illegal drugs and alcohol, take a class in making good decisions and do 30 hours of community services. She will not be allowed to have a cellphone for a year.

In September, Copening took a similar plea deal. If both comply with the terms of their deals, then their records will be wiped after a year.

Jeff Temple, a psychology expert at the University of Texas Medical Branch, has conducted research suggesting that 30% of teens “sext” each other. He called for “common sense” from the authorities.

Temple said that if states used their laws literally, “tens of thousands of kids would be in jail and registered as sex offenders”.

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2...-phone-selfies

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WTF?