The Bigsibling Blog

Bah, kids these days. They just can’t figure things out. A couple of excellent examples of the dumbing down of American youth are Shaun Harrison and Saverio Mondelli.

These two Einsteins created a tracking program that would allow anyone to track IP addresses and email addresses of MySpace users. They were selling the program online for $30. This is might seem rather innocuous on the surface, but I could see them being sued in civil court for damages if a user of MySpace.com was in some way injured or damaged as a result of their software.

Regardless. MySpace was aware of the program, and implemented security measures to block it. So these dweebs contacted the MySpace people and claimed to have an ‘ubreakable’ version of their software which they would sell unless MySpace paid them a ‘consultancy fee’ of $150 large.

Now, I am not Bill Gates, but I am smart enough to know that, in the computer world, there is no such thing as ‘unbreakable’ software. There will, given time, be someone who can create a way to break or work-around anything out there. Look at DVD encryption. Supposedly unbreakable, but some kid in Europe was able to crack the DVD encryption.

I am also smart enough to know that the MySpace folks are not so dumb as to give in to this type of blatant extortion. If they did that, then these asshats would just keep coming back for more. Did they forget that business mogul Rupert Murdoch owns MySpace? Probably didn’t even know that. Murdoch did not get where he is today by paying off kids who make impossible claims.

The kids did one smart thing though. They listened to their attorney and got off with what I think is a fairly light sentence for what their crimes were. They received three years probation, 160 hours of community service and have to pay $13 large to MySpace for damages. Chances of MySpace ever seeing a nickel of that? Slim to none. If these kids are this stupid at 19 and 20, where in the world will they find a job that doesn’t require them to say “You want fries with that?”

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Technorati Tags: Hackers, MySpace, Shaun Harrison, Saverio Mondelli, Black Mail, Dumb Crooks

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