rebootied

By Kevin Poulsen Email Author |  August 14, 2009 | 2:51 pm |

It’s official. There’s nobody in the chat rooms but pedophiles and undercover police.

On Thursday, a federal appeals court upheld the conviction of an Indiana man whose online efforts to proposition underage girls led him to not one, not two, but three undercover cops, none of whom apparently knew about the others.

The case began in August 2006, when aspiring sexual predator James Daniel started an online conversation with Amanda_13, a fake 13-year-old girl voiced by Sergeant Richard Howard of the Porter County Sheriff’s Department.

After several highly explicit chats, Daniel asked Amanda_13 to meet him at a park in Valparaiso, Indiana, to have sex. When he showed up, he was arrested for inducing an individual under 18 to engage in criminal sexual activity.

When Secret Service agents searched Daniel’s computer, they found logs of chats with two other apparent minors, who described themselves as 13 and 15 years old, respectively. Federal prosecutors introduced the chats at Daniel’s trial as evidence of his perverted motives.

Supposedly, it was only after Daniel was convicted that the feds realized that one of those girls, daisy13_Indiana, was also a cop working the very same Secret Service operation. They informed Daniel’s attorney, who appealed on the grounds that the government improperly withheld information that would have proven entrapment.

The case became even more bizarre when the three-judge appellate panel reviewing the conviction saw the screen name of the third supposed teenager, blonddt, and recognized it from an earlier case.

“To our surprise, the government was unaware until this panel told it at oral argument that the other screen name, blonddt, was also an officer from the Indiana operation,” wrote Judge Diane Wood (.pdf) on Thursday.

Despite the prosecutorial missteps, the panel upheld Daniel’s conviction, ruling that the additional chat logs still showed his intent to commit a crime. Daniel is serving a sentence of 17-and-a-half years in prison, followed by supervised release for life.

There’s no evidence in the record that he ever succeeded in talking with a real underage girl.

The firms deserve a bigger piece of the profit from music titles, Warner CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. says.
By Michelle Quinn and Alex Pham, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers ; August 18, 2008
Many music industry executives facing a CD sales slump love the sound of Guitar Hero and Rock Band.

The video games have millions of followers who memorize every note of songs so they can jam along -- and they often buy the original version of their favorites. In addition to the publicity, the record labels get licensing fees from the game publishers.

But not all music industry executives are singing "Hallelujah."

Edgar Bronfman Jr., chairman and chief executive of Warner Music Group, recently grumbled that the record labels deserved a bigger piece of the spoils from the games' success.

"The amount being paid to the industry, even though their games are entirely dependent on the content that we own and control, is far too small," he said during an Aug. 7 earnings call.( full article behind cut )

gamers

The above is a screencap (note: not included to avoid hotlinking) from a TV program with a list entitled "statistics which show the reality of Osaka." The figures show that Osaka comes out tops (worst) out of all the cities in Japan in the following categories...

* Theft
* Car vandalism
* Murder and other violent crimes
* Number of homeless
* Death by Cancer
* Number of offices declining
* Unemployment rate (2nd worse)
* Bankruptcy rate (2nd worse)
* Number of primary schools that don't serve food
* National learning proficiency test
* Child abuse deaths

First Blood
Rambo: First Blood Part 2
Rambo 3
Rambo

That is worse than the titling sequence that a child might make. Boo. What will the next one be called? Rambo 2: First Blood Part 5? Man, I hope so.

chernobylred

Terry Hartle, vice president of the American Council on Education, which represents higher education in Washington, said the mistakes showed the entertainment industry has unfairly targeted college campuses.

"Illegal peer-to-peer file-sharing is a society-wide problem. Some of it occurs at college s and universities but it is a small portion of the total," he said, adding colleges will continue to take the problem seriously, but more regulation isn't necessary.