criminal
Latest
Watch the first trailer for Netflix's police interrogation drama 'Criminal'
How many crime-detective dramas does Netflix have now? Not enough, apparently. Today, the company released its first (proper) trailer for Criminal, a 12-episode series set entirely in police interrogation rooms. The show is split across four countries -- France, Spain, Germany and the UK -- and every episode will be a unique story. Participating in the cat-and-mouse mind games are David Tennant (Doctor Who) and Hayley Atwell (Agent Carter), among others. In the 60-second trailer, we catch a glimpse of the nervous suspects and 'are they innocent?' police discussions that will permeate the series. The full show is out on September 20th -- perfect timing for people who have already gobbled up Mindhunter season two.
What's coming to Netflix in September: 'The Politician' and 'The Spy'
We're edging into the final embers of the summer and as the weather starts to turn for many of us, we'll perhaps find ourselves curled up on the couch a little more often to stream some movies, shows and whatever else happens to be on offer. To wit, Netflix has revealed much of what's coming to its platform in September.
Lyft will run ‘continuous’ background checks on its drivers
A lot can happen in a year, so it's probably wise that Lyft will no longer rely solely on annual background checks for its drivers. The ride-sharing company will now run daily criminal monitoring of its active drivers and will receive immediate notification of any disqualifying criminal convictions. Lyft will also keep a closer eye on identity fraud and will require drivers to carry both a license and an up-to-date photo of their face.
UK will track thousands of criminals with GPS tags
It's not a novel idea to make criminals wear GPS bracelets, but they could soon be relatively commonplace in the UK. The country's government plans to use them for around-the-clock monitoring of criminals across England and Wales by the summer, with a handful of regions already putting them to use. They'll be used to both track behavior when out of prison (say, to ensure offenders attend rehab) and enforce geographic limits like restraining orders.
Netflix's 'Criminal' series will never leave the interrogation room
Netflix is still determined to show that it doesn't have to conform to TV tropes. The company has ordered a police procedural, Criminal, with more than a few hooks. Most notably, it's set entirely inside police interrogation rooms -- it's all about the "intense mental conflict" between officers and suspects. It's not The Usual Suspects, but it's hard to completely avoid comparisons.
DOJ wants access to suspect's encrypted Facebook Messenger chats
The US government wants Facebook to help break Messenger's encryption to get access to a suspect's voice conversations in a criminal case, sources told Reuters. The case, an investigation of the MS-13 gang, is under seal so filings aren't publicly available. But the sources stated that Facebook has contested the DOJ's demand, and may be held in contempt of court for refusing.
Uber drivers the focus of class action suit alleging sexual assault
Uber is facing yet another lawsuit, this time in response to alleged rapes two unidentified women suffered when taking an Uber. According to a report at Recode, the plaintiffs of this class action suit seek compensation for the sexual assaults as well as an injunction to force the ride-sharing company to improve its background checks.
Yahoo must explain how it got a drug trafficker's deleted email
Were you wondering how Yahoo managed to recover deleted email that was supposedly impossible to retrieve? You're not the only one. A judge has partially granted a motion that orders Yahoo to explain how it recovered deleted email from UK drug trafficking convict Russell Knaggs. It won't have to detail more than how it dealt with the email account in question, but that still means having to say just how it grabbed six months of message drafts when its own policies suggest this should have been impossible. The company has to provide both documents and a relevant witness by August 31st.
Drug trafficker gets 20 years thanks to emails he never sent
A UK man has been convicted of 20 years for drug trafficking conspiracy thanks to Yahoo emails in draft he thought were deleted, according to Motherboard. While already in jail, Russell Knaggs devised a scheme to have an accomplice write a draft email and save, but not send it. Another partner located in Colombia would then read the draft, delete it, and write another in reply. The idea was to avoid sending emails that could be seen by cops, but the traffickers didn't realize that Yahoo keeps the deleted drafts for a long period of time.
Apple urges judge to make up mind about unlocking phones for Feds
Today, Apple tried to prod New York Magistrate Judge James Orenstein into settling a months-old debate about unlocking an iPhone at the heart of a criminal investigation. A letter submitted by one of the company's attorneys maintains these sorts of unlocking requests aren't going to to stop anytime soon, and that both Apple and the Department of Justice agree the judge should make a ruling. And really, that's about the only thing those two players agree about.
Posting revenge porn could soon become a serious criminal offence
The posting of 'revenge porn' may become unequivocally illegal in England and Wales soon, after the House of Lords agreed yesterday the law should be amended to specifically include the practice. Currently, anyone that shares explicit images to humiliate a former partner can be prosecuted under sex offense laws -- something the Crown Prosecution Service was keen to highlight in new guidance released a few weeks ago. To deal with the growing problem more directly, however, the Lords' amendment would consider the sharing of such images a serious criminal offense in its own right, carrying a maximum prison sentence of two years. Should MPs in the House of Commons approve the amendment, perpetrators would be more easily punishable, and victims would have stronger grounds to demand the removal of any published images. Clarifying the law with regards to revenge porn isn't the only crackdown on bad internet behaviour currently under consideration, as the UK Justice Secretary recently called for the maximum prison sentence for serious trolls to be increased from six months to two years.
eBay's ticket site StubHub says it's the victim of a 'global fraud ring'
StubHub has revealed that it's been the victim of a global fraud operation that's lasted longer than a year. Rather than being hacked, however, criminals obtained user details from other websites and keylogging software, then proceeded to make purchases on the eBay-owned ticket site. Company official Glenn Lehrman has told Reuters that authorities in the US, Canada and the UK will conduct arrests later today, at which point more details will be released. Worried users of the service should relax, for the moment at least, since the company has promised that any unauthorized transactions were spotted and refunded back in 2013.
Irish court ruling says defacing Facebook and physical property are the same thing
What happens on Facebook doesn't just stay on Facebook, and your social network activity can be used against you in a court of law. Trolling, bullying and posting offensive content can all land you in hot water, not to mention that your Facebook history can be used as evidence in all kinds of criminal cases. Currently, even the US Supreme Court is trying to clarify legal accountability of social media. Now, in what's thought to be the first prosecution of its kind, a man in Ireland has been charged with "frape" -- the rather tactless term that describes defacing someone's Facebook page from within their account.
LogAnalysis maps the structure of gangs using phone records
It's no surprise that law enforcement agencies use mobile phone records to investigate criminal activity, but a platform called LogAnalysis could facilitate some of the most sophisticated analysis for all that raw data. Developed by Emilio Ferrara and his team at Indiana University, the software uses call records and other info to map hierarchies within criminal organizations according to "social network theory." (Hint: Those who make the most calls are usually at the bottom, while those in charge tend to communicate the least.) And by automatically importing call records and removing ambiguous or redundant information, LogAnalysis streamlines the process of analyzing that data. In a paper, Ferrara and other researchers describe how LogAnalysis processed call records for a group convicted of several robberies, drug trafficking and extortion. By clustering together calls based on the time and date, the software revealed which numbers traced back to gang members involved in a particular robbery or murder. The data also clumped calls together in 14 different subgroups, revealing individuals (or at least phone numbers) involved in specific crimes. As the MIT Technology Review points out, many of the researchers behind this paper are based in Sicily, so it's likely that some of the call data in this case comes from Italy. If that's true, we have a pretty good idea what criminal organization they're talking about here.
The Art of Wushu: Finishing the job
Last episode, we talked about getting a bounty and the mindset of a career criminal. Unfortunately, this is the last Art of Wushu, but that doesn't mean we can't finish what we started. And that means talking about the art of killing good guys. Having a bounty means living on the edge. A lot of the time we take for granted the fact that we can walk around in Chengdu without too much fear. This is not true if you have a bounty. Every moment you spent logged in is spent on edge because a constable could jump you at any moment. You are constantly doing 360 degree camera spins looking around for trouble. You position yourself where you can easily run away, and you have escape plans in your head if things go bad. You worked really hard for your bounty, and you don't want to lose it because you lost focus for a moment. This kind of thrill is the most satisfying thing for me about Age of Wushu. When I get to log in, have that bright red star swirling around me and know that I need to be on the move immediately is the best feeling in the world for me.
The Art of Wushu: Getting yourself a bounty
We all know what side of the law I fight on in Age of Wushu: the bad guy side. However, there's a marked difference between being a professional criminal and an indiscriminate mass murderer. Being a criminal means that you need to be more discreet in which targets you kill. If I don't have a bounty, a kill that doesn't get me a bounty is pointless. Infamy is a resource, and if I ramp it up too much, I could be looking at jail time without even getting a bounty. Nothing is more frustrating than having to idle for hours in some out of the way place because my infamy shot up over 2000, but it's pretty easy to get there. Being selective in whom I kill helps prevent those kinds of mistakes.
EVE Evolved: Designing EVE Onland, part 1
When I'm not playing or writing about EVE Online, I can usually be found huddled over my computer typing lines of code into a compiler and chipping away at bugs that make varying degrees of sense. Designing my own hardcore space game is a really fun challenge and very fulfilling work, but I have a dirty little game dev secret: I've actually always wanted to make a fantasy game. While the budget and personnel required to take on a project the scale of an MMO remain quite far outside my grasp for the moment, it's still fun to think about how I might design such a game if the opportunity arose. The MMO genre seems to be heading for a sandbox revolution this year, and there's no bigger sandbox than EVE Online, but could all of EVE's gameplay translate to a fantasy game? EVE is probably the most atypical MMO out there, maintaining a subscription-based single-shard PvP sandbox in a genre that's typically headed in the exact opposite direction. There are several new sci-fi sandboxes on the way that may or may not qualify as massively multiplayer titles, but the vast majority of MMO gamers still prefer to keep their feet on the ground in fantasy lands. I often find myself wondering how much of EVE Online's core gameplay is possible only because of its setting -- and how much could actually be applied to a fantasy MMO. Not only should it be possible to adapt most of what makes EVE great to a modern land-based game, but many of the mechanics sandbox gamers now attribute almost solely to EVE actually started life in classic fantasy MMOs like Ultima Online. In this week's unusual EVE Evolved, I'd like to start a game design thought experiment as I delve into the hypothetical world of EVE Onland.
Man who sold up to $40 million worth of counterfeit headphones gets two years in jail
A man accused of being one of the "most prolific sellers" of counterfeit electronics in the UK has just been sent down for two and a half years. Over 4,000 KiRFs, mainly consisting of knock-off Sennheiser and Monster headphones, were found at Michael Reeder's address, with a value of around £250,000 ($400,000). However, Sennheiser claims this is just 1 percent of $40 million worth of items Reeder has sold online, which is why the German manufacturer has taken a keen interest in his prosecution. Last year, Sennheiser introduced a series of authentication technologies to prevent counterfeiting that was mainly originating in China -- including QR codes on product packaging that customers can verify online. If Sennheiser's estimate of 400,000 fake items is accurate, then it makes the UK's recent Microsoft Windows scandal look almost like small fry. Update: Apologies for the earlier stumble with missing zeroes on this post.
Jagex reports student to police following school shooting threat
For all the talk about video games causing crimes, we don't often hear about the times when they may well prevent them. Thomas Frongillo, age 18, has been arrested on charges of threatening to commit a crime after making statements about shooting up the college that he attended, but the threats were not made in person. They were made in an online game run by Jagex, most likely RuneScape, which is what led to his arrest. Frongillo allegedly said, "I'm going to shoot up my school tomorrow," and indicated a knowledge of firearms to other players in the game. He also made anti-Semitic comments and had indicated shooting at small wildlife in previous chat sessions. Jagex employees notified the police, and he is currently on bail pending his court date on April 19th. Frongillo's lawyers claim that the statements were made in jest and that the young man had no intention of carrying out any acts of violence.
EVE Evolved: Three ways to break Retribution
EVE Online's upcoming Retribution expansion is set to revolutionise PvP with its brand-new criminal and bounty hunting systems. Players will be able to hunt down criminals who show their faces in highsec, and bounty hunters will track not just individuals but also entire corporations and alliances. If past expansions are any indication, however, the first thing players invariably do with any new feature is to try to break it. Some people will undoubtedly find ways to bend the new gameplay into scams, others will trick players into getting themselves killed for a few laughs, and a few will hunt for borderline exploits. We now know enough about Retribution's new features to figure out some of the ways they can be potentially abused. The ability to sell kill rights opens up a whole new scam based on tempting players with a juicy target and then pulling the rug out from under their feet. The new Suspect flag that lets players dispense justice to criminals can also be used to bait innocent players into getting themselves killed. There may even be a way to get rid of bounties for free, undermining one of the expansion's core mechanics. In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at three potential pitfalls in the upcoming Retribution expansion, how they might work when the expansion goes live, and how to protect yourself from falling victim to them.
