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Nintendo counterfeiter gets 32 months in another castle
Justin Success-Brooks hasn't quite lived up to his name, at least in terms of staying out of jail. After pleading guilty last month to selling thousands of counterfeit Nintendo games in the UK, Success-Brooks has been sentenced to 32 months of jailtime.This was no mere case of someone copying a homebrew cartridge: Success-Brooks was convicted of selling counterfeited games (in conjunction with a few dealers in China) through 18 different websites, and continued to do so after being warned by Nintendo and the UK Border Agency. At one point Success-Brooks had his stock seized, and he then continued to sell the fake games through a different website.Success-Brooks is officially sentenced to 32 months, though he's been told to expect to serve just half of the time. Francesca Levett, one of the prosecutors in the case, said the real victim here isn't necessarily Nintendo, but legitimate online game retailers, forced to compete with counterfeit sellers. "Nintendo may be big enough to weather the storm," she said to the Guardian, but "the damage that this has done to the reputation of online retailers is untold and incalculable."
German prosecution charges HP staff with bribing Russian officials to clinch PC contract
The legal system's engines can take awhile to get churning, but there's no questioning the impact when they're at full bore. German prosecutors have wrapped up an almost three-year investigation into allegations of HP managers' bribery by charging the executives involved. Hilmar Lorenz, Päivi Tiippana and Ken Willett, along with claimed accomplice Ralf Krippner, have all been indicted for supposedly funneling €7.5 million ($9.7 million) in bribes through a German subsidiary and far-flung shell accounts to land a €35 million ($45.3 million) PC supply deal with Russia's Prosecutor General Office early in the previous decade. While only the people directly attached to the scandal currently face any consequences if found guilty, German lawyers are motioning to have the PC builder attached to the case, and there's a chance the formal charges could fuel an ongoing US investigation. HP is cooperating even as it's trying to distance itself from the indictments as much as possible -- these are for old allegations and a "former HP company," it says. While we don't yet know the whole story, it may be a protracted tale knowing that at least Tiippana and Willett plan to fight the accusations.
Cops hacking iPhones for information
I used to think that if I ever got hit by a car while out and about (God forbid, of course), the most useful place to find identifying information would be in my wallet. But that's not really the case any more. As cops are learning these days, the best place in a person's pockets to learn about them is their iPhone. Not only is the phone full of contact information (and indeed, I've included an "ICE" number on every phone I've ever had), but it's also got lots of other information about me, including where I've been lately, what kinds of things I've searched for, and even what apps I've used and how often. Besides the obvious places (in the apps themselves), there's a lot of information that you as a user don't have access to. iOS apparently caches both screenshots and text used while multitasking and spell checking, so even if you don't actively save information on your iPhone, odds are it's there anyway. Before you panic and decide to ditch your iPhone for privacy's sake, keep in mind that whoever's trying to get this information needs to have direct access to the iPhone itself. At this point, hackers can't dive into your phone over the air and steal your secrets (most of them, anyway). But this type of "iPhone forensics" is very useful for cops trying to figure out what anonymous victims have been up to lately. Thanks, Colin!
