Michael Soden, who quit as chief of the Bank of Ireland after admitting he had perused Internet porn on his office computer, may not be the only one at the bank to have done it. Reports have come forth in the past two days that a number of BOI workers are being probed for likewise seeing Net porn on the job. Soden quit last week, and has since said that the surfing which led to his resignation was a case of “curiosity killed the cat. It was a silly incident,” he told Agence France Presse. “It was unfortunate and I am paying a very high price for it. I regret it enormously. It was foolish.”
A former U.S. Marshal whose specialty was hunting escaped prisoners is now hunting other fools – namely the fools many think hold the Internet hostage: spammers. Meet Sterling McBride, who now works as a Microsoft investigator and waits for bits of data linking some of the flood of spam Hotmail gets to those who send them. When he makes the links, McBride reverts to old-fashioned police work: trailing, subpoenaing records, and finding disgruntled associates to make into informers.
All he has to do to make that work is pierce Internet anonymity. “The guys who do this are pretty tenacious,” he told The New York Times. “There are networks that are very well organized. But we have really started to figure out how they operate.” Among his successes so far: tracking Jason Cazes, whose spam usually sells penis enlargement, and whom Microsoft hit with a civil lawsuit last December.
Speaking of online scam-dals, Australia is dealing with a scam involving hackers illegally accessing computers to steal confidential banking details. Uncovered by a Melbourne man, Australia’s Federal Police is warning customers who bank online not to open unfamiliar e-mails, after authorities learned thousands of illegal transactions were made through hack activity.
Go way up north along the Pacific and you’ll bump into a little case out of Tokyo involving two men busted for stealing personal information on an estimated 4.6 million subscribers to Softbank Corporation, an Internet service provider. Yutaka Tomiyasu and Takuya Mori are being held on suspicion of leaking some of the information to Yahoo, with Tomiyasu suspected of hacking into the Softbank database with a password from a former temporary staffer. Tomiyasu is also accused of conspiracy in a related case involving an unnamed executive of a conservative political group to extort $9-18 million in consultancy fees from Softbank.
Go outward toward the Philippines and discover the Internet porn operation that was broken up over the weekend. The country’s National Bureau of Investigations reported May 31 that they raided Philippine-based operations that offered pay-per-use Internet porn in the northern provinces, with raids on two areas in Rizal coming following tips from “foreign services.” The unnamed company was said to have run a foreign-based Net porn service involving Filipino women and charging $2.99 per minute for streaming video.
Kansas has other scofflaws in its sights online: actual or alleged tax cheats. State officials are hoping the deadbeat taxpayers will pay up rather than let their names get splashed up in cyberspace, as the state Revenue Department wants to do with a delinquent list premiering some time in 2005. Over a dozen states now do this as well, with names ranging from CyberShame in Louisiana to Debtor’s Corner in South Carolina. Kansas, though, hasn’t yet thought of a name for its projected such page, but the Revenue Department thinks it will work. “The key,” said Revenue secretary Joan Wagnon, “is notifying people that their names are going to be published. Nobody wants his neighbor to know he hasn’t paid his taxes.”
If you want to concentrate on the Old Ball Game, but you can’t get to the ballpark or the television set, has MLB Advanced Media got a deal for you: you can watch as many games as you want online, when you’ve got the time, on a pay-per-day basis at $2.95 a day – or, at $14.95 a month; or $59.95 for the rest of the season.
Following the money elsewhere, it seems federal law enforcement officials seized about $3.2 million from television and media company Discovery Communications in April – as part of a crackdown on Internet gambling. The feds said the money was first the property of Tropical Paradise, a Costa Rica-based Net casino operation which paid Discovery for TV spots to push ParadisePoker.com. The feds insist online gambling is illegal, but the offshore casinos are beyond their jurisdiction, so they have been spending time trying what they think is the next best thing: pressuring U.S. companies doing business with the offshore casinos – on the aiding and abetting theory.
Japan Internet venturer Joichi Ito would like to aid and abet something that’s already taken off big enough in the U.S.: Web-logging, or blogging. He wants to make them just as hot in Japan as they seem to be elsewhere, and his Web journal – described as a “lively peek into the tireless mind of one of Japan’s biggest Internet stars” – draws in a swelling community with matters from the Middle East to the U.S. elections to the newest in technology. “Weblogs are doing a lot of what people were excited about the Net when it first came out – the fact that anyone can be a publisher,” he told the Washington Post... while clicking away and checking the blogs, his own and others’.
