Considering the hedge fund manager behind the trades was ranked number 559 on Forbes' World Billionaire list, something tell me these guys could have done without the hassle and made a little less by trading the old-fashioned way: guessing. [The Register and GigaOM]

Even though large parts of Internets and many old and famous trackers have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Ifpi and all the odious apparatus of MPAA rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France...[Full version]

You can't really blame the ISP. Yesterday's rulings meant it faced $70,600 in fines if it didn't yank the cord.

And what of Swedish software outfit Global Gaming Factor? It votes this Thursday on whether or not to go ahead with its Pirate Bay buy out. But between all this, and its chairman stepping down, will it still go ahead with plans for a legal version?

If you're looking for help to get your torrent on in the meantime, check out the Pirate Bay clone, or our favorite 5 Pirate Bay BitTorrent Alternatives. [TorrentFreak]

A few days ago, amidst talk of how a new, improved, crowd-powered Pirate Bay would work should the sale go through, the trading of Global Gaming Factory shares on the Swedish Aktietorget exchange was frozen. Why? Its administrators found out that the CEO owes quite a few people quite of bit of money, including the government, for taxes. Today, the company's chairman has stepped down for no obvious reason, and the stock exchange has said that they're going to keep a freeze on stock trading until they figure out what on earth is going on. Something strange, is a good guess!

What does this mean for the Pirate Bay? Well, GGF's debt-ridden CEO has previously said that the deal to purchase the torrent site—which, remember, hasn't actually happened yet—would be "rubber stamped" by shareholders by Thursday. That date is pretty much out of the question now, and the whole plan is starting to look like it was doomed from the start. So what was the point? Was it some kind of weird share-inflating publicity stunt? An intentional distraction? An earnest bid to buy an illegal filesharing site, by idiots? As much as I like the last one, I don't think that's it. [TheLocal via Slashdot]

The gang, made up of six men and three women, included one DJ who created the music. They then listed it on iTunes and Amazon and negotiated a pretty plush 40% commission for themselves before using stolen credit cards to purchase $750,000 worth of their music.

British police stated, "We will not know why they did what they did until we have conducted all the interviews," which confirms my suspicion that there is no crime, and possibly not even formal currency, in England. The scheme managed to inflate their almost certainly fragile musical egos and net a pretty penny at the same time, and the British police won't know why they did it until they ask them?

Unfortunately, the artist name they used hasn't been released, so I can't make fun of whatever clanging noise they passed off as music. Apple and Amazon helped the police track down the culprits, who are currently being held in jail. [Times UK]

A reader, who is a MobileMe subscriber, received this fake email today. It says:

Welcome,

Your annual subscription is set to renew automatically on February 06,
2009 PST, but attempts to charge your credit card have failed..

To avoid suspension of your account please login to update your information.

The "login" button leads you to a page pretending to be Apple's, in which, like the rest of these schemes, you are supposed to put your credit card info. [Thanks Bryan]

The folks at Zero Day uncovered a bunch of promotional material for the SMS-capable skimmer, which can send up to 1,856 coded numbers via a standard GSM SIM card for 24 hours on a single charge. The skimmer replaces an ATM's normal card reader, and is even painted with the exact same pigments and techniques used by the real manufacturer. When I logged on to my bank account online last year to find it had just been emptied by a series of huge withdrawals in Jordan ("Have you been to Jordan recently?" asked the bank fraud department innocently), maybe this was the enabler. [ZD Net]

It wouldn't make sense for Walmart to be in any kind of dealings with a company like Friendship Star International Limited, whose knockoff media players look much like the one above, and it's even more unlikely that they'd permit such blatant copyright and trademark infringement in their stores. What has most likely happened here is that some enterprising young individual purchased an iPod, replaced it with a much cheaper knockoff and returned it to the store for a full refund.
Our tipster tried to explain this to the staff at the store, but didn't have much luck. It'll resolve itself when the unfortunate teenage girl who buys the "iPod" brings it back after she gets tired of watching the Chinese language bootlegs of Two and a Half Men that came on it. -Thanks, Mitchel!

There are actually open source versions of this I-Doser app (which they might have even taken a few assets from), so you can try it out before you sink some cash into this. Their shady looking site also has a disclaimer that says "I-Doser makes no medical, psychological, physical or otherwise, claims to the effectiveness of the I-Doser application, Simulation CDs, and MP3s," which leads us to believe that it's quite bogus and most likely does nothing. Don't you think that if you could get high from a SOUND, kids would have been all over this years ago? These kids sniff cat pee! [I-Doser via JPostvia T3]

The Diebold machines achieved notoriety in the 2004 presidential election, losing hundreds of votes and exhibiting several serious security flaws. This is equipment proven to be vulnerable to attack, and Michael I. Shamos, professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and an official examiner of Pennsylvania electronic voting systems, said the machines had "the most severe security flaw ever discovered in a voting system." In 2006, dropped votes were discovered in 11 of the 44 Ohio counties in which the equipment was used.

Premier pre-emptively sued Brunner and the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, seeking a court order that they have held up their side of the contract. This is evidently a standard move when one party believes they are about to be sued, as a decision in Premier's favor would prevent Cuyahoga County from suing for breach of contract. Brunner's suit, actually a countersuit, is an attempt to recover taxpayer money spent on the faulty machines, to the tune of $22 million.

The scariest part of the story is that these machines are still somehow in use, and it is too late to make the change to the recommended optically-scanned paper ballots by this November's election. Brunner says Ohio residents should remain calm as they vote this fall, and that officials will be on hand to make sure all votes are tallied. There, now you Ohioans can vote in total confidence! [Ars Technica]

Apparently, a candidate's name was marked as withdrawn on a number of voting machines and the internal audit capability on the machines had been manually disabled by election board programmers, which is pretty shady. And Ohio doesn't exactly have a great record when it comes to voting.

Two Cuyahoga election officials were convicted of rigging a recount in May 2004 because they literally admitted to doing precounts and displayed the evidence while being recorded on videotape. A different Cuyahoga county recount, for a November 2007 local election, was equally marred when Brunner turned the state's voter-verifiable paper audit trail law into a mockery by conducting the recount with paper ballots reprinted after the election from voting machine memory cards.

Some Princeton researchers made a demonstration video of how it's possible to steal an election with a Diebold voting machine in under a minute. Anyone with physical access to the machine can put in malicious software to steal votes—such as election workers who have unsupervised access to the machines before elections. All they have to do is open up the machine with a key (or pick the lock), remove the old memory card, stick in your own memory card, boot the machine, and it automatically installs any software that was on the memory card.

At the end of the demonstration election, the poll machine prints out the incorrect "stolen election" result. The internal memory card also stores in the incorrect result. Every piece of evidence of how the election actually went reflects the "wrong" result. And, after the election is over, the vote stealing software can delete itself. There's no evidence left that the vote has been conducted incorrectly.

There's even a flaw in Diebold machines that allow a virus to spread from machine to machine, infecting a memory card and using it to spread to other machines. – Jason Chen

Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine [itpolicy.princeton.edu via Digg]

The charges come amidst two events that happened over the past few months. He was involved in an accident where one of 399 rare Ferrari Enzo's was wrecked into a light pole at well over 150mph and ripped in half. Eriksson's blood alcohol test registered well-above the legal limit, but he claimed that another man, named Dietrich, was the one driving and then fled into the woods. Dietrich was never found.

More questions began arising just a month later when a $600,000 Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren was seized by police when Eriksson's wife was stopped in Beverly Hills on suspicion of driving without a license. The car had been reported stolen to London's Scotland Yard.

Eriksson was officially arrested for failing to make payments on three sports cars that were imported to the U.S. from Britain. Other charges may be added pending DNA tests and further investigation including DUI and fraud for the business venture that the three sports cars were purchased on. He is also being held without bail because of his questionable visa status. Arraignment on this case is expected to begin this week.

An arrest for theft in Malibu mystery Crash of Ferrari led to charges over exotic car imports
Fast cars and fast living at heart of Malibu mystery [San Francisco Chronicle]
Arrest Is Made in Ferrari Accident [LA Times]

The SLR, as we all know, is an amazing car and if I were a former Gizmondo investor I'd be pissed. Stefan is rolling with his home-girl in a classy ride while our GPS-enabled handheld gaming system disappears in a cloud of lies and vaporware. Karma, however, is a bitch.

UPDATE - Sorry, forgot that it was Mercedes.

Ferrari Owner Is Minus His Second Car [ChicagoTribune]

Streamcast is basically saying that the Skype boys fraudulently sold their software to Sharman in order to prevent P2P lawsuits from eating them alive, thereby breaking all previous deals.

The charges probably won't stick and the "file-sharing" industry is notoriously nasty and sketchy, so this was to be expected. More a PR move than a lawsuit, I'd wager.

Skype, Zennstrom, Friis Et Al Sued for RICO Violations [AndyAbramson]
The Streamcast vs. Skype Et Al Complaint [AndyAbramson]
Skype, Founders Charged With Racketeering [TechDirt]