AOL insider case …
p2pnet.net News:- An AOL employee recently stole close to 100 million subscribers’ e-mail addresses and sold them for almost $100,000.
Big surprise?
“For the public, it was jaw-dropping,” writes Jonathan Krim in the Washington Post here.
“But for many on the front lines of computer security, the reaction was a knowing nod. They live daily with the uncomfortable truth that while outside hackers often steal the headlines, it’s the insider gone bad who can more easily make off with the jewels.”
The ‘insider gone bad’ syndrome applies not only to the front lines of computer security, however.
The MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) spends millions of dollars coming up with puff pieces which say file sharers are causing movie industry employees terrible hardship and are responsible for tremendous financial losses.
The mainstream media faithfully report this, somehow ignoring the fact that last year was Hollywood’s second biggest year EVER with official MPAA box office figures at $9.5 billion.
Come to that, when was what should by-now have been the famous AT&T Labs report (which hangs much of the blame for online movie trading on ‘insiders’ rather than p2p movie fans) last mentioned? Of a total of 285 movies sampled, 77% were leaked by industry insiders.
Much more recently, Mel Gibson’s movie company Icon sued a Hollywood post-production company claiming bad security allowed three employees to copy The Passion of Christ.
There was a massive outcry when Last Samurai and other hot movies started turning up online.
Those damned file sharers again.
Ultimately, “Technicolor technicians determined that copies of such pirated movies as Warners’ ‘Samurai’ and ‘Mystic,’ 20th Century Fox’s ‘Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World,’ Fox Searchlight’s ‘thirteen’ and Buena Vista’s ‘Calendar Girls’ all could be traced to Academy screeners” in the possession of Yep, a Hollywood insider, one Carmine Caridi, a 22-year member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences.
