p2p news / p2pnet: Wikipedia Germany is down because of a court order of some sort, posts James Enck on EuroTelcoblog today.

In an update, " A reader writes in to explain that the legal dispute relates to a deceased German hacker whose real name is used on the Wikipedia site," he says. "The family has sued to have the site shut down on the grounds that this violates their privacy."

But it doesn’t make a lot of sense when you can still read about it in both German and English, Enck points out, adding:

"National litigation [is] rendered nonsensical by a supranational web."

What of the story?

"Tron (8 June 1972 – October 1998) was the nickname of Boris Floricic, a German hacker and phreaker who used that pseudonym out of respect for the character in the 1982 Disney film of the same name," says Wiki here.

"He became famous due to the unclear circumstances of his death. Tron was interested in defeating computer security mechanisms and broke, amongst other things, the security of the German phonecard by producing working clones. He was later sentenced to 15 months in jail for the theft of a public phone (for reverse engineering purposes), but the sentence was suspended on probation.

"Tron is also known for his diploma thesis, in which he created the Cryptophon, which was one of the first implementations of a telephone with built-in voice encryption. At the end of 2005 and the beginning of 2006 Tron was again the subject of media attention when he became the background of legal actions brought before by the parents and Andy Müller-Maguhn (one of the spokespersons of the German Chaos Computer Club but acting on his own behalf in this case) against the Wikimedia Foundation and its German chapter Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. This action found its most current peak in a court interdiction against using the German domain wikipedia.de as a redirect to the German wikipedia version. The redirect is out of service since January 18, 2006."

Also See:
EuroTelcoblog - Wikipedia.de.ad, January 19, 2006

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