Month: January 2013

What the ban on unlocking phones means (worse than you think)

Source: What the ban on unlocking phones means (worse than you think) / Boing Boing

 

RE:

If a court rules in favor of the carriers, penalties can be stiff – up to $2,500 per unlocked phone in a civil suit, and $500,000 or five years in prison in a criminal case where the unlocking is done for “commercial advantage.” And this could happen even for phones that are no longer under contract. So we’re really not free to do as we want with devices that we own.

Source: Is It Illegal To Unlock a Phone? The Situation is Better – and Worse – Than You Think | Electronic Frontier Foundation

You should know that the hacker, programmer, writer and activist Aaron Swartz has died of suicide at age 26. His body was found in his apartment on Friday.

at the time of his death Aaron was being prosecuted by the federal government and threatened with up to 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines for the crime of — and I’m not exaggerating here — downloading too many free articles from the online database of scholarly work JSTOR

Source: The brilliant mind, righteous heart of Aaron Swartz will be missed | MSNBC