It happened last Feb. 27, 2008. All of a sudden, Italian Parliament approved the enforcement of the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime.
A 40.000 Euros tax to get your data back (or, computer forensics’ hidden cost)
In Italy, whenever you ask for an official copy of a trial-related document you must pay a specific tax established by a Presidential Decree (Testo Unico sulle Spese di Giustizia).
So – as happened today during a computer forensics phase of a criminal trial – a client had to withdraw the request of getting a 120Gb hard disk copy, because the final tax amount would have been about 40.000 Euros. The Testo Unico, in fact, set a rate of 258 Euros-per-CD.
Thus, if you do the math…
More on the Iphone unlock legal issues…
In its final judgment n. 33768 released on Sept. 3, 2007, the Corte di cassazione (Italian Supreme Court) Sezion III penale, seems to have overruled the previous decision by Bolzano’s Lower Court asserting the right of a consumer to hack a Sony Playstation. If confirmed – the decision text is still not available – this might negatively affect the conclusion I’ve drafted in my previous post about the Iphone unlock legal issue.
An update on the Skype Log on problem
Skype denies that the outage is the result of an attack, but still failed both to demonstrate the lack of foundation for the attack announcement and clearly explain the reason that caused this sign-in problem. Standard Public Relation technique.
Skype outage raises again network design issues
Recent Skype outage, apparently fault of a denial-of-service attack on the Skype centralized login infrastructure, raises again the intrinsic flaw of designing a service or an application (even partially) based on a centralized network topology.
As the recent facts show, offering a service with a Single Point of Failure creates a “domino effect” whose legal implications (in terms of damages suffered by paying clients) might bear unforeseen consequence. The “flawed-by-design” kind of liability might, indeed, lead to a class action against Skype for having knowingly chosen to build their service on a technical structural weakeness.
Of course, I imagine that should that issue be taken into Court, ICT expert witnesses will play the major role in addressing the underlying technical issues.