Helsinki Police have arrested nine men in and around Helsinki, of which three have been tried and convicted, and the rest remain suspects.
They have been sexually exploiting thirty children in the range six to seventeen years old in hundreds of separate crimes.
One of the suspects is a teacher who abused his position. In other cases the suspects used IRC and message boards to make contact with children.
The nine arrested were not organized, although some of them had contact with each other.
A global notice on the FreeNode network announced the death of FreeNode admin Lilo. “On the 12th September Rob Levin, known to many as Freenode’s lilo, was hit by a car while riding his bike. He suffered head injuries and passed away in hospital on the 16th”
Lilo was being treated at the Neuro Trauma Intensive Care Unit in Houston, where he died the 16th.
Those who would like to pass on their condolences can do so at condolences@freenode.net.
Sirvulcan passed this tragic news to IRC-Junkie.
The coders of the Zotob worm have heard their sentence in a Moroccan court. Farid Essebar, a 19-year-old programmer got 2 years of prison, and his accomplish Achraf Bahloul 1 year. A third individual is awaiting sentence in Turkey.
The two got arrested just 2 weeks after the worm started to spread. The worm infected systems from companies like CNN, The Financial Times, ABC and The New York Times. Systems infected were used to collect credit card data and perform DDoS attacks. The systems were being controlled from IRC channels.
“Over the past few days, the dude who runs the ‘irc.efnet.net’ round robin decided that he was tired of running it, and removed all the servers from the list”, Doug announced on EFnet.org. “It now only sends users to his one IRC server. Some admins were clearly upset, and one even called for the delink of the dude’s server.”
EFnet’s loosely structure allows admins to own a broad range of domains such as efnet.net, efnet.org, efnet.info and efnet.us and give them the freedom to do with the domain how they feel like.
Once the roundrobin was changed, Doug setup a new roundrobin on EFnet.org.
The owner of EFnet.net is brad/jafo/paragod who runs the ircd.lagged.org server, which was the only server left in the roundrobin. The effects of that change can be found on this statistics page. In short, the change increased his number of users from a few hundred to over 4k.
“There was no discussions about possible delink,” one EFnet admin who asked to remain anonymous explained to IRC-Junkie. “.. as it didn’t have time to escalate to that before he realized how stupid it was and pointed it back to all open efnet servers. We have mailed mirc asking for irc.efnet.org to be official rr in the future to avoid this again. Mirc already have irc.efnet.us as us rr.”
The admin also sparked off a discussion before after starting to sell shells with the efnet.net domain name, making it look like an official service.
“A year back he put the domain out for sale seeing how much he could get for it, no one went high enough but that says something about his standards”, the anonymous EFnet admin concludes.
IRC-Junkie tried to contact Brad for a reaction but got no reply.