
Pirate Bay ‘Advert’ Appears on Hacked Billboard - Lightning
http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-advert-appears-on-hacked-billboard-130310/
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rikelmens
Actually, no billboard has been hacked. From what my friends back in Serbia
tell me, the Serbian Pirate Party, piratskapartija.com, rented a time-slot on
that particular billboard just for the media attention and publicity.

It seems that it played out very well for them.

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JDGM
Fascinating. What an effective stunt! I believe you, but cannot find any links
that confirm this is a hoax. Anyone?

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jarrett
In the US, this could be life-ruining for the students. Anyone familiar with
Serbian laws: How, if at all, does law enforcement typically respond to these
sorts of hacks?

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nikolak
I am not a lawyer but I doubt they will get anything more than a small
monetary fine, if even that.

These kind of crimes are not really state priority and they are often ignored
even though they may be against the law, just like piracy.

And the personal lawsuits often tend to last longer than necessary. So if the
state/police doesn't do something I highly doubt that the company who owns the
billboard will sue them. Especially in case like this where no damage was
caused.

I'm sorry for vague response but I couldn't find any official laws that would
be relevant.

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jarrett
Interesting. Here in the US, I can imagine a scenario where the Pirate Bay
logo makes it a priority. Our government is sometimes very aggressive about
anti-piracy. While it appears that the Pirate Bay logo was just put up as a
humorous homage, I can imagine how a government official could perceive a
deeper connection between the students and the broader piracy movement. This
might be enough to motivate a prosecution.

Also, I can imagine how the state could make the case that the students were
actually stealing. I.e. advertisers pay for time on the billboard, and if you
take their ads down for any length of time, you've stolen the time they paid
for.

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nikolak
In this case the Pirate Bay logo only increases number of foreign
reports/articles, like the one linked. It would definitely not make any
difference unless the story gets really _a lot_ of attention in western media
and sort of forces officials to show the world that they're really anti-
piracy; which they're not.

That's how it is pretty much in whole Balkans with maybe slight differences in
Croatia.

For example: I owned a small PC repair shop in Bosnia(until ~2 years ago) and
I sold copyrighted software openly even to police officers, government workers
etc. in fact I even installed illegal copy of Win XP on ~15 PCs in local
police station for around ~$40/PC. I never had any issues. As far as I know
this would be impossible in US.

I think that shows how little governments in these regions care about piracy,
a logo of PB is well... just that, an image that under normal circumstances
doesn't mean anything for officials. In fact I wonder how many even know what
it's about.

____

Note that my experience with piracy in that region isn't really current, but
it is my understanding that little changed, or at least I haven't heard
anything about it.

It's also worth mentioning that the country has bigger issues than fighting
piracy, and the amount of government workers/police officers/prosecutors who
are educated about those issues is very low.

>Also, I can imagine how the state could make the case that the students were
actually stealing. I.e. advertisers pay for time on the billboard, and if you
take their ads down for any length of time, you've stolen the time they paid
for.

While you are technically correct I _can't_ imagine state pressing those
charges. They usually go for open and shut cases. If they want to charge them
they will charge them for something vague-sounding like "illegal access to
billboard/PC". Also the billboard was down for 22 minutes, that might be worth
enough money in center of NY to press charges but in Belgrade I don't see it
expensive enough to prosecute them for that damage.

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css771
How did they just hack that billboard with just their phones?

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jarrett
My guess is, the billboard has some kind of control protocol using wifi,
bluetooth, etc.. And that such protocol is not secured or is minimally so.

