One of the Internet’s most famous pirates, Stephen Michael Cohen, has been apprehended by Mexican authorities and handed over to US agents. Cohen has been on the run for 4 years to avoid paying a $65 million court judgment. When I call him a pirate, he is a real internet pirate. Not the definition of pirate that used by the RIAA or MPAA. No I’m not talking about people that download files from the Internet and make no money from doing so. I’m talking about real piracy. Cohen is a con artist. He steals things, including websites to make money from the Internet. His most lucrative con and the reason he is now in law enforcement custody was his illegal acquisition of sex.com. Using forged documents he obtained control of the DNS server settings, which point Internet browsers to the IP address of a website.
One of his most recent projects was called Earth Station V. It was a filesharing application which claimed to protect users IP addresses using encryption and proxy servers. That claim didn’t stand up to investigation by various filesharing groups. It was soon discovered that pretty much nothing claimed by the developers of Earth Station V was true. One of the most outrageous claims was that developers worked out of a Palestinian refuge camp. Attempts to interview or locate the developers produced nothing. One journalist even went to the refuge camp and discovered that no one there heard of any programmers at the camp. Despite efforts to increase the networks popularity, users were not switching over. Major websites that review and offer unofficial technical support were giving Earth Station V terrible reviews and advising users about the false claims made by the developers. The developers fired back with a barrage of attacks against these websites and websites of other filesharing applications. This only prompted further investigation into the truth behind Earth Station V. This was when it was discovered that Cohen was involved with the project. The developers claim he was hired as a consultant to help with advertising. Many believed he was more deeply involved, including being part of the project conception and fabrication of its strategy of lies. Money was of course the motivation. The plan was simple. Create a mildly functional program, eliminate competitors and then sell advertising banners. The developers just greatly underestimated the filesharing community.
I’d love to know how much money Cohen wasted on the Earth Station V project. People like him deserve to have their bad deeds come back to haunt them. I hope he gets a significant prison sentence and the rest of his crimes are exposed.