Annatar:
1. Killerette and Phonestud and all the other ones involved in this particular case (except for the German Kimble you know who) were U.S.-based. Most of them were sysops.
Edit: funny handle you have here. I bet you already know this and the rest also …
2. Using the bluebox in France got us all busted in 1991. No-one here ever got busted for using calling cards (at least during all the time when I was active). Do you know why? AT&T, MCI, Sprint… all of these were American phone companies, with no subsidiaries in Europe. Who was going to launch a complaint? They had to lure Max into coming on the U.S. soil for him to get busted, that’s the real story. Otherwise he would have never been jailed in Europe for that. France wasn’t safe for him because of Nintendo, that’s all, Spain was just safe for everything. Bluebox? A lot more dangerous as it equated to steal local (national) phone providers. I bet you were in a country where they didn’t care at all, or at least they didn’t while you were using this.
Edit: when you placed a call through a carrier switchboard located in the U.S. you were on U.S. territory submitted to U.S. laws. When you emitted control frequencies in order to takeover a switch to get an outgoing line while calling a toll-free number, the equipment was generally (besides a few exceptions such as MCI bluebox) located in your own country. If you don’t get the point, ask a lawyer.
3. Today. Well today is another story. Free unlimited calls to 40+ countries through fixed lines/VoIP have been common offers by phone companies for years. Otherwise use Skype, Google Talk or whatever. Today is another story for software too, so your pro-open source rants are funny reading (the more so as they are now a bit dated with cloud applications, pay-per-use, etc.). And what about the corporate software like ERP, CRM, whatever? Again, funny reading, completely out of the subject.
Edit: the network is the computer was already buzz at the end of the 90’s. Today ubiquitous/pervasive computing is where we stand. We could discuss somewhere about what will come next. Interesting discussions.
Anyway whatever to which extent you may be right or not in your views, having supplied, cracked and spreaded games the way we did it at the special time we did it, did some harm to game software companies and the Amiga platform as a whole. I’m not talking based on doctrinal views towards a more moralized worid, but only based on facts I can heavily detail. Which game companies died? When and why? Thalion, Silmarils, etc. The Amiga? Well of course the main reasons of its collapse were the greedy men behind Commodore: Irvin Gould, Mehdi Ali… but losing game developers to PC and consoles couldn’t have fuelled up the business prospects.
That’s how it happened. Later I’ve had the occasion to discuss with a few game developers who had been fired due to their employer’s (game companies) bankruptcies. Some got nice indemnities, others not. Ok that’s life, we can say that we do not care, or we can endorse responsibilities for our deeds. Also we could have dealt drugs, or trafficked human beings, which would have been far worse. We didn’t do that, so let’s keep it in the right proportions.
They “come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.”