The men were snared as part of ‘Operation Higher Education’ – a component of ‘Operation Fastlink‘ – and charged with conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement. Dominic Tymorek, a 53 year-old from Woodstock, Georgia, and 57 year-old Robert Hardick, of Getzville, N.Y., faced three counts. Steven Fiatarone, a 55 year-old from Spring Hill, Florida and 43-year-old Michael Uszakow, of Oakdale, Minn., faced two counts and William Parrott, of Roanoke Rapids, N.C., faced one count.

Previously, 57 year-old Robert Hardick, known as ‘tcut’, was found guilty of helping to run the ‘TEN’ and ‘TBR’ servers and was facing a five year prison sentence and huge fine. However, Hardick agreed to plead guilty to one count of conspiracy, and as a result picked up three years probation instead, which included 6 months of home confinement.

Steven Fiatarone of Spring Hill, Florida, also faced a harsh sentence of 5 years in jail and a $250,000 fine. However, he pleaded guilty on July 8th this year to one count of conspiracy, making a similar deal to Hardwick in return for a more lenient sentence.

On Thursday, Fiatarone appeared in the U.S. District Court for Connecticut, for his offenses linked to his operation of the warez server known as NRH (Nite Ranger Hideout), which was actually located in a school in Emporia, Virginia. Fiatarone, also known as ‘kidzap’, setup the server in 2001 and was alleged to have uploaded over 23,000 files and downloaded more than 40,000 in his role as administrator of NRH during 2002 and 2003.

Senior United States District Judge Ellen Bree Burns sentenced Fiataroine to three years of probation for conspiring to commit criminal copyright infringement, with the addition of a $2,000 fine.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

An .NFO file (information file) is a small text file included with warez releases on the internet. They can be viewed with applications such as Windows Wordpad or a dedicated viewer such as DAMN NFO Viewer. These files usually include a lot of information about the particular release and on occasion, directions on how to remove copy protections, sometimes with included registration serial numbers. These text files are the semi-public face of available Scene release information, presented in a friendly format.

Although .NFO files are widely available to the public via sites such as NfoDB, VCDQuality and Nforce (who all have sizeable databases) it’s almost unheard of that an almost complete database of Scene release information should become available for enthusiasts to download, which is what has happened, says the Czech iNFO.w4Club.

According to the .NFO included with the release, the MySQL database covers the period 01/01/1980 to 07/07/2007 and comprises information on some 2.6million Scene releases.

Included with the release is a script for anyone wishing to maintain and update the database by adding new entries. Nearly 1.4 million releases have files and size information included but there are claims that some of the release times may be inaccurate.

It’s being suggested that the database was ’stolen’ round 12 months ago but there is conflict over the method by which this happened. The person who copied the database suggests that he managed it because the administrator used a really weak password but the admin is insisting that the guy is a hacker and employed some sort of exploit to access it.

Although the copy of the database was taken 12 months ago, it seems the last 12 months have been added using the included script.

For those enthusiasts willing to undertake a 50mb+ transfer, the database can be downloaded here.

Thanks to MaE for the translation

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.