Has anybody heard of this? A German court has temporarily disabled the domain wikipedia.de because the parents of a famous dead 1990s hacker do not want their son's name to be displayed. From english wikipedia, important stuff bold:
"Tron (8 June 1972 – October 1998) was the nickname of Boris Floricic, a German hacker and phreaker who used that pseudonym out of respect for the character in the 1982 Disney film Tron. He became famous due to the unclear circumstances of his death. Tron was interested in defeating computer security mechanisms and broke, amongst other things, the security of the German phonecard by producing working clones. He was later sentenced to 15 months in jail for the theft of a public phone (for reverse engineering purposes), but the sentence was suspended on probation.
Tron is also known for his diploma thesis, in which he created the Cryptophon, which was one of the first implementations of a telephone with built-in voice encryption. At the end of 2005 and the beginning of 2006 Tron was again the subject of media attention when his parents and Andy Müller-Maguhn (a spokesperson for the German Chaos Computer Club but acting on his own behalf in this case) brought legal action against the Wikimedia Foundation and its German chapter Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. This action found its most current peak in a court interdiction against using the German domain wikipedia.de as a redirect to the German Wikipedia version. The redirect has been out of service since 18 January 2006."
from here.
The legal action taken by tose folks has triggered a vivid discussion in many german message boards about freedom of speech, censorship and personal rights.
What do you think about it? Is Tron a person of historical interest or just some dude? Is it okay to force a public encyclopedia to omit well-known facts? |
