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    136 days ago

    I haven’t been following this, and I imagine others already have similar thoughts on this, but this article raised my hackles on this Louie dude.

    When Rossmann searched for Luan Tahiraj, he was stunned.

    News articles revealed that in 2013, Tahiraj had been jailed in Australia for offences against two girls, aged 13 and 14. In total, he served an eight-year sentence, with parole after four.

    Court records show that Tahiraj sent the 13-year-old a file while chatting to her on MSN Messenger. He promised he would help her get more friends on MySpace, but it was, in fact, a remote administration tool (RAT).

    Using the RAT, Tahiraj took over the girl’s computer and threatened to destroy it and hack her social media if she didn’t perform certain sexual acts for him.

    He then recorded these acts via her webcam and shared the video online.

    Jesus Christ. What a fucking monster. Only 8 years and served half that? Unbelievable.

    McEwen says the AFP found evidence that Tahiraj had hacked 133 people using the RAT technology.

    “They prosecuted on two matters, but there were many more out there that they did not prosecute, because it’s about the quality of cases that you bring to court,” he says.

    There is no suggestion that these other people were underage.

    “But it shows that the appetite didn’t stop at two,” McEwen says.

    “It went far broader than that.”

    A serial psychopath. Unbelievable they could only get him on 2 counts.

    My spidey senses are tingling, I wonder if he couldn’t help himself and was doing the same thing again with his PS5 diagnostic software.

    But she had repeatedly told him she was not trying to pirate his software, and also that she thought one of his security systems, called Digital Rights Management (DRM), was invasive and beyond the norm.

    Other people were saying the same thing, pointing out that Louie’s DRM system could identify if you were running competitors’ software.

    Some voiced concerns about the risk of malware or spyware if you did as Louie suggested on his website and turned off your anti-virus to run his software.

    Alarm bells.

    “There is no actual proof that I hack my customers, spy on my customers, breach any laws, or even go outside my own terms and conditions,” he wrote on the Better Way Electronics website.

    “The fact that nobody has proven otherwise […]”

    There it is. One of these brazen unremorseful psychos that didn’t learn shit from his imprisonment. They only got him on 2 of 135 crimes in which he did heinous shit to people after all, so now he thinks he can keep doing the same thing. He thinks he is such a genius, he is outright daring people in front of their faces. It’s a game to him.

    Jones paid about $300 to buy a licence for the software, which at first worked perfectly. “It was maybe two weeks later, after we were like, ‘Oh, this is gonna be so great,’ that we started to have problems,” she says.

    I bet it took about 2 weeks for him to get around to remoting into their PS5 diagnostics computer where the software was installed. The software does have to work of course, to be a tasty enough bait.

    Access revoked

    Better Way Electronics’s owner, Louie, fired off an email as a warning: Jones would be banned from the software she just bought if she kept running it “in a modified state”.

    She had no idea what he meant, and told him she had only used it as advertised — to fix PlayStations. But Louie was unmoved, pointing to his terms and conditions, which stated he could revoke access at any time, even without providing a reason.

    The pair went around in circles, Jones assuring him she wasn’t trying to pirate anything and suggesting the problem must be at his end, and Louie not having a bar of it, until things got heated on both sides.

    Their interaction ended with Jones being banned from using the software.

    But Jones soon saw she was not the only one having problems; other people were saying online they were getting banned without cause, and without a refund.

    My speculative take is, these repair folks were running this software on clean-room machines used only for PS5 diagnostics, in a DMZ (or something similar), especially if the advice was to disable antivirus in order to use the software. I speculate when he eventually remoted in and snooped around, this would either a) look like a reverse engineering environment, or b) piss him off because he couldn’t get into anything else, or it was boring compared to his expectations/whatever his intent was.

    Presumably, when he couldn’t get what he was looking for, he’d just jump right to fucking with them plainly over email instead of some other m.o. we’re unaware of, perhaps because this blew up too soon. I mean, why not, he’s already got their money and the terms let him do it; he set it up that way. And “stopping piracy” is the perfect smokescreen.

    It makes sense when the primary goal isn’t actually money. Any business that isn’t “interesting” is competition to another business that actually is interesting, therefore the competition for them should be culled, so that the “interesting” business pool is stronger. Perfect psycho logic.

    This is some weird power trip on many levels. Just like his previous 135 victims were subjected to his power. Disgusting.

    This is all speculation on my part, of course.

    “I feel you don’t understand me and my business goals.”

    I fucking bet.