Convicted “computer criminal” Kevin Mitnick’s parole ended Monday, finally allowing him to use a computer for the first time since 1995. Can you imagine? As the Wired article points out, when he last surfed the Web was mostly text, and Mosaic (the precursor to Netscape Navigator) was pretty much the only browser. I think it’s cool that his first surfing was done live on Tech TV’s program Screen Savers with “legendary hackers Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, and Emanuel Goldstein, publisher of the hacker quarterly 2600, a vocal supporter of the long-running ‘Free Kevin’ campaign” as guides.
In a cruelly ironic twist, on Tuesday, one day after his parole expired, “two federal appellate courts ruled Internet prohibition was too broad a punishment for computer criminals. The Internet is as essential as a phone, the courts said.” Now that just sucks…
