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WikiPedia.de Goes Down
John Stith
Staff Writer
2006-01-24
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A German court ordered the German version of Wikipedia, Wikipedia.de, closed on Monday. The order came as a result of a lawsuit against Wikimedia Deutschland filed by the family of a deceased hacker after the online encyclopedia printed the full name of the man.
 | | Lawsuit from family of deceased hacker |  |
The administrative judge in Berlin-Charlottenburg agreed with the family's assertion that the name of their family member, popularly known as the hacker Tron, be pulled from the site. The entire site will remain down until the appropriate content is stricken.
The hacker is best known for developing clones of German phone cards and was even sentenced to jail time for theft of a public phone. The Wikipedia entry said this:
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 public implementations of a telephone with built-in voice encryption.
The real interest in the young man came when he died under very mysterious circumstances. Wikipedia had this to say about his death:
Tron went missing on October 17, 1998 and was found dead in a local park in the Neukölln district of Berlin on October 22 of the same year[1] after being hanged from a waistbelt wrapped around his neck. The cause of death was officially recorded as suicide. Some of his peers in the Chaos Computer Club, as well as his family members and some outside critics, have been vocal in their assertions that Tron may have been murdered.[2] It is argued that his activities in the areas of Pay TV cracking and voice scrambling might have disturbed the affairs of an intelligence agency or organized crime enough to provide a motive.
A German journalist named Burkhard Schröder published a book about the death titled "Tron - Tod eines Hackers" ("Tron - Death of a Hacker") in 1999 in which he presents the facts about the case known at the time. Because he concludes that Tron has committed suicide, the author is harshly criticized by both members of the Chaos Computer Club as well as Tron's parents. A lot of myths and conspiracy theories are circulating about the death, and the case was also used as the basis for various works of fiction.
UPDATE: Jimmy Wales, the official Wikipedia guy weighed in on the matter at Joho the blog.This is what he said via that blog:
This is so mindbogglingly wrong that I don't even know where to begin.
1. The German version of Wikipedia is *always* at http://de.wikipedia.org/
2. The site was never shut down not even for a single instant
3. The http://www.wikipedia.de/ domain belongs to the German Verein (a club of Wikipedia users, a local chapter).
4. That domain has never been used to access the encyclopedia. There was always a courtesy notice on the 404-not-found page there, telling people the correct URL.
5. The Wikimedia Foundation has never been served process about any action against us in German court.
6. The Wikimedia Foundation has not reached any temporary settlement with any Berlin court - we have no contact with any Berlin courts.
7. The German Verein was ordered very briefly to not point people to the http://de.wikipedia.org/ - a rather stupid order which was quickly reversed - but in any event an order with absolutely no material meaning since that domain has never been used to access Wikipedia at all.
So yes, most of us got it wrong. The website pulled was not part of the official Wikipedia network per se. There are distinct differences in the site.
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About the Author:
John is a staff writer for SecurityProNews covering cyber security.
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