Convicted Felon runs this website?

[CMX]

Before anyone gets their panties in a bunch, I shall post it here. More details will surface in the future, but here goes....

Yes, you have heard correct. I was sentenced today for my involvement in one of the largest warez, cracking, hacking group known as Kalisto/Echelon on the net in the time period from around 2001 to 2004. The original first public report was direct from -> #09-203: 60th Felony Conviction Obtained in Software Piracy Crackdown “Operation Fastlink” (2009-03-06)

Yes, my real name is Bryan Thomas Black, and I was originally from Waterloo, Illinois. After the long road, it is finally over. As stated above, I was sentenced yesterday, August 18th, 2009, for those wondering what the sentence was, head on over to -> Illinois resident sentenced for his part in an online software piracy ring

For those who do not want to view the site above, rest assured, that C M X will still be here, I received 3 years of probation. I have learned a lot from this experience, the one that sticks out the most to me is that being the absolute best at something, is not always a good thing. Being young and dumb always amounts to more trouble than it's worth. For some people, they did drugs, for others, they shoot people, for others, they abuse people, my troublesome area involved computer languages. But like all things, cheating, hacking, reverse engineering is a form of a drug. I have since learned how to control the situation and have grown because of this experience.

I can say that even though this element of my life has molded me into the man I am today, that if I could go back and change things, I still would most definitely change a lot of things. I'm sure everyone can atest to the fact that they would change things if there was a possibility of doing so. More details will arise from my past years on the net over time, including how I was not really involved in the "piracy" aspect of the deal. I was involved in the cracking of the protection for certain games. And even then, the amount of games I looked at was like 1-2% of the actual releases involved in the group. I never profited off any of the releases, I was more like a collector, like pokemon, gotta catch em all I guess.... I will probably end up writing a book about the entire situation to try and help anyone from chosing the same path that I did, but that will be much later in time.

The end of the road for me was 3 years of probation, a class D felony, no monetary fine, $100 assessment fee, and the drug testing was waived due to my non existant drug usage in my entire lifetime. I was lucky, it could have been a lot worse. I am very happy with the outcome of the sentencing and I wont be in the same boat in the future. Hey sony or microsoft, interested in hiring someone to help protect your games in the future from the likes of codemaster? Reach out and see what I can offer, you may just be surprised.

Bottom line, if you stop visiting this site because of this new information, then so be it. But think really hard, you visit a cheating, hacking, cracking site for cracking games. It was inevitable for it to go further for the unsuspecting, young adolescent to eventually look at cracking games for archive purposes if nothing else. I'm sure everyone of you reading this has some burned cd or dvd in your household, if not even burned home console games as well. If you have those mentioned above in your household and you are shunning me, are you really that much better?

-CMX