Seems the first Wii release didn’t make it long…

Here is a quote from the page:

WAB.COM is now the property of the United States government.
The domain and web site were surrendered to U.S. law enforcement pursuant to a federal prosecution and felony plea agreement for conspiracy to violate criminal copyright laws.

Antonio Del Santos, a.k.a “AloneTrio” pled guilty in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia on January 25, 2008, to conspiring with others to violate federal copyright laws by illegally releasing copyrighted code illegally circumvent built-in security protections and allow individuals to run “homebrew” software on game consoles, such as the Sony PSP and Nintendo Wii. Del Santos and his co-conspirators used www.wab.com as the exclusive outlet to provide copyrighted code to individuals. As a result, the WAB website is now the property of the United States government. Individuals involved in this conduct face up to five years in federal prison and a fine of $500,000 for each count charged.

Piracy is the unauthorized, willful reproduction or distribution of copyrighted material, such as software, movies, music, and games. People who distribute pirated works over the Internet via IRC, FTP sites, web sites, or file-sharing networks, and people who download or reproduce pirated works are risking criminal prosecution. Piracy is a crime even when the works are distributed over the Internet for free or where the conduct does not involve monetary gain, such as the trading of pirated products for other pirated products.

The Department of Justice and federal law enforcement will continue to investigate and prosecute individuals and groups that violate the federal criminal copyright laws at home and abroad. For more information on these and other federal anti-piracy investigations, visit www.cybercrime.gov.

In fact the whole things smells a lot. The page claimed to have ripped graphics from a PSX game, which turned out to be a homebrew one. So the ones who don’t believe should check this video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9sedsE4cxE

Also the grammar above seems fishy. Best is to forget the “first homebrew Wii” game for now. The US eagle, basically those two logos shown on the left and right are hosted right on wab.com plus its still the 24th in the eastern part of the states. Browsing for “similar” violation texts did not succeed. This all was way too fast for someone to react proper, even for a goverment institution. Also the mentioned http://www.cybercrime.gov/index.html does not mention any case of “WAB”. I am sure they would announce their heroic success, if there would have been any. (Those are partitially results by discussing with EvilDragon/GP2x.de and reading the Maxconsole webboard).

The coder AMOS, who created the original PSX game “Wartris”, is known to me in person. He might be very amused about this 🙂 Oh “AMOS”, greetings to Vienna 😉

A stripped down version of Wartris can be found here: //files/1510/

http://www.wab.com/