Scott McCausland, aka "sk0t", the first person to be jailed for Bittorrent use and a former member of Elitetorrents, has been told he may no longer use his computer with an Ubuntu Linux operating system. McCausland pleaded guilty last year to "conspiracy to commit copyright infringement" and "criminal copyright infringement" by downloading Star Wars: Episode III illegally. After serving five months in prison, he was put on probation with the requirement that he must have monitoring software on his computer, as per his plea bargain. One small problem, however: the software doesn"t run on Linux.
On his blog, McCausland writes, "the [monitoring] software doesn"t support GNU/Linux. So [my probation officer] told me that if I want to use a computer, I would have to use an OS that the software can be installed on. Which basically means Microsoft and monitoring software or no computer. I use Ubuntu 7.04 now, and they are trying to force me to switch."