Updated Notorious Canadian cracker kiddie 'Mafiaboy', the sole unfortunate scapegoat in the much-hyped distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks which shut down Yahoo!, eBay, CNN and Amazon back in February, has been placed in custody once again after being suspended from high school for cutting classes and being otherwise beligerent and annoying to his teachers.

Terms of his bail had allowed him to live at home and continue attending classes so long as he held to strict conditions of behaviour, which included avoiding other boys deemed to be a bad influence, keeping his hands off computers and being a model of decorum at school. Due to his lapses, he is to reamin in custody until a court appearance later this week.

The lad has struck a nerve with Canada's twitchy Feds, who apparently dread the thought of uncovering in open court what three minutes spent with a search engine will reveal in vast multiple rewards.

Mafiaboy is looking for a deal which would exclude any time in the slam, and is banking on predictable reluctance among the self-anointed leaders of the mighty IT revolution to testify publicly and in detail as to how a teenager humiliated them with a prefabricated script.

His lawyer, Yan Romanowski, has indicated that he's ready to challenge everything the Feds have on his young client, from server logs to wiretap transcripts, and drag the victims through gruelling testimony on precisely how they were made monkeys by a 15-year-old.

Indeed, if Romanowski can turn the trial into another O.J.-esque media circus - and he's threatening precisely that - the Canadian Feds will be hard-pressed to convince would-be copycats that making the Chief Technology Officers of, say, CNN and Amazon look like a lot of dithering morons is anything less than the coolest thing on earth.

Hence the Feds' willingness to contemplate a plea arrangement. However, they are expected to dig in their heels over at least some jail time for the notorious lad. US Attorney General Janet Reno, you see, indulged in a bit of public triumpahalism back in April when Mafiaboy was arrested, and the Canadians know better than to disappoint her. ®