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Police Target Free Email
Red Wolf writes "The Australian Federal Police are talking with the major free email providers in the hope of making it easier to trace suspects who use the accounts for crimes like fraud and paedophilia."
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Lets face it, in out time we have all had the free email addy's from these places, i mean i have had (too name but a few)
a rs.com (freaked a few people out)
hotmail.com
yahoo.com
lycos.co.uk
britneyspe
fcuk-me.co.uk
etcetc
how many of the other big name free email providers out there are gleefully handing out any details that you registered (like any were real) and say to the cops
"theres an adress here you might want to check something_horrible@some-email.com" and then the police sit there and track all the emails for a while.
How much worse would this be is you encrypted your emails so it looked really suspicious ?
Are there any really good free web based email clients out there that you can suggest where this thing might not be an issue, what do you use ?????
S
Kingdom of Loathing (www.kingdomofloathing.com) Addicted is me
I have kids and I am speaking as a dad... I'm as paranoid of government as the next XFiles fan however, there comes a point in society where people should be accountable to others in that society. In the case of child pornograhpy accountability should be pressed in as many directions as possible. Let's face it while as another /.er noted that paedophilia isn't a crime it IS for the most part only paedophiliacs that commit those crimes. Any institutions or services that actively would seek to protect the identities of people that advance an inconceivably horrible agenda should also be liable under law. Kudos to any company that helps keep predators at bay.
I use free email accounts to keep spam away from my regular email addresses. I also like to keep spam away from my physical address. So when I sign up for a free email address, I use a fake physical address. I don't trust these guys with my real email address, why should I hand them my physical address and (cell)phone number to boot?
Likewise, if you have a criminal intent and use a free address to stay anonymous, you won't give your real physical address unless you're really stupid. But then they won't need that info to track you down, as you probably allready posed for a security camera, and left your wallet on the scene of the crime....
When has the fact that something has legitamate uses stop the authorities/companies from making it illegal.
ie: DeCSS
Lock picks / slimjims (is that one or two words?)
Guns
Knives
Crossbows (They ARE illegal in Australia excl Victoria)
I once knew a guy at my school who had his head bashed in with a hammer. Maybe we will have to go back to hitting nails with rocks (nope, they should be banned too because they can kill).
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
Just like beeing an alcholic doesn't mean you're a drunk. If someone live out their alcoholism, s/he will become a drunk - if someone live out their paedofiliact tendencies, s/he will become a childmolester.
Please do not interprent the avbove statement as as defence for paedofiliacs. I find the idea sick and twisted - but I aslo belive that like beeing homosexual, some people just can't control what they are turned on by. Controlling their urges on the other hand, is something all grown-ups should and could be capable of.
Beeing a peadofile is a bit like beeing an alcoholic. If you got it, you have a problem you must work with to overcome.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
Don't forget that it has already been demonstrated that intelligence is an universal constant, and the number of people on Earth tends to rise.
So, for technology-aware people, that commits the most serious crimes (specially fraud), this step will be mostly ineffective, yes.
But there have been lots of people who got arrested because they believed that they couldn't be traced back if they were using an anonymous service. Usually related to smaller felonies, like harassment, threatening, etc.
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Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF, find / -name '*base*' |xargs chown -R us && mv zig greatjustice
No running - or writing, or trafficking in - SMTP and POP3 software without a World Government licence, you GNU/lunix using terrorist.
When (if ever) will Plod realise that it's all just IP packets, and that anybody in the world can run any service they want? You want to ban anonymous email? Right, you go ahead and try and find my SMTP server running behind my firewall and accepting SSL encrypted connections from my friends over a non standard port and logging to /dev/null. And at least I know I'm doing that. How are you going to find and stop all the Joe Sixpack trojaned machines running SMTP proxies, all across the globe?
These guys are either breathtakingly ignorant, or are wilfully trolling. Budget time again, huh?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
The Australian Government has no idea how to handle matters,We as Australians are presented with gifts(Internet)therfore we think that we have the right to control these gifts and know how to opperate them as we imported some US IT professional to teach us.(lots of room for expansion in our local IT professionals Heads)
We have a task force that deals with Nigerian Scams and public complaints in regard to loosing money therfore as the comment says they want premium access to information from anyone and everyone.(make them pay big $$$$ in administration is a great start)
If you are a free e-mail provider please think before you act on behalf or possibly cooperate with Australian loosers,They are very small and many have noidea what a line of HTML is that run our policing/crime system.
In the spam department I have been an Innocent Victum via Hotmail of which I replied to a bulk mail by mistake and had my account terminated without question.
I could go to jail for this if Australia had anything to do with the way things are run.
The latter dose not matter as my spam dose cost many a ISP in being blocked and hence alot of cash however Australians certainly have noidea WHY spams happens or why crime happenes.
Identification to use the Internet is Australias best chance of battling against the whole world and its self to combat computer crime.
We are being banned from certain TV stations which means certain imports so I see no reason as to why they should not start restricting Internet unless you have a passport.
They are just plain dumb.
I contacted my Local Australian Police about thousands of dollars in Illegal software with a full traceout and address and information on how to track this market down as they never even moved from their seat.
The e-mail was opened for 3 secs then deleted.
Hmm... normally I'm staunching pro-privacy. However, situations like what happened to me this morning make me concerned: I received a very realistic, but forged, email purporting to be from Wells Fargo (my bank, and the most popular bank in my region of the US). In actuality (SpamCop helped me analyze the headers), it was being routed through a Korean ISP and contained a ".pif" attachment. I run Linux, so it didn't affect me much. But a not-so-savvy Windows users double-clicking their alleged "Business Account Application" could be in trouble. Until we get people to switch en masse from SMTP and/or to use more sophisticated email clients, this stuff is going to continue.
And yet, on
The purpose of life is to find the purpose of life.