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Kiddie Porn - The Virus Did It
The New York Times reports on a British man who was accused of downloading child pornography, and who successfully convinced the court that a virus did it. This is at least the second time this has happened. These cases are extremely interesting since they bring together all sorts of issues of computerized agents - who is actually responsible when your computer does something?
i would have thought. we don't have to get the truth involved, do we?
"It wasn't my fault, Officer. Honest, the video said it was Terminator 3 when I downloaded it!"
"The evil hacker even took the time to arrange and sort those pictures by series!"
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
One evening late in 2001, Julian Green's 7-year-old daughter came upstairs from the computer room of their house in the resort town of Torquay, in western England, and said, "The home page has changed, and it's something not very nice."
When Green checked the family PC, he found that it seemed almost possessed. The Internet home page had been switched so that the computer displayed a child pornography site when the browser software started up. Even if he turned the computer off, it would turn itself back on and dial the Internet on its own.
Green called the manufacturer and followed instructions to return his PC to a G-rated condition. The porn went away, but the computer still often crashed and kept connecting to the Internet even when "there was no one in the blinking house," he said.
But Green's problems were only beginning. Last October, police knocked on his door, searched his house and seized his computer. They found no sign of pornography in his house but discovered 172 images of child porn on the computer's hard drive. They arrested Green.
This month, Green was acquitted in Exeter Crown Court after arguing that the material had been gathered without his knowledge by a rogue program created by hackers -- a so-called Trojan horse -- that had infected his PC, probably during innocent Internet surfing. Green, 45, is one of the first people to use this defense successfully.
While a case that played out in the British legal system sets no precedent in the United States, legal experts say the technical issues raise two troubling possibilities. For one, actual child pornographers could arm themselves with a new alibi that would be difficult to disprove. Or, unknowing Web surfers could find themselves charged with possessing illegal material that a lurking software program has acquired.
"The scary thing is not that the defense might work," said Mark Rasch, a former federal computer crime prosecutor. "The scary thing is that the defense might be right," and that hijacked computers could be turned to an illegal purpose without the owner's knowledge or consent.
"The nightmare scenario," Rasch said, "is somebody might go to jail for something he didn't do because he was set up."
Green was eventually exonerated, and he said he had no clue how the rogue software showed up on his computer. "I never download anything, and as far as I knew, no others had," he said.
When his solicitor, Chris Bittlestone, hired a computer security consultant to examine the PC, nearly a dozen Trojan horse programs showed up on the hard drive.
"When the report came in, it was very much what you would call a eureka moment," Bittlestone said. But Green took the news differently.
"He was very quiet and said, 'See? I told you,' " Bittlestone recalled.
"There's some little sicko out there who's doing this," Green said, "and he's ruined my life. I've got to fight to get everything back."
Green's case could point the way to a new defense in U.S. courts , said Andrew Grosso, a lawyer and former federal prosecutor. The presence of a Trojan could mean that the computer is "not entirely under your control," he said, and a defendant could "legitimately point a finger elsewhere."
I would think that whoever caused the computer to act would be ultimatly responsable. If that someone wrote the OS with malicious code, then whoever wrote the OS. If that someone was a malicious remote user, than the remote user, and if that someone is the PC's owner, then the owner.
The trick is prooving who caused the effect. It's not as simple as prooving who was behind the wheel of a car.
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
Here
Evidently we must all run Plan9 now? Security through obscurity...
who is actually responsible when your computer does something?
If it's passively, this could either be the user's or the software architect's fault (if some OS's security hole allow one to get into trouble).
This could also be due to the ISP's neglect.
if it's actively, the answer should be the same but now, the problem is that we (as in "the consumers") would have to argue about this against some ISP's or worse, against a software editor's lawyer, in which case, we don't weight enough not to be in trouble.
concerning the present situation, I'd be somehow concerned if I learnt that like my ISP, my OS was actually logging whichever off my actions in order to prove the Law how bad I am actually behaving...
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Many of the common adult newsgroups are polluted by paedophile images sent by hard-core porn sites. It's a serious problem because it means that the majority of newsnet-carrying ISPs and servers are actually carrying large amounts of kiddie porn.
So the tissues by the keyboard were because you had a virus?
Omnis amans amens
Couldn't the courts just use these logs? If it shows him visting goatse.cx then downloading kiddy pr0n then going to google.com to search for lawyers, I'd say that's good evidence.
Roughly twenty years ago it was hyperbole for the Dead Kennedys to "sing" about things like this. I forgot which song it was, and you have to remember the culture was more conservative in some ways twenty-odd years ago, but the words went like this:
Pissed at your neighbor?
Don't bother to nag.
Pick up the phone.
Turn in a fag.
Well add about a million times as many transistors and just a little bit extra effort on the part of the spiteful neighbor, and change the setup, and bingo--instant permanent damage to the private citizen you hate, for whatever reason!
You do realize that things are not news just because they appear in the oft-cited NYT. This case for instance came to conclusion on July 17 and the BBC covered it two weeks ago.
the law in Finland (IANAL, but still) says "if you know or SHOULD know..." I believe this one falls under the "should know" category.
Now that we're on this topic, though, does anyone know where to get a virus that downloads high quality images of nubile women with scant clothing who are of legal age?
Sigs for Nerds. Sigs that Matter.
There are spammers/pr0no pages that try to get you to install a "porn downloader" ActiveX control. (If the security settings in IE are really bad [default?] IE might just suck it down for you.) Then it changes your Internet connection to a dial-up via an expensive (900-type or long-distance) connection. No doubt it installs various backdoors too.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Do not be stupid. Of course it is a valid defence.
Most viruses do not need an unsecure os, just a clueless person. Of course I do not think it was
a virus, but *if* it was a virus, then of course it would be an excuse.
This is probably an unfashionable idea, but the problem appears to be more that law enforcement agencies are treating child porn as an easy way to increase their scores. In truth there is probably little basis for treating downloading of child porn as "criminal behaviour", although the making and selling of it is most definitely so. I'm not defending child porn, but it's entirely possible that it represents for many would-be child molesters, an alternative way of satisfying their unhealthy sexual tendencies.
Aggressive policing against people who have (for whatever reason, and there may be many, both innocent and less so) child porn on their computers is counter-productive. It does not protect children, it does not prevent child abuse, it does not catch the real exploiters, but it does create grief for many people who have done little more than click on the wrong button.
Crime and punishment must be based on some kind of real moral injustice and the redressment of this. I don't think this is what we're seeing in these cases.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Did anyone check the name of the company that located the virus? Vogon International, LTD.
I suspect the Prostetnic Vogon Geltz.
Joe Average is an easy victim for the countless malicious trojans floating around. Visiting a straight porn site is no crime. Being deceived by messages like "Install browser enhancement (OK/Cancel)" is no crime. I have removed countless porn-related trojans from friends' PC's. If someone wants to put kiddie porn on unsuspecting victims' computers, this is no hard task. Removing a trojan when your anti virus software detects it would be the sensible thing to do. If the trojan has downloaded contraband to your PC, it will still be there, but you have removed the proof that you didn't dowload this intentionally. I would say proving intentional downloading of child porn should be pretty hard.
"And you are dying so slowly, you believe to be living" - Bertrand Besigye
"I see that you're trying to open a pr0n attachment. Just turn on the preview window and LookOut will open and run it for you!"
A colleague and I presented a paper on this problem at a meeting of the Forensic Science Society back in June. We went on to discuss how we need to improve education for forensic investigators... If anyone cares to read it you can find a PDF at http://cafe.cic.hull.ac.uk/~marshalla/silpath/silp ath.pdf
Subject says it all.
Yeah, I always said that to my girlfriend when she asked where to loads of pr0n came from...
Support bacteria, it's the only culture some people have
But now I have another problem: :-(
I want to run the dialer.exe but Outlock wont let me
Can we demand that regular Joe's take responsibility for their computer, and their computers security? That is to say, should we be responsible for ensuring that others cannot access our computers and do illegal deeds with it? Now, that would require way more knowledge IT security than the regular Joe has, however it might cause the public to demand a more secure OS etc.
If I had moderator points, you would so be marked flamebait. It is ALWAYS possible to get around an OS's security defences. And I presume you are looking at a Windows OS when you are talking about the security record. Linux can, and does get exploited for similar things.
Reasonable precautions to one, are unreasonable to others.
A Marshall is responsible for this broken link: http://cafe.cic.hull.ac.uk/~marshalla/silpath/silp ath.pdf
And that's the worst part. There will always be a percentage of the population that assumes anyone accused of a crime is guilty. Nevermind that he convinced a Jury, who presumably were working off expert testimony.
(putting my hand up)
I find it intensely disgusting that you see no problem with coopting other folks' property, for any purpose.
I posted before starting to read.
Do not like to register, but I have now read
it, so I think you are right, I am blind, dumb
and idiotic. But as of the rest I think I am right.
"who is actually responsible when your computer does something? "
Personally, I'm blaming Orrin Hatch. Someone download the PC killer to his machine forthwith.
Excuse me, are we talking real child pornography here or images from those so called lolita and nymphets popups out there.
I did read the headline of the story, i did not register. The headline made me think that it was
all clear and just a bad excuse.
I thought it was a good excuse *even* if he was guilty, but as I said, the headline fooled me.
Umm...I don't, actually, and I don't know anyone who owns "a couple of random window boxes on the net..". Even among computer geek types, many people don't have the spare cash to keep 3 or 4 boxes up, ya know.
I do find it rather odd that you seem to think having child porn would be okay, as long as nobody gets blamed for it....Like that would make it a good thing somehow.
I haven't heard of a virus that will copy porn images to your hard drive. But, now that i think of it, it would be very easy to make as long as there was a host server to give the images out.. If there was this case then, the computer should have been checked for this virus and the virus should have been decompiled and the source would probabaly show the host server. If this was all to happen then I would belive this guy..
--Matt Fisher
I am not a lawyer (I still can't bring myself to write that abbreviation,) but if it is a valid defense in a criminal child pornography case to say I wasn't responsible for downloading it, could this not set a precedent for Civil copyright cases? Or are the RIAA's rights more compelling than that of the victims of Child pornography?
"I was hacked. You know, ever since all the Lawsuits started happening, there has been an increase of people hacking computers to download music."
I think a case could be made of that.
"those with pictures are statistically likely to go on to physical acts..."
Do you have figures to back up this claim?
The study of pornography and its impact on sex crimes is always highly charged, but there is a good basis for believing that free access to pornography actually reduces sexual offenses (not just against children, but of all kinds).
And yes, there are "wrong buttons" that will download images to your PC. Someone else here mentioned that Newsnet is regularly spammed with child porn.
Criminals should be punished, no doubt about it. But witch-hunts are never productive. You think you are catching the real crooks? You're not. In fact, you're driving the sale and distribution of child porn underground, causing it to become harder and more violent.
Pushing even an obnoxious trade into the hards of real criminal networks is not wise: you may get that rosy feeling of 'doing good', but the cost is paid by huge numbers of new victims in far-off places.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
I feel this device would find a significant market.
Now I'm just looking for investors.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
...I've seen this one before (by the description). When I was working on PCs for a living, an optomologist's secretary brought in her computer, which was acting "strangely" and all sorts of "foul things" were coming up on her screen. I figured something had just replaced her homepage on IE with a porn site or something like that, so I plugged the machine up and let it boot, explaining to her "well, there's some bad shit you have to look out for, but there's always worse". I was quite wrong. This was worse.
When I fired up IE on the system, it went straight to a child pornography site that was obviously a typoed URL (freecilpart.com or something like that...don't hold me to it since my memory's terrible), and the default homepage setting was being updated constantly (like kak). This program was listening on some oddball high-numbered port.
Since the box was inside a Novell network and wasn't exposed to the outside world (much) I figured it wasn't a normal compromise. I told her to contact the FBI over the site, and I went looking for the malware, but couldn't track it down (limited time on it, though) and wound up wiping the box clean and reinstalling Win98. She's very religious about keeping the a/v definitions updated now (:
If people can throw their hands in the air and say "The trojan did it", then the law will change to catch the paedophiles who are using it as an excuse.
If it becomes popular to do so, and easy to get off if that is the case (and it seems like it might be, I'd hate to have a court disbelieve me if a trojan downloaded kiddie porn to my computer) - then who gets the blame?
This might lend some power to the palladium protocol (nothing's impregnable, but the guff is pretty air-tight) - "get rid of all viruses and trojans" - can now be replaced with "protect your children from being brutalized and their pictures sold to sickos all over the world while you rot in jail forever"?
Johns: Well, how does it look now? Riddick: Looks clear.
I don't think he means "owns", I think he means "0wn5", ie they don't belong to him but he's got them thoroughly rooted.
dave
Possibly intentionally: child molesters, and people who download child pornography.
Uhm, I've a large collection of videos about cars crashing, but that does not make me a dangerous driver.
You are being somewhat wicked when you imply that everyone with a penchant for watching a kind of act is also likely to go out and commit it. This is a tired pseudo-psychology that has tried and failed to link TV to violence, games to violence, foreign-language films to political insurrection, what have you. Monkey see, monkey do? I don't think this argument has any provable basis.
You cannot save children from exploitation by making such falacious arguments. You must show a clear connection between the person in possession of pornography, and those committing the acts.
Imagine we're talking about rape videos. Now rape is a crime. Does this mean that someone luridly watching a rape video (real or faked) is actually a criminal too?
How about someone watching the film of a bank heist. Or the millions of viewers who watch 'cop reality shows'. Are they all likely to jump up and start stealing cars?
You can't stop using logic just because you're discussing an emotive subject - if anything you have to be more clear headed than usual.
Lurid interest in an illegal act is not (in the general sense) a crime, and is often a substitute for the real thing. Think clearly and you will see that there are better ways of preventing abuse of children.
One example: to recognise that most abuse of children actually happens in countries where children's rights are totally ignored, and often takes far worse forms than sexual exploitation.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Technical issues aside, there can only be one advice: If confronted with any kind of child pornography, or even being offered such - inform the cops.
This kind of stuff is illegal in almost any jurisdiction worldwide, and it is immoral by all but the sickest standards. There is also no argument that children are exploitet for this, and suffering from it.
Chase spammers for fun all day, more power to you! But do not collect evidence on child porn, leave that to professionals.
And again, in most jurisdictions, law enforcement _will_ act on your tip.
Alex
Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder
Clearly having intent to do something makes you responsible.
Knowing also makes you responsible, depending on what you knew.
Ought to have known, or what a reasonable person knows is different.
Reasonable people may have a very limited understanding of a computer, which means they could possibly not have any understanding of what it does, as opposed to a computer geek who probaly does. This is why it is a jury of your peers, so they can form an opinion as to what you should and should not be aware of.
I remember back in the PC/C64 transition, coming from the C64 I was horrified that someone would suggest leaving a disk in the drive as you turn on the computer. (FYI leaving a disk in a C64 drive could erase it, and had happened to me)
Mod the parent up. I live in Japan and KNOW that this hits home. The Japanese goverment has been suspiciously lax in pursuing enactment of Child Porn laws (Cyber or otherwise) ispite of heavy pressure from US and many European countries. I would say that Japan and Thailand are responsible for most of the Child porn being generated worldwide.
Anyone then faced with an RIAA lawsuit can just accidently install it and claim that the virus did it. Am I missing something here? And why isn't there any mention of wich virus did it?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The computers of the future will be capable of rendering a picture indistinguishable from a real one. In this case no real harm is done to anybody by making such a picture. So, the defendant will claim he/she just rendered those pictures. Can anyone be arrested for rendering a picture?
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
Who the hell modded this 'Insightful'?
The question of culpability for the actions of a computer is going to become increasingly interesting. Spammers and other miscreants are getting more brazen about the use of third party computers by which to make mischief. I'm not saying that it's a new concept -- far from it -- only that the audacity factor is going up. Dealers in kiddie porn and other widely-considered-bad things may start to see third party computers as a safe medium for their wares; a good way to cover their tracks.
It seems unfair for a person with a virus-infected computer to be accountable (even in part) for the actions of a malicious third party who takes control of that computer without the owner's knowledge. On the other hand, it's risky to let them off the hook for it: genuinely culpable parties may install a virus on their own system as a legal defense measure! And if the owner of the computer were nailed for the actions of their computer, could they then sue some software or hardware vendor for enabling a malicious third party to use their computer without authorisation, thus exposing them to this risk? Presumably the end user doesn't haven't much of a case against the Internet Service Provider: I would expect the ISP to be offering a network service, leaving it up to you and your equipment as to what use is made of that service.
The real problem here, as I see it, is that we want to discourage systems which facilitate abuse by evading accountability. The real culprit -- the malicious third party who uses the computer as a zombie slave to get up to no good -- is safely hidden from accountability through anonymity. The owner of the equipment is deemed not culpable on the basis of inability to know or do anything about it. The owners of the network infrastructure are just providing the advertised service, and should be thought of as common carriers. The owner of the software which enables the virus, well, no software authors seem to want to be held accountable for their software either, and that's somewhat understandable.
But if we don't come up with some strategy for discouraging systems which facilitate abuse by third parties, the natural consequence will be an increase in unpolicable lawlessness. To complicate matters, insecure systems are already pervasive, so it's hard to know where to start. Who do we put the pressure on? I didn't RTFA, as I said (don't read NYT's website on principle), so I don't know what conclusions were drawn. It strikes me that perhaps we need to start holding the end user accountable for the mischief of their system if they don't take reasonable precautions to prevent it, such as using anti-virus software, or keeping modestly up to date with security patches. Maybe we can also hold commercial software/hardware sellers accountable to do their fair share in selling a merchantable product, with particular reference to reasonable standards of safety, and working as advertised. In the case of OEM-installed operating systems, it's probably the OEM that should foot the bill, as the seller of the product. Penalties should be relative to the cost of the product.
I'm not suggesting that these ideas ought to be implemented, but we ought to think about them. What seems fair and would have the desired impact? Most end users aren't aware how unsafe the Internet is, with regards to this kind of abuse, and they should be educated about it, or protected from it. Computer manufacturers are selling computers as internet-ready but by and large they are selling an unsafe product. Selling a machine bundled with anti-virus protection might be sufficient to make the product "safe", from a merchantability perspective. Removing (or not providing) Internet functionality would also protect the manufacturer from Internet-related issues. Providing clear warning material on the dangers of connecting to the Internet might also be sufficient ass-cover.
Stuff to ponder. And note that I didn't rant about Microsoft Windows, despite opportunity and motive.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
Yes, but you wouldn't be able to sue me if it turned out that some one cut my brake line while I was in the store getting milk.
Yes, we should run scans regularly, but we should also look to make sure that there isn't a banana peel/patato stuck in the tail pipe. Have you turned the key before walking arround the car, turning on and off every light and such?
When your Linux machine does something, do you hold Linus personally responsible?
I know it's not very practical to suggest that the 95% of computer users running users switch to another system, but this case is something that could be used for at least a small strike in that area. A letter to the BBC and NYTimes showing, in laymans terms, the fact that with a good distro (all unnessesary ports closed/unneeded daemons off by default/regular security patches by distro maker) there would be a significantly lower chance of something like this happening to the user. Hell, even a letter pointing out the obvious vulnerabilities of Outlook and IE as opposed to Mozilla/Eudora etc would be a good thing.
First off, the car analogy falls flat in that when your brakes start malfunctioning there's a rather noticable effect on the car's performance. In the computer world, you could have your PC zombied and not even know about it. (Let alone trying to explain to some people about zombies...)
It would actually be quite simple to get unwanted pictures onto a computer's HD. Simply use the resize capability of most modern browsers and send 1x1 pixel sized versions of the pics you don't want them to have. The PC will download the whole thing and then not really display it but it'll be in your cache.
Actually this is even MORE relevant to the case that was just being decided here in the US. In that one you have a "vigilante" who deliberately used a virus (SubSeven I believe) to infect and investigate computers. At the very least that action should seriously taint the evidence in question.
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
With the wild DAs making accusations, perhaps it is time to finally delcare any software that acts without the user's knowlage to be illegal hacking...whether it be Windows "phone-homes", Gator advertizing, or of course malicious virii!
Of course I wouldn't condone hacking Gator to put inapproperate pictures on unsuspecting users' computers in any way...
Well, it would be better, wouldn't it?
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
All evidence presented in the media articles point to it being a virus/trojan. So, why do you think otherwise?
The driver rams into someone because his brakes don't work. Did
A) The repairman screw up on last check-up
B) Someone rig the brakes
C) He did it himself
However, going back to the "motive, means and opportunity", a car driver would hardly have much incentive to be in an accident. In this case however, you would because it would be a "get out of jail free" card. It's as if you happened to ram down a pedestrian that you had a motive to kill. Is that any evidence of who rigged the brakes? Nope, it could be just a coincidence. Would it still be relevant in court? Absolutely.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
would you believe it got to +3
Karma: Bad due to google bombing - Robert Watkins woz 'ere.
Microsoft... if it was secure in the first place then this sort of thing couldn't happen...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
I think "better" would be rather relative in this case.
And as for the "0wned" thing, sorry for misunderstanding you, but I think it still brings up a new issue - how would you justify to yourself the fact that you could ruin someone's life by putting certain material on a hacked Windows box? What if the court didn't accept the defense the guy in the article used?
I think it's time that people took some sort of responsibility for their book reading. Don't read books about illegal acts. Don't look at art depicting them. Don't look at movies about them. Just go hide in your room with your gun.
Mr. Green, 45, is one of the first people to use this defense successfully.
Bah!
From el reg: (24th April)
A man was cleared of possession of child porn this week after experts testified that a Trojan horse infection on his PC could have downloaded 14 depraved images without his knowledge.
New York Times: As uptodate as we are accurate.
When I was sharing a house, we had a P-233mmx which was shared between several of the occupants, running windows 9x. After using the thing for some time, the machine began to slow down, behave oddly, and then a few other odd things started to occur; the mouse moved strangely - and then the machine started to type things. By itself. It was fairly obviously some sort of remote control program (either trojan or maliciously stuck on there by one of my housemates) - which started to do other odd things.
Including displaying child pornography on the screen.
The first time this happened, I had the willies scared out of me as my 14 inch monitor was suddenly filled with an image of a girl of a similar age to the size of my monitor, barely dressed, obviously looking up at a taller photographer. It petrified and disgusted me so much that for a moment I didn't move - before I promptly turned the machine off at the mains and gutted it. I couldn't work out what had caused it - and no virus software picked the thing up. Thank god it was a shared computer, or I'd have never used the net again, I think - in the following months the above happened on a monthly basis, and every now and then the bootup screen changed to an image of a fly on windows background, with the label "ISpyFly Windows {something I forget}".
To this day, I have NO idea what the software was that caused it, but of one thing I'm certain - child pornography *can* get onto your computer without your consent or knowledge. No-one knows better than I how much paedophilia goes on online - I worked in computer forensics - but all the same, there are *two* sides to this coin, in whatever proportions they occur.
Incidentally, if anyone's heard of the software or has any idea what it was, let me know. And no, I don't still have access to the machine. It wasn't mine anyway.
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you
If I was seriously out to get someone I could do a much better job than this, and so could you.
1. Get him infected with a trojan. Just send him shit on email (from free accounts), icq, irc, latest windows exploits and whatever until you find something his antivirus doesn't bite on.
2. Drop him a shitload of illegal stuff. As techies, I'm sure you'd be able to find it, it's just that we don't *want* to. Maybe even download it directly to him through the trojan, keeping yourself completely clean. If he gets logged downloading it, all the better.
3. Jerryrig the dates, to make it seem as if they've been collected over extended period of time, accessed repeatedly etc.
4. Uninstall the trojan. Give him a total clean-up and remove any over shit he might have happened to have too.
5. Tip the cops. Payphone, anonymous note, whatever. Anything untracable.
OTOH, his life is pretty damn screwed already (even if you get aquitted, everyone will still wonder... did he *really* do it or not). This is if you want someone really thrown in jail and lose the key. Maybe I shouldn't give anyone the idea, but at the same time it might also get people to actually *care* about their security.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
So, using that as an example and considering how much more common computers are in every day life than cars (know anyone how hasn't driven in the past 12 months? Now, know anyone who hasn't touched a computer in any way shape or form in the same time period?), why don't we have compulsory "basic operation" licsenses for computers?
Most people outside the IT Industry use computers as a tool, a means to an end. And yet there are NO requirements in place to ensure people are competant when using that (potentially dangerous) tool
Think about it this way; Truck drivers are forced to undergo rigerous driving training (in the form of logged experience and lessons from qualified staff) before they're allowed to sit for their license and operate the tool they use to make a living. Builders are required to undergo at least two years of apprenticeship plus TAFE (think community college) courses before they can build any type of large structure. People who pilot any form of marine vessel are required to sit a test and get their license before they can command a vessel capable of going over a certain speed/weighing more than a certain tonnage. Hell, even short-order *COOKS* are required to undergoe some form of food preperation and service training before most places will give them a job.
And yet companies all across the world will hire someone into a position that required daily, extended user of office type computers at the drop of a hat. At best you can expect "Can you touch type? DO you know Microsoft Word?" Hell, even that's only mostly for secretaries!
A basic computer competency test should be *compulsory* before anyone is allowed to purchase a computer. Said test should include the following areas;
- Basic hardware in a computer (stops the old "my cupholder is broken and the tv wont start!" support call when whats actually happened is that they've kicked out a cord at the back)
- Basic use of word processing, database, presentation and spreadsheet software (by basic I mean VERY basic. "This is a spreadsheet. It does simple simple calculations, like so")
- Basic Internet skills ("this is how to use email, this is SPAM - its bad, dont ever reply. This is how to browse the web" etc)
- Basic computer security (in fact, dont even include the word "security". Include this in the "basic operation" section. Cover topics such as viruses ("don't open email with attachments unless you have an UP TO DATE virus scanner running, and the file is NOT an exe/vbs/whatever", spyware, password security (and the importance of it, with say a "your internet banking and hotmail account are vulnerable! listen up!")
- How to report a problem (if you have a support line/helpdesk/manufacturer to call under warrenty.
When computers are in as widespread use as they are in our society today, rivaling even vehicles in their numbers, people should be forced to prove at least some BASIC competancies. I'm not talking about doing us out of a job (I am paid to fix problems, among *other* things), but ensuring that the damage/aggrivation/grief caused by computer-ignorant people is minimised.Janie took my gun...
the answer is not to make this stuff easier to use! first, we have been doing that for 10 years now. we've been lowering the bar and people still keep tripping over it!
secondly, making it 'easier' has taken away security and safety mechanisms.
no matter how easy we make this, if you are not required to learn/know a certain amount, you will be making a mess. maybe just for you, maybe for other people.
eric
Yeah, but their culture see's it differently i.e. not so much of a problem. To them, it's like Saudi Arabia asking us to clamp down on alcohol, because their society doesn't tolerate our activies. A lot of Asian porn features school girl references there, and they really dig the whole cute china-doll thing. I'm sure many of the legal ones get made up to look as young as possible, jeez that even goes on in Western porn as well, 25 year-olds masquerading as 18 year-olds.
With different ages of consent around the world, policing this planet is not an easy task. I think I heard once that the age in Spain was 12, though that may have been years ago and it's probably standardised through the EU now. How exactly to you legislate based on widely differing laws and cultures?
Remember also that our society is very diffent to many others, and has only become that way recently. Several hundred years ago, most people were married and had had several children by 17-18 years old. You'd be lucky to reach 30 years old and have half of your children reach adulthood. Our ever extending life-span has lengthened the "age of innocence", but it's not "naturally human". If a boy/girl can conceive children, that's natures way of saying it's time to start having sex, regardless of what abstinence groups or abusive catholic priests regard the issue.
It's a very muddled issue. Where do you draw the line?
I think he means other people's random windows boxes. That he's "0wn3d".
Excellent point...You have made me see it in a new light...
In truth there is probably little basis for treating downloading of child porn as "criminal behaviour", although the making and selling of it is most definitely so.
1. What about purchasing? Oh, wait you've just made making child porn an income source, an industry. So it has to be be free, then.
2. "I got this new shit, newer seen before, what you got?" "Umm nothing special, is there any way I can have it?" "Go make some yourself, and we'll swap"
Just as in any other case, I imagine there's a certain level of "quid pro quo". The only way around that would be if there was so much around, it didn't really have any "value". "Yo I got this child porn vid you've never seen before, what's it worth to you?" "Um.. I'm still downloading the endless flow of child porn vids, so that's nothing special. Feel free to share it with us though, if you want." which is completely utopian (in a very twisted way). The more stuff you could get for free, the less new stuff would show up because its "value" would be lower, while it is still a very incriminating piece of evidence. So it just wouldn't happen.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
You can waste a lot of time sitting in front of a Usenet screen, downloading and decoding messages. So I looked around, and found "brag". (brag.sourceforge.net) It can download and decode messages automatically. A few shell scripts, and a cron job later, I have a nightly download of a few selected newsgroups. Could there be kiddie porn in there? Maybe. I have thought about what might happen if there was and I was caught with it. I can easily prove that I had set up my computer to download things nightly from usenet, so I would hope that it would be obvious that it wasn't intentional.
Since it downloads about 1000 images a night, I don't have to time to look through them all. I could have questionable material on my computer right now. But who would be responsible for it? Me, for not verifying every image that is downloaded? My ISP for carrying that material? The person who posted it to a non-related newsgroup? The creator of "brag"? Ultimately, in this hypothetical case, the responsible party would be the person who posted it to the newsgroup. Everyone else would be an innocent bystander. We have to remember WHY the laws against these things are out there. At one point I did see some images where the age of the girls was questionable in my mind, so I deleted them. These weren't the typical 25 yr old with pigtails described as "teens", but what appeared to be girls under 18. It wasn't like they were kids, but just to be sure I deleted the pictures. If I come across anything that is questionable, it is removed ASAP.
In the news story, people successfully defended themselves against kiddie porn charges. Where is the issue here? That they were accused? Hey, they had the stuff on their computer, and they were able to explain why they had it. How is the system not working here?
"I have removed countless porn-related trojans from friends' PC's."
...
You don't *need* Trojans. Your friends must be newbies, huh?
Ahem.
I shouldn't read this site so early in the day
I had an interesting experience helping my cousin with his computer a few hours ago. I've done this plenty of times before, and I'm sure every computer professional has served as volunteer tech support for family members at least occasionally. The difference this time is, instead of simply doing a few quick fixes for the things that were broken/nonfunctional (which is what I usually do, in the interests of time), I actually thought long and hard about what was broken, and more importantly, how and why it got that way.
I will state from the top that I don't intend for this to be a Windows bash session. Though it's plainly a software environment I try to avoid when it's practical to do so, I recognize that I'm a kook and that most of the rest of the world has decided otherwise. Since, like death and taxes, Win32 is omnipresent, unavoidable, and in the end always victorious, it's prudent to learn how to efficiently work with it.
My cousin purchased a basic home system earlier this year, a modest (but powerful enough) system with Windows XP Home Edition preinstalled. It also came with Microsoft Works (which he's just starting to use for his classes) and the various and sundry shovelware that no user ever bothers to either run, nor uninstall. We live very close to each other, so we both have the same network provider -- in this town it's basically Comcast for broadband or the highway (read: craptacular dialup). He uses Yahoo as a portal page, and occasionally uses Yahoo Messenger. He likes tuning in to streaming radio, so he has dozens of stations bookmarked. And that's pretty much it -- he uses his machine for web surfing, internet radio, and the occasional short word processing or IM session.
I stopped by today to help him with a project he's starting up and he went to log into his computer. My first clue that something was very wrong: it took forever. The interval between the time when he entered his password and when he gained full control of the machine (i.e. when the busy cursor went away and the machine finally became responsive enough for him to do anything as basic as using the cursor to launch a new application) was at least 90 seconds. This box isn't a server, he's not compiling code or serving pages or rendering frames or anything else that ought to be stealing major cycles from the foreground UI. After that eternity has passed and he finally gains control of the machine, he gets a dialog box advertising cheap university degrees. By this time, I'm all like "what the f___?!?" It seems that in my time away from mainstream (i.e. Win32) computing, something known as "Windows Messenger Service Spam" has become a serious nuisance. How goddamned evil can they get? You don't even have to open your mailbox before some lowlife jumps in your face trying to sell you merde? How fricking evil is that? I do wonder what kind of krakk kokane your software engineering staff has to be smoking for them ship an operating system that, in its default configuration, allows an unauthenticated tcp message from any random spot on the internet to display a dialog on a client workstation, but, as I mentioned earlier, that's not where I want to go today. I felt a sick feeling in my gut, realizing that there are probably millions of grandmothers out there getting these stupid things popping up in their faces all day, without the vaguest clue of how to stop them.
After closing the messenger spam, my cousin started his browser, which happens to be IE 6. This took an extroardinarily long time. Once it came up, I noticed that he had a Yahoo toolbar underneath the standard Explorer toolbar, bristling with gewgaws, animated crap, pulsing buttons and links to, erm, "synergistic content". In addition, there was a vertical pane along the left side of the window, also Yahoo branded, also full of pulsing, flashing, irrelevant happy crap. In the middle of trying to throw up (and I do mean "throw
Maybe access related computer crime needs to be looked at very carefully. The people who take the photos and who probably rape and abduct the children are the real criminals, true people who download it have questionable minds (assuming they actually did it intentionally and it wasnt an accident, virus or someone else) but that doesnt change the fact that they are were using their computer to access data.
If you asked someone to read out loud the hex code of a jpeg containing child porn while you copied it down and put it in a file is that illigal or is that free speech? this has already been looked at with the DeCSS case. You might say who cares they are pedophiles but it does infringe on every other aspect of the internet: If you are arrested for downloading something, eg music, films, porn, software you are really just being arrested for using your computer, its a very different crime from taking out a gun and shooting someone, rape, murder, assult etc.
It just seems to me that legislators dont understand what computers are and they are treating it the same as everything else. If the law allows someone to be arrested for downloading child porn on the internet then there will be no problem making it illigal to do any number of things (downloading anti-american political pages,diagnostic tools, research papers/dmca violating material etc.)
That doesnt mean that computer crime should be abolished, if you are trying to bring the internet down or disrupt traffic that is pretty serious and should be treated differently (in that case you are accessing remote systems with out permission etc.) and ofcourse if you write an outlook vbs virus the case should just be laughed out of the court room and microsoft should pay for your taxi home!
Sorry for bad spelling or flaimbait views - my spell check is broken and the milk in my coffee curdled this morning
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Yes, you can blame M$ all you want for the flaws and poor default configurations to exist in the first place, but ultimately viruses, trojans, adware, etc are a social issue that is best dealt with using education.
Do not be stupid. Of course it is a valid defence. Most viruses do not need an unsecure os, just a clueless person.
But then again: since when "your honour, I'm clueless" is a valid defence?
Actually, alcoholics and drug users are more likely to show compulsive behaviour when their chosen drug is illegal. When the substance is banned, addicts consume as much as they can get. The very fact of the illegality adds to the addictive element.
Put it like this: banning alchohol may decrease total consumption, as moderate drinkers consume less, but it creates more alchoholics, and incidentally, more crooks selling the stuff.
For drugs it's the same. And although I'm starting to sound like someone I don't want to sound like, I have to assume this applies to other things we find noxious.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
No.
I hold Alan Cox personally responsible. ( kernel 2.4.18 )
Karma: Bad due to google bombing - Robert Watkins woz 'ere.
"someone watching a child porn may go out and and try it"
How on earth do you reach this conclusion?
It matches nothing demonstrated or seen elsewhere. In no domain do people jump up and imitate the things they see unless it is clearly part of an ongoing social movement.
A person who intends to molest children will do so with or without porn. Children have been sexually abused for all history.
It's the same old argument about violence on TV: people forget that the western world (US included) has the lowest levels of violence of any society in any place, any time. Although the levels of violence portrayed are higher than ever, the actual violence we encounter is rarer than ever.
You cannot just state that child pornography is an exception to this trend. People commit criminal acts because they have the means, the motive, and the opportunity. Not because they watched some illegal pictures.
And I have a daughter, yes, and if someone touched her or took pictures of her, I'd hunt him down. Nonetheless: there are ways to attack crime, and the current witch hunt on people who have kiddie porn on their computers is a mistake and it will eventually be seen as such.
I'm going to stop discussing this subject now but I will say one last thing: most of the 'science' in the public discussion on child porn comes from the police, and this is a party with a vested interest in depicting all child porn viewers as twisted criminals. The police are a large part of a public perception that is painting huge segments of the population as criminals. It makes no sense except when you are trying to "act tough on crime."
Ceci n'est pas une signature
I'll leave the discussion about whether or not possession of kiddie porn should be a crime for the other thread. I want to remark on the comment made that when someone came across some KP he immediately deleted his news group cache.
This is insufficient.
When the UK police (in Cambridgeshire at least) seize a computer they use a package called EnCase to pull data off the drive. This includes unallocated blocks of data that had previously held the images. These recovered blocks, in the absence of their filesystem metadata, still constitute evidence.
Deleting files is not enough. You need to scrub the data blocks.
Those who do not learn from Dilbert are doomed to repeat it.
You can't compare broken brakes with surfing the internet.
The situation is more like that you park your car in a foreign country. While you away, somebody opens your car and put drugs into a hidden place within the car. After that you drive home and pass the borders to your country. Later, another person will pick up the drugs. You will become a curier without knowing it.
It is realy hard, even for professionals, to harden a pc against attacks from the internet.
> There are lots of issues to consider here, firstly the daughter claim... his daughter may have had a vendetta against him because he molested her, or she knew that he was commiting acts against children and just wanted him to get what was coming to him. Who knows...
To be blunt, who cares? If she was molested, she should accuse him of that. If she has reason to believe he's molesting other children, let her present that evidence. Framing him for a crime he didn't commit is never right, even if he committed some other crime.
> also the other thing to consider (and i have some experience in this) when i was getting started in computers and did some stupid things (bruteforcing passwords from my own system), i always ran a copy of BO on my own pc, so i could blame "the evil hackers" if it came down to it. Possibly he was doing the same thing with much more sinister acts.
Sorry, but "possibly" doesn't do in a court of law. Sure it's possible he set up an alibi, but if there's not sufficient evidence that he did it's not the court's right to assume guilt. That's how "beyond a reasonable doubt" works.
Virg
> I can't comment on the virus thing because I'm still reeling from the statement "nobody died" in reference to child pornography.
Then stop reeling. The reference "nobody died" referred to a computer crashing because its owner is unfamiliar with its protection, and (as stated by the jury in the case) this guy didn't have a hand in making or distributing the porn, just as if someone had hidden it in his garage for someone else he didn't know to pick up. So, he's not responsible for it.
Virg
sorry, i just couldn't help thinking that the phrase "harvest porn" is not unlike "furniture porn" so couldn't help imagining combines in painfully silly poses.
OK, move along, nothing to see here...
ed
"those with pictures are statistically likely to go on to physical acts..."
Do you have figures to back up this claim?
In other news, people looking at gay porn tend to have gay sex, and people looking at straight porn tend to have straight sex. Scientists are shocked.
The statistical question is: "Would there be more or less people commit child abuse if child porn was freely available?" This decomposes into two questions:
A-1. How many current abusers would be sufficently satisfied with only looking at child porn, had it been easy available in great quantity (reducing abuse)?
A-2. How many people that otherwise wouldn't have abused children get so inspired by child porn that they choose to abuse children (increasing abuse)?
Note that there are two groups that are simply irrelevant to this question:
B-1. Those who would abuse children, porn or no porn
B-2. Those who wouldn't abuse children, porn or no porn.
Due to the
a) total inability to measure this (child abuse records show A-1 and B-1, child porn arrests don't really say anything because you don't know if they're abusers or not (could be any of the four categories), or how this affects the statistical likelyhood of being arrested and so on and so on).
b) the incentives to not answer truthfully (Me? Commit child abuse? Never! Never, I tell you!)
c) the inability to answer truthfully (no I wouldn't do that even if I looked at child porn... would I?)
I don't think we'll ever get a solid statistical answer to this question out of police records, censuses and other second-hand data. It would require an "Eye of God" view to get the real data.
And running a controlled experiment? Yeah right. For one it'd have to ensure that those that shouldn't have porn don't have it, which would require detailed personal surveilance. And at the same time, if they wanted to abuse children they'd have the opportunity to do so (and if they were abstaining from it because they were being surveilanced, the entire experiment is down the shitter. OTOH, if they knew they would get away with it for the same reason, it'd also wreck the correctness). Not to mention the idea of letting children knowingly be abused in the first place.
To summarize, you simply won't get a good statistical answer to this. Ever.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The standard Microsoft EULAs tend to protect the vendor from damages that result from using the software, but what about damages done to someone who never uses the software, and never agrees to a EULA? Could a group of people accused of collecting child porn because Microsoft Outlook users had their porn collections sent to others file a class action suit against Microsoft for damages caused by bugs in Outlook?
Because you left the door open and the keys in the ignition!
You have to wonder what operating system the poor sod ran. 95% chance it was MS? This actually is an extremely good story to show people the massive dangers of insecure operating systems, browsers, email clients... and to explain what alternatives exist. Or how to run windows update..
Of those to whom much is given, much is required.
Seems like the TCPA guys are right - there are some poeple to stupid to be root on their own machine. (Not that I would prefer Disney/M to be root on any) Maybe there should be some kind of secure OS for lusers. But who will administrate such systems? Preferably a knowledgable friend or relation. Which leaves the problem of those to pigheaded to ackknowledge this. Maybe we will fare better with a Palladium like system for the great unwashed. (providing it is done properly) and a obscure, hard to use but powerful (read: like early linux) for the savant. Doesnt`t sound perfect, anyone got a better idea? TCPA by the FSF?
-- Put crudely, the world is an extremely large problem instance. (Russel/Norvig Artificial Intelligence)
People post more pictures in one go on news groups than this.
This should not even have gone to trial. If there were say a 1000 or more pictures, now that would be a serious offence.
As you say, this computer was a mask!
Well... I do... but the analogy is not great either.
First lets at least mention that cars and buildings and whatnot are physical objects; rules applying to the usage and or operation of real world things will necessarily always have to differ from the responsibilities of manipulating abstract commands and data in computer memory.
In terms of licensing physical things we don't even fully cover the physical realm. Power boats, for instance, or Jet Skis, don't really require any sort of license whatsoever. They are powerful devices with combustion engines that can easily cause lots of damage and grief if misused, but any twerpy 16-year-old can cruise down to the beach and rent a Jet Ski with nothing but regular ID and his dad's credit card. (note: I'm in Canada, your legal may vary.)
As fir this,
why don't we have compulsory "basic operation" licsenses for computers?
Hey, great idea, but how in the hell are you going to enforce that? It's not impossible, but it may as well be in practical terms.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
While its true you cant ( currently ) kill anyone via poor computing habits, you can cause LOTS of monetary damage.
Similar to hitting someone's fence with your car ( to utilize a similar analogy ), no one died but you are responsible for damages.
But then again, even 'professionals' get hit every day with worms/viruii/crackers/etc.. so how can you draw a line of 'competency licensing' for regular people?
There are no easy answers here.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Use an old computer as a router if you have one lying around. Linux is GREAT for this.
Put a proxy on this router with a weird port e.g. 3128 and point it to an ISP's proxy. Also put a firewall on this router.
Connect to the router using ethernet, add a second network card if you need to.
On the computer you'll be using, put on a local firewall and block all programs except those you need to use. Point your browser at the router's proxy port [3128].
Simple!
They wrote the operating system which is riddled with security flaws that easily facilitate malware. This is GROSS NEGLIGENCE.
They wrote the email software which is riddled with security flaws that easily facilitate malware. This is GROSS NEGLIGENCE.
They wrote the web browser which is riddled with security flaws that easily facilitate malware. This is GROSS NEGLIGENCE.
I say three strikes.
Whenever a maker of products (vehicles, appliances, foods, cosmetics, medicines, whatever) are negligent in the design of a product, that causes harm to consumers, they get the holy crap sued out of them. Software makers should be no different.
I have pictures of naked asian ladies of legal age. They turn me on, but given a chance I would never actually have sex with an asian woman. My penis is way to large and my wife would kill me!
"A trojan horse has been forcing my machine to constantly go to Slashdot! It wasn't me! It also forced me to go to CNN, Salon, Tom's Hardware..."
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
You probably would have gotten this nice lady arrested and probably prosecuted.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
> So, using that as an example and considering how much more common computers are in every day life than cars (know anyone how hasn't driven in the past 12 months? Now, know anyone who hasn't touched a computer in any way shape or form in the same time period?), why don't we have compulsory "basic operation" licsenses for computers?
You need to get out of the area you live in a bit more if you think that computers are more common in everyday use than cars.
> Think about it this way; Truck drivers are forced to undergo rigerous driving training (in the form of logged experience and lessons from qualified staff) before they're allowed to sit for their license and operate the tool they use to make a living. Builders are required to undergo at least two years of apprenticeship plus TAFE (think community college) courses before they can build any type of large structure. People who pilot any form of marine vessel are required to sit a test and get their license before they can command a vessel capable of going over a certain speed/weighing more than a certain tonnage. Hell, even short-order *COOKS* are required to undergoe some form of food preperation and service training before most places will give them a job.
Um, in every single one of the cases you cite, the cost of failure can be fatal. Operating a computer that doesn't run fatally dangerous operations does not carry the same cost by a huge factor, and those who run computers that do run that level of risk (control systems in hospitals, aircraft guidance, and the nuclear power industry, for examples) are indeed licensed and trained for their work. You can't seriously consider that even something as awful as wiping out someone's life savings stands on the same level as killing them in a truck accident. This is apples-to-oranges comparison.
> And yet companies all across the world will hire someone into a position that required daily, extended user of office type computers at the drop of a hat. At best you can expect "Can you touch type? DO you know Microsoft Word?" Hell, even that's only mostly for secretaries!
If that's all the job requires, what's the motivation for demanding more? You can pay an IT person good money to protect your system from users who don't know more than touch typing, so why make everybody learn stuff they don't need to do their jobs?
> A basic computer competency test should be *compulsory* before anyone is allowed to purchase a computer.
Elitist drivel. You don't have the right to demand any given level of competence from anyone who can afford to own a computer. It's not your business. And no, not even when their system gets infected and attacks yours is it your business. When your lawn gets dandelions from upwind, do you cry out for people to be forced to get a lawn care license or not have one? Get real.
Let's go through your points one at a time:
> 1.) Basic hardware in a computer (stops the old "my cupholder is broken and the tv wont start!" support call when whats actually happened is that they've kicked out a cord at the back)
Basic hardware changes so fast that anyone who isn't actively using the knowledge will quickly have their knowledge turn obsolete. If you think not, then I ask, how many personal computers had CD-ROM drives, or any need for the term "gigabyte", only eight years ago?
> 2.) Basic use of word processing, database, presentation and spreadsheet software (by basic I mean VERY basic. "This is a spreadsheet. It does simple simple calculations, like so")
Why would someone who doesn't use these functions need to learn them? Spreadsheets aren't basic if I never need to use them. Presentation software? What does your short order cook or police officer or teenage gamer need with that? Get out of your boardroom and recognize that you don't have the right to define what's basic for everyone, and that "basic" needs aren't the same for everyone.
but a lot of that "kiddie porn" you'll run across on adult newsgroup is not kiddie porn at all. There are people who go to great lengths to find youngish looking adults to sell this lolita image.
Your best chance of finding actual kiddie porn accidentally is through the webcam newsgroups, as they aren't checked by anyone. No one checks your ID when you buy a Quickcam.
When I was about 14 I knew this kid who sold CDs with pictures/movies of 14/15 year olds, to others the same age... (No, I didn't buy one, even then I knew not to pay for porn...)
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
you are a willing participant.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
I hear their poetry is pretty awful.
-- My Weblog.
is a service that runs on top of windows rpc. That (ports 135-137) should have been blocked by your ISP! Why they are letting windows RPC traffic through to residential customers is beyond me. Don't tell me people are sharing their drives over the internet, because that's fucking retarded. Some broadband ISPs are such complete idiot farms.
The messenger service is actually useful if all the machines on your protected net are under your control. You can send popups to people in a controlled fashion without IM software. If a person is logged out, they'll get the message(s) the next time they log in.
But if he's the only machine on his connection, well that's not a big deal
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Probably the same stuff that was being smoked near any place shipping a unix operating system - remember "talk"? The internet used to be a much calmer place. (Actually, I haven't done a default install of any linux distro in ages - does redhat install talk-server by default?)
Now, had you added "in 2003" or "in this day and age" to your comment
What, your trojan can't send email to the cops itself? What's less traceable than that? ;-)
-- I avoid spam by accepting only OpenPGP encrypted or signed email at this address. Clear-signed, RFC2015, heck, even
[n/t]
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Someone with modpoints decided you were saying something with a herd like mentality.
Even Unix boxes get hacked occasionally.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
If users are 100% responsible for how their computers are used, they'll be more careful about what they install and make doubly sure that they are firewalled, patched and otherwise secured. If using Windows makes you more likely to go to jail for having an insecure box, it may make people want to use better alternatives.
I'm surprised they have time for anything other than busting folks for marijuana. Nothing fattens up a law enforment budget like an endless "drug war".
Wow, that's the only time I've seen that happen on slashdot :)
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Kids are being killed for porn pix? Prove it
Don't forget you can get this garbage via unsolicited email or web-page redirects/popups from a bad search or typo too.
So you don't even have to be compromised to have stuff on your pc you don't approve of, or even know about, or want, but could be illegal. Even non KP items.. such as 'hate propaganda' which is now illegal in several countries and gets you jail time.. or 'how to blow up your neighbor' which gets you jailed here in the US as a 'suspected terrorist'. Or 'supressed code'...
True most people just hit delete.. but its still on your drive in the 'trash' or in your 'cache/history'..
Does 'lack of intent' qualify as a defense? I hope so or we are ALL screwed..
Of course you cant claim that when you have 500mb on CD of the stuff, but for the average Joe I bet if you searched everyone's pc on the planet you will find a LOT of stuff no one knows they have or want..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
sniggly wrote: "....how to run windows update."
So how do you teach someone that the "intarweb" is a dangerous place to download stuff from and that you shouldn't trust automated programs that offer to install themselves for your convenience, then explain to them that it's ok if it's from Microsoft or from the Windows Update?
I can see that one being a defence in the future, which may see Microsoft end up in court defending itself against accusations that some over-zealous employee must have sent them kiddie porn in their latest update, or that the latest update actually opened a new vulnerability that allowed someone else to hack your computer and store kiddie porn there.
"My computer was secure until Microsoft auto-updated me, after that a trojan ended up on my machine and put kiddie porn there."
Interesting times ahead....
Quizo69
Visceral Psyche Films
Heck, sporks can be pretty dangerous too! A spork competency test should be compulsory before using such a potentialy dangerous tool. Said test should include the following areas:
Hmm... actually, we could solve all of this and have a slashdot moderating competency test. Basically, whenever some short-sighted elitist suggests an insane reduction of basic freedoms for absolutely no reason, a mod of "insightful" will result in instant failure. Yeah, I think that would do it.
"Question with boldness even the existence of a god." - Thomas Jefferson
Noone was "convinced". That isn't what's required. Reasonable Doubt is what's required to acquit.
First, a distinction. I see there being two kinds of possible abuse here: info-crimes, and general abuse. Info-crimes are those instances where possession of or trafficking in data is the crime. This includes copyright infringements, kiddie-porn, and other kinds of information that can get you in hot water just for having them (classified military documents, anyone?). General abuse is everything else that can be done with a computer and counts as abuse, such as DoSing, h4x0ring, spamming, online fraud, and so on. Freenet can facilitate info-crimes, but not general abuse (unless there is an exploitable bug in it, but that's true of every program). Viruses of the kind which infected the computer in the news article can facilitate general abuse, as well as info-crimes.
So, what if Freenet becomes the next big thing for kiddie-porn creeps? Well, I have no idea what (if anything) ought to be done about it, since info-crimes aren't exactly a clear cut case of right or wrong, in my opinion. So let's assume, for the sake of argument, that The Government decides the good points of Freenet are no excuse for allowing kiddie-porn creeps safe haven, then consider the following.
In the case of the virus-infected computer, the defendant was let off the hook because of a lack of culpability. Participation in Freenet, however, is voluntary. The info-cops could issue a public warning to the Freenet providers: get rid of the kiddie-porn, or we start making arrests. The Freenet architecture probably does not allow such simple selective removal of information (that's its goal, as I understand), so the participants can abandon the Freenet or face arrest.
It seems to me that Freenet is already providing a perfectly viable trail of accountability. Thus, it does not fall into my category of "systems which facilitate abuse by evading accountability". It may or may not facilitate abuse (depending on whether you consider "info-crimes" to be abuse), but I don't see a problem with accountability. If you wanted to evade accountability, you'd have to h4x0r someone else's computer and set up a Freenet node on it without their knowledge. At that point, we're back to the original "virus" scenario, really.
(My knowledge of Freenet is patchy at best, and I may have been wrong about its ability to hide the activity of downloading. I suspect that the info-cops would only go after Freenet node operators if the system were actually effective in making it hard to identify the people who were accessing the contraband material. The courts, I understand, tend to take a dim view of the obstruction of justice.)
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
"those with pictures are statistically likely to go on to physical acts..."
Why would I have pictures of something I wasn't interested in? Saying pictures will drive someone to commit an act they wouldn't have normally is irrational. I have pictures of naked woman because I like having sex with woman. I don't have pictures of naked kids because I have no desire to have sex with them. Am I going to download pictures of naked kids with the idea "Gee, I'll look at these until I get turned on by them?"
The point is the desire already exists that drives the person to get images for it, not the other way around (unless you are talking about propaganda which you are forced to watch repeatedly). Getting rid of kiddie porn isn't going to stop child molestation.
One more thing, the sexualization of children by advertisers is just as bad. If you go after kiddie porn you should also go after Abercrombie & Fitch, the makers of the thong for 12 year olds.
Pornography is not _intended_ to encourage anything. It is a material for consumption, and it satisfies an urge that most sexually active men have, namely for sexual variety and sexual stimulation. Not all men enjoy porn, not all women find it silly, but in general it's a man thing.
Why do some men like watching rape videos? Maybe because they are unable to feel comfortable with women in normal situations, and rape seems to be one in which the man is totally in control. Does watching a rape video make men into rapists? That is a ridiculous idea. Men rape pretty much as a matter of course in certain situations: wars, conflicts, wherever moral society is damaged and women are unprotected. Rape videos may depict such settings, but they no more encourage rape than a gun-filled action film encourages violence. Sure, it feels nice to imagine that you could just shoot that punk who robbed your car. Hmmm... does that make you a criminal? Decidely not.
Child pornography seems to fall into the same patterns as other kinds of extreme porn: it appeals to men, mainly, and men who have trouble acting as adults in a complex society. Children - like women in wars - are easy victims and clearly need protection from what is a pure crime.
But depictions of crime, graphic or not, are not the same as the crime itself, and while the make feels 'right', it is not logical nor sustainable.
Your example of gay porn is a good one. Do you imagine for a second that watching gay porn will entice a straight man to go to a gay bar? It does not seem plausible. Similarly, men who seek out and victimise children are not stimulated nor encouraged by kiddie porn, and looking at computer hard disks is a poor way to try to find them.
Instead, go to the places where children mix with adult men who are not their relatives, and you will find that this is where paedophiles also go.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Fortunately, not all countries are still in the Middle Ages, like the UK and the US apparently are. Posession (and downloading) of child porn is safe in most countries, as it should be, because punishing something that is so close to thinkcrime sucks.
No harm is done by downloading child porn, therefore the downloader should not be guilty. Creators of child porn should be punished, but not the viewers. Child porn IS free speech. You may find it appalling, but do I need to remind you that some countries find Satanic Verses appalling. If you impose limits on speech, it is no longer free.
P.S. I am happy to live in a country where I no longer have to fear a sudden night visit by the secret police, no matter how many bomb plans, Party criticisms and child porn images I have on my computer. And let me tell you, my British and American friends, it feels really nice.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
The reason so many computers are so insecure is that most computer users are completely unqualified. But the solution isn't to legislate them off the net. I think computer vendors should administer a test, and if you pass, you get a discount.
When you get auto insurance, they offer to give you a video and CD-ROM (Windows, ugh) training course, and if you pass it, you get lower premiums. Dell could do this: after all, competent users cost them less in tech support time. So all of us nerds would get cheaper hardware, and everyone else would have an incentive to learn the basics of computer use and security.
Litigious bastards
Ever hear of a virus? .. .they are easy to catch, requires little 'cracking' ( hacking isn't the right term ) skills, and can cause LOTS of monetary damage.
.. )
We got hit here with the slammer worm due to an outsider's HOME pc and we lost countless man hours to clean it up. Real hard dollars.. It would have been worse if the worm also deleted data..
Previously a place I worked for got hit with the ' I love you' virus.. and while my users were protected, many other divisions weren't.. again many man hours of time lost..
Some viruii delete files... and propagate from unsuspecting HOME users.. again concrete damages that can be caused.
Cutting the brake lines is a bad example, you ARE responsible for the upkeep of your vehicle.. so the lines being cut would most likely fall under that same umbrella, as that would be noticeable from the instant you started the car. So would be low tires, or a bad connecting rod, leaking gas tank, etc..... You are responsible for making sure your car is safe before you leave your drive way.. ( legally anyway. I realize few of us really do that in reality.. ). The only true exception is in manufactures defects where you cant tell..
That being said, my post DID mention I don't know where to draw the line.. as its not an easy answer.. just that your pc can cause monetary damage, and perhaps loss of life ( such as a DDOS attack on a hospital thru their unsecured firewall for example --- yes its far fetched - but just an example, so don't rip that to shreds
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This is not a case of corporate accounting fraud, whre the CFO and CEO claim that they "didn't know". We're talking about some of the cleverest programmers on one side working to fool the cleverest programmers on the other side. And caught in the spokes are innocent people like my 7 year-old who is trying to research ladybugs or my folks who are in their 70's struggling to grasp the intracacies of e-mail (yes, 12:00 still blinking on the vcr). Most people don't have a clue about the computers they use. If they did, there would not be the need for company windoze and wacintosh "experts".
The fact that witch-hunts like happen doesn't surprise me at all. What does surprise me is that people who should understand the level of complexity of this problem and its intractability, and who consider themselves geeks and experts would presume that the the non-geeks and non-experts would solve such a problem, or "know" even how to find such a problem, that the geeks and experts cannot themselves do without considerable frustration and effort. And whatever "solutions" are found are always ex post facto, which means the crimes have already occured. It takes a special kind of stupidity to believe that crime can be preempted.
The most bone-chilling aspect to all of these "war-against-what-not" laws is their cornerstone: the Presumption of Guilt. When someone who is clearly innocent, or even probably innocent, or even on-an-outside-chance innocent, have to fight to get their lives back, the "laws" are most certainly worse than the "crimes". True offenders will eventually be found out without having to destroy lives of innocent people.
But, if we are to presume guilt, why not simply jail everyone from birth until the prove that they will never violate laws of any kind. With some 150,000 pages to the US Code of Federal Regulations, alone, never mid state and local laws, international laws, and federal, state and local laws of the other 235-odd countries, should be no problem at all. Once everyone gets those memorized, we can teach them all about interpretation and selective enforcement, and then we can realize the dream of "killing all the lawyers."
"Difficult times hard to deal with" and "anguish of nations not knowing the way out" is how the Christian Bile describes the 'end times'. Sounds like the 'end times' to me.
You are absolutely correct to state that child porn is not a "victimless crime". This was never the statement.
Child pornography is an illicit thing, as bad an item as was ever fabricated by the hands of an immoral person. No discussion on that issue.
But: we live in an age in which no walls can contain digital materials. No digital image, text, video, or recording can be kept locked up. What this means is that a vast number of people will inevitably find themselves looking at, possibly even collecting, child pornography for reasons more to do with curiosity than vice.
I don't disagree that there are many people out there who should be put behind bars because they represent a real danger to children.
But I don't think it's a sustainable argument to make that child porn on your PC makes you a danger to children. I know this is a lie, and it's one being pushed by law enforcement bodies because it gives them easy targets who don't fight back. The current harsh public views on child molestation makes it all to easy.
It is a witch hunt. And while witch hunts may indeed find the occasional witch, they take the lives of innocents with them.
Is it not a basis of our system of justice that it is worth allowing ten criminals to go free to avoid that one innocent person be wrongly imprisoned? That the state must shoulder the burden of evidence?
Today, simply being publically accused of having child porn on your PC is enough to ruin your life.
It is a sad story, and time will show it to be a failure and a farce.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
'Round about the time of the nasty SQL bug (which also took down this machine, the poor lass) we discovered exactly why the machine was running... not slow, just funky. (Note, this girl is not a computer expert.)
... It was strangely difficult to find a number *to* call. Finally getting ahold of a real person, we told her that we had found several megabytes worth of child pornography on one of our home computers -- that none of us had downloaded.
We found, hidden in our files, a program called "Binary Boy" and a Trojan (Not sure which - the house sysadmin found it) and several megs of both child pornography and weird german mpgs. This caused a great deal of strife for us - we did not know what to do at that point.
We actually called the FBI, ourselves, after a day or so of deliberation.
She politely told us that the FBI doesn't just investigate things like that. There was nothing she could do, and there was probably nothing we could do. She gave us another number to call - it ended in an automatic answering service, with no live person to speak with. I was not about to leave this information on an answering machine. So I hung up. We formatted the hard drive and put Icepack linux on it, which we were all curious about.
I wonder what the file on me says....
Actually, I haven't done a default install of any linux distro in ages - does redhat install talk-server by default?
I think Red Hat now comes with "drool proof" security settings (low, medium, and high--pretty funny, IMO).
OpenBSD is solid in the default install. If you want talk, you have to turn it on. A wise computer geek would grab one of the BSDs and put it on a separate box between the broadband connection and the PC. Firewalling really isn't that hard to set up (OpenBSD's man pages are quite good, BTW).
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
"Should have known..." means something different than you think.
He should have known something was wrong with his system when the home page of his browser changed without warning, when the system was active when nobody was around, etc.
And he did know, he repeatedly attempted to restore the system. He should have known those attempts were unsuccessful, and he did, but nobody could give him instructions on how to fix the problem.
But should he have known that there were almost 200 kiddie porn images on his machine? No. Why should he know to check the machine for these images? Why should he even know how to run Windows' equivalent of "find" to look for those images? What if the images were marked 'hidden,' or the directories they were in?
"Should have known" should only be applied in cases of willful neglect, not just cases where the information is knowable if the person had sufficient technical skills and time to investigate.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
As a victim of childhood molestation, let me tell all you something.
This scars a person for LIFE!!!
There has been no end to my suffering and mental
anguish. I cannot forget, and all the drugs or therapy still cannot
diminish the terrible impact on my life and those around me. Anyone who says
otherwise in an idiot.
DEATH TO ALL CHILD PORNOGRAPHERS!!!
What next, a virus that copies pix of Osama to your p/c and sends out messages that are sure to interest carnivore ? Wait a minute ! that might be a way to fight back against big brother's surveillance ... flood the net with false positives using a virus ! Bill Gates might be on our side after all ;-)
i was just wondering about this . . . is it illegal for, say, a 15 year old boy to look at naked pictures of a 15 year old girl?? I'm not sure how the "underage" thing works if both parties are underage . . .?
The equivalent would be (IMO) not only shipping with the talk server installed by default, compiled without TCP wrappers, and already enabled in inetd/xinetd listening for incoming connections on port 517, and talking to your window server. I can't speak for Linux, but I can tell you that Mac OS X ships with ntalkd installed in /usr/libexec, but commented out in inetd.conf. It takes a conscious act by a user at least sophisticated enough how to edit a root-owned file to enable the service. On the other hand, all my cousin did was turn his computer on, an its default config in WinXP Home, he was running a similar service, open to the internet.
Actually there are certain accusations that almost certainly produce a "they're guilty" reaction from the public. Any crime involving children (porn, molestation, physical abuse, etc...) and wives being murdered (the husband "always did it") pretty much ruin the accused's life. Forever. That's powerful stuff... and damn scary. Simply by naming a suspect you can ruin their life.
Is it illegal for a minor to download sexual pictures of people his or her own age?
I'm just curious. I bet there are at least a few horny 13-year-olds who would rather look at people their own age.
ISP logs would only show what the computer had downloaded - not who initiated the download.
as users of porn the world over realise they will never be able to use the `virus' excuse with their OS.
Yes that's a better example as its more clear cut.. ( no pun intended ).. As even with a small leak you can tell something isn't right with the pressure and should investigate before you head down the road..
Here in my area at least, you would be liable to a certain extent, if your stolen car was used in a crime. Since you left it unlocked.
Same as if you had left you gun unsecured in the front seat, and it was used in a crime instead.
If you reasonably secure your car/gun/bat then you are ok.. If not, its considered 'contributory'.. True you would be held at a lesser percent then the actual perpetrator, but you will still be considered negligent and at partial fault.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I'm happy courts give leighway on arguments like this, even with the potential for abuse in mind. It's like the idea of pleading insanity, or temporary insanity. Most people don't like the idea because what they've seen on TV, but in actual statistics, as far as the US is concerned, the plea is rarely used and it's even more rare for it to be accepted.
Same idea with computers. While an insanity plea means you couldn't control your mind, the virus plea means you couldn't control your computer, and it's totally plausible. I just bought a new laptop and was browsing through some sites, being bombarded with pop-ups. I was going to click a button, but the pop-ups kept... well, popping up, and just as I went to click the button, a pop-up sprung up and I clicked yes on that instead. (This was before I could install Mozilla or anything else to get around that kind of situation.) Almost immediately, there was all this porn-ware and spyware installed on my machine. I used ad-aware and spybot but, still not satisfied with the clean-up job, just formatted and reinstalled. The average user would not have even heard of ad-aware or spybot or thing that it was that big of a deal.
Use the computer of a friend of yours who is an average computer user. Downloads music, checks e-mail, chats... that kind of thing. Run ad-aware or spybot on their computers. When I do this to help clean up friends computers and improve performance, the programs find something like a thousand files that are in suspicion. Sure, it'd be great if they could be more educated about the situation, but the education isn't readily avalible unless you're looking for it. To compare the use of a computer to driving a car is absurd. The system for licenses is very organized and infractions can clearly be observed, and then punished, as they're in public. You drive outside so it's relatively easy to make sure you're doing the right thing and even then, not everyone who doesn't signal as they change lanes or stop at red lights gets caught. Now image trying to apply such a thing to people while they're in the privacy of their own home.
A solution (maybe it's temporary) will be to hear these exceptions in court and I could only hope that further courts will follow such examples.
> However, your statement assumes that people believe kids when they accuse adults.
My statement assumed nothing of the sort. It didn't even address that issue. While I understand, and sympathize completely, your comment is irrelevant to mine. Framing someone for a crime they didn't commit is wrong, in all cases. Fairness and justice for crimes already committed do not figure into the equation. Yes, it sucks, but that solution is not a solution.
Virg
the real problem is that while something like a car or a hammer or something similar the device is passive unless used by the user. a pc on the otehr hand is very mutch able to work without hte user being present, you can set it to download stuff while you are at work, school or for otehr reasons away (most download managers allow for this). and how many "normal" users know what goes on behind the desktop they keep looking at? hell even with DOS one had stuff that while appeared dead was running in the background to handle stuff like sound and similar... so the real problem with the modern pc is that it is able to multitask, and do so most of the time without telling the user what prosees are running... the only way to secure a systme like that is to remove all scripting languages from stuff like wordprosessors, email systems and anything else and run every program from read only systems (cd/dvd) basicly turning the pc into a console...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
You can already fine someone for proven financial loss due to damages, if you can prove that they were negligent in allowing the attack. We in the U.S. call those fines "damages", and they're pressed in civil court.
Virg
People who are involved in BDSM are generally not actually rapists and misogynists. If even simulated rape does not turn people into monsters, then how can you argue that child pornography is a catalyst for turning normal people into pedophiles?
This case tainted him forever. He'd lost his personal life, probably most of relatives turned away from him. It doesn't matter that he wasn't guilty. At least two types of crimes you can be accused and that will ruin your life whatever the outcome is. I mean peadophilia and rape. For many it will be enough that he was accused, no matter what was the decision of court. It's worse than shit under your shoe...
On the other hand he should be grateful that case ended this way, if he would gone to prison - many `nice' people there would take `care of him'.
We have the same issue: our provider has all the cable customers in the subnet on a "hub", not a switched head-end, so I get all manner of broadcast packets slamming my connection. It is in the customers best interest to implement a firewall themselves; if they all did I wouldn't have the issue with chattiness on my connection.
it's better when the ISP blocks nothing. When they blocked 80 i got rreally pissed.
But, IMHO, there is zero reason to allow 135-137 anywhere past the first gateway. 1) The protocol isn't WAN tractable. 2) That is asking for huge trouble, and the default configurations are too open to ignore.
If in this case, it was other members of his subnet spamming him, then it just shows you have to be proactive if you don't want to get 0wn3d.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
and my moviez and warez too!
There's no place like ~/
Why is it that "a virus did it" is an acceptable excuse for a priest or some random guy downloading child pornography, and establishes some reasonable doubt, to the point where people often successfuly evade prosecution, not just conviction?
Maybe there's nothing wrong with the excuse - if it's true - but why can't the governments keep the same standard when investigating hacking incidents, etc. I find it annoying that a pedderass doesn't even get charged while I myself might one day be tried and convicted of someone jacking my box and using it as a anonymizer for their hacking activities. Especially since I may fit 'the profile' - whatever that might be. Of course, a priest fits the profile too! ARGH!
(I'm expressing frustration over several things at once, but basically, some priest in california had gigs of child porn on his computer, got caught, and is not going to be charged because 'there's not enough evidence'. My ass.)
Palladium will become their best solution to keep from getting caught.
Imagine a trusted network for ped's! All their content encrypted, from internet transit all the way down to the hard drive platters.
You apparently don't work in a large organization. Currently its not practical to 'just switch' over, regardless of what we want to think. Perhaps in a small shop that doesnt have legacy apps and doesnt have to corrdinate with anyone else.. but not a *real* business with a huge userbase.
,and more viurii written.
Furthermore, you don't blame a person that doesn't know there are alternatives ( i.e. , home end users ) because of the choice they make. A alternative choice, incidentally, that most likely WONT do what the need.. such as play the latest game, or get them onto AOL. These are the things home users need. Business users have other reasons its not practical.
At least for now. Perhaps eventually that will change as the alternatives become more viable. ( its a slow process.. but progress is being made )
The reason visuii don't exist in large amounts for other OS"s is that they are not the most common. People write vruii for windows both because of the perceived holes and larger user base.
Get a larger user base of other OS's and I guarantee there will be more holes discovered
I agree that the system level components may be more isolated, but that doesn't negate the potential of viruii to infect user files and propagate via their personal work.
Education will help tediously, but not going around and calling them stupid and refusing to care isn't going to help anyone.
And before you call me a MS troll, i personally dont use their prodiucts, and often move people to a unix solution WHEN IT MAKES SENSE FOR THE USER, but that is not as often of an option as you appear to beleive. I have also been forced to give up somethings due to this perosnal choce. While Im willing to do that, a user should not be EXPECTED to do so.
Grow up a little and look out side your bedroom...The world is much more complex then you realize.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
50.1%? But what if you only have 50.09%?
:) )
"Preponderance of the evidence" just means greater than 50%, or 50% plus an infinitestimal for math geeks in the audience.
(And yes, I'm obviously one of these math geeks, or else I wouldn't be posting this...
The line is where *reasonable* effort ends.. We could go on for years debating where the line is on thousands of examples, but it all boils down to what society feels is reasonable effort.
:)
In that example, locked doors are reasonable and accepted as protection, forgetting to set the alarm would not be considered negligent. Though it might reduce your insurance rates
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Remind me to shoot myself up full of trojans next time the RIAA rudely calls up and tells me they're comin over for an open house party.
"But the prosecutor in the case, David Sapieca, told the BBC: "We don't accept the conclusions of the defense expert report, but there were already other issues in the case regarding the history of the computer itself. We cannot show that Mr. Green downloaded the images on to the computer, so the Crown reluctantly offer no evidence in this case."
Despite having no evidence to support his claims, the prosecutor does not accept the conclusion of not guilty?
Gee, and here I had thought that a prosecutor of all people would understand the merits of aligning one's beliefs with the available evidence.
.sig Realistic fines for copyright in
Do you think that the guy would have been able to get away with it if he was running Linux, or another open source platform? Though there certainly are binaries out there for Linux, it's generally assumed that Linux users tend to stay toward open source software. So all in all, do you think the courts would accept such an excuse from someone using Linux?
http://mediagoblin.org/
Frankly the pervert who sits in his house all day and all night getting off on kiddie porn is much less of a worry to me than the pervert who molests his neice and other kids.
This reminds me of the Kobe Bryanent case and the current rape laws: currently if a woman decides she didn't want to have sex, even after agreeing to have sex and the act has already accured, she can legally cry "rape" and the man could spend life in prison. That's incredibly stupid in my opinion, just like current kiddie porn laws.
Don't get me wrong, both kiddie porn and rape are horrible crimes, but I think the "time should fit the crime": don't give kiddie porn distributors more jail time than you would a murderer.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
You tell me where you've seen it, and I'll tell you what it means.
The most important part of computer security isn't keeping secret data IN your system, it's keeping incriminating evidence OUT of your system.
any with WOL or a bios that supports it. My old work dell used to turn itself on at 8am every weekday so it looked like i arrived early...
I don't know about the specifics in the case, but having witnessed about half of the computers at my previous place of employment suddenly have their homepage reset to some porn site, I can definitely believe it is possible.
And by the insecure OS/clueless person line of reasoning, if somebody were to break into your home through the window, it would be your fault, as your home was not impregnable.
fuck you.
...even tho it's offtopic.
.
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
Obviously, child pornography is a very emotive subject, and it is one about which I feel particularly strongly. At the moment, I am working with a non-profit organization dedicated to hunting down those who use the Internet to exploit children. I am also co-authoring a book on the subject. Because this is a subject I feel so strongly about, this is likely to be an extremely long post. For that, I apologize in advance.
Our organization has worked very closely with law enforcement on several high profile cases, so it doesn't surprise me that there are so many popular misconceptions about the scale of the problem and the ability of law enforcement to deal with this crime. First of all, I think there are many misconceptions about the true nature of the child abuse images that are proliferating the web. Illegal child abuse material is so prevalent on the web that neither prosecutors nor organizations such as ours are concerned with "teen" pornography where the age of the models featured is ambiguous. The vast majority of child abuse material available on the web involves prepubescent children, and in many cases infants. Under U.S. law, a prosecutor has to convince judge and jury that the defendant not only knowingly obtained the images, but that he/she knew that the models featured in those images were under 18 (16 under many state child pornography statutes). That is an important distinction. If there is any reasonable doubt regarding the defendant's knowledge of either of these facts, it is common for prosecutors to either reduce the charges or drop them entirely in order to avoid an acquittal. This rule was cemented in 2002, when the Supreme Court struck down two portions of the Child Pornography Prevention Act as unconstitutional; namely the sections that criminalized images that "appear to" feature children. In other words, the evidentiary burden is on the government to prove that illegal images feature real children---as opposed to morphed or virtual images---and that the children were actually underage when the images were made.
From the perspective of law enforcement, they are completely outgunned and ill-equipped to deal with this scourge. According to U.S. Customs, there are more than 10,000 known websites containing images of child abuse. However, this number is difficult to quantify, given that many illegal websites change URLs every few hours or days, and many more are hidden behind layers of security designed to keep out the prying eyes of law enforcement. Anecdotal evidence provided by investigators familiar with this issue suggest that the true number of illegal websites is closer to 100,000. Of the known websites catalogued by federal authorities, more than half are based in the United States.
The frequency of media reports concerning child pornography arrests suggests that law enforcement is creating a huge dent in the "market". In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. We've all read and heard about "Operation Avalanche", the investigation that led to the arrest of Pete Townshend. Avalanche began with the 1999 investigation into a Texas-based Adult Verification Service called Landslide Productions, which provided subscriber access to a variety of adult and child porn websites. The vast majority of Landslide's profits were derived from child pornography subscriptions ($1.3 million in a single month). When authorities raided the business premises of Landslide, they discovered a subscriber list of 275,000 individuals who had used their credit cards to access illegal sites (the real number of subscribers was considerably higher, but this statistic discounts those who merely accessed legal adult pornography). This number gives you some idea of the scale of the problem, bearing in mind that internet usage is considerably more widespread now than it was in 1999. Of those subscribers, it is reported that barely 200 have been arrested in the United States, for reasons I will explain in due course.
At the time of writing, federal authorities are winding up an almost identica
http://www.spywareinfo.com/articles/hijacked/
Only on
You need to grow up a bit, and I really don't believe you manage anything beyond 5 users, if that.. ( I suspect you are just some snotnosed kid still in high school )
When you do, you will see what the real world is like, not all can 'convert' due to hard limitations as you would like to believe. Someday, but today switching for MOST people is not a realistic option.
End of discussion. Its not worth continuing.
And I guarantee I'm older with a lot more experience then you will ever have in your lifetime. ever hear of a 3270? Well I predate that, child.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"You can't look at porn on the Internet for very long before you ask yourself one simple question: What the hell is wrong with Japanese people?" --Me
is responsible.
-m
I was coding COBOL on the big iron when you were still in diapers. So don't wave 'programmer' around like it means something.
Any fool can produce code.. it only takes patience, nothing more. So calling yourself a 'programmer' doesn't impress me at all.
I have years ago moved on to something that actually takes some thought. And no, not some "MS Admin" as you were suspecting.
*Now* you can call this thread a troll, not the initial statements I made about alternatives not yet being 'prime-time', however this last thread qualifies as you are a total idiot and im responding as such.
However I'm done with you, as this is getting nowhere, and just wasting my time which apparently is a bit more valuable then yours.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
is that while systems like winxp and win2k enable one to use the computer with a very restricted account (not installing new software, not being able to access other files then his own) there are still a lot of computers out there that are running win9x/me that run both the user and everything esle with the same accesslevel, and they are most likely not being updated with the latest security fixes... sure this can be blaimed on not using systems like microsoft update but the fact is that if there is something fundamentaly flawed with say a car or a dishwasher that is not wear and tear but from design then the corp makeing them would recall the product and either give the people that have allready bought it either a refund or new hardware with the same rules around it. and if a item like this breaks down then you dont fix it yourself (unlike your the mr. fixit kind of person), you tak it to the local repair shop/garage and let someone else take a look. now on a item like a dishwasher you have a defined are of work, its suppoe to clean you dishes. but when you look at a pc it can play music or video, you can play games on it, write letters and emails, use it like a phone or a fox machine and so on. the problem is that with all it will take a mutch longer time before someone gets so mad at the computer that he delivers it to the repair man. and while the pc is doing all this it can allso perform stuff in the background that it never tells the owner of... i compare this to someone putting a bomb into someones car and rigged it so that it will blow up after the person have driven so and so far or into this defined area by gps or other means of posision detection and then it will blow up. the perfect scapegoat as everyone will think he was a terrorist or something... the fact is that microsoft and other companys have made the pc users very used to strange behavior and faulty products. and it does not help that the internet explorer is able to install tons of dialers and whatsnot in the background without telling a soul whats going on...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
My girlfriend is 23 years old, but looks like a 14-16 years teen. I'm 26; still, some people think that I have 17 years.
What if we take pictures of each other naked and for any reason they end on the net. Sould someone get convicted for having pictures of naked adults that look more younger than they really are?
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
A law that criminalizes simple possession of anything has no right to exist. No exceptions.
This generation is hopeless. Educate your children.
What bothers me is that even with computers arguably being so damn easy to use and learn, is that nobody has the slightest inclination to even want to try to understand what's going on when you do something on one. Even if it makes their job easier, or just by retaining the information that others try and impart during training or everyday use.
:(
When I'm helping someone I usually try to impart just a little bit of the underlying theory (ie:what's going on) behind the software and %95 of the time I get blank looks and responses like, "Oh, I'm just not a computer person" (which means they don't even try.), even when I speak without using any acronyms, technical terms, or overly qualifying everything - which I've found just usually confuses people even more. (Sure, you can do just about anything with software (eventually) on descent hardware, the only problem is the time and investment required)
The scary part is, for the %5 of those that actually give a crap and listen or want to learn something, they usually tell me that I've got an amazing knack for explaining technical matters and that they've never understood even when they've had it gone over a few times before.
It's like computers are almost taking on religious overtones - people just take it on faith that they are crashy/insecure (MS), are hard to use (unix/linux/anything text mode), and so they don't even try.
why?
In a criminal case, proof is supposed to be beyond a reasonable doubt. So, the fact that a trojan could have reasonably been responsable is enough to generate reasonable doubt. In a civil case, it is just whoever argues theri case better. There can still be doubt but they can still win.
Its a friggin appliance! What next? Ummm sorry mister, you bought this vcr over a week ago and it still has a blinking 12:00. We are going to have to cite you and take away your equiptment.
Hey if they want to spend a $1000 on something and not figure out how to use it fine. That's there business. I have a $500 remote controlled airplane I am in the same boat with.
As for companies, if you work for a company that hires stupid people then quit. Go work somewhere else... Making the whole country take a test so that you are not inconvienced is not a solution.
If your that angry at the users you support then maybe you should switch jobs! Either that or try to teach the users something instead of bitching about em.
Hey, your not that Nick the computer guy from Saturday night live are you?