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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?
Here
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.
As a former abuse admin at an ISP, I actually find his story pretty plausible. It's been common for a couple of years now for Outlook/Outlook Express worms to have their own SMTP engine for propagating themselves. "Special viewers" from "free" pr0n sites that disconnect a dialup connection and dial back to a 900 number or similar in an offshore location have been around since the early days of the commercial Internet. They're apparently a huge problem in Japan, because Japanese long distance companies were for a long time (and could still be) including warnings about that scam along with their bills.
There are countless varieties of peer-to-peer networking programs out there. Lots of spyware, too.
In other words, all the technology to create a worm that will, upon installing itself, set up to dial the Internet, harvest child pornography, and make it available to other zombies with the same program, is already on the shelf. All some sicko has to do is assemble it and release it in the wild. I find it entirely plausible that someone already has. Very disturbing, but plausible.
Didn't know that they did computer forensic work as well. Sensible, considering their other talents.
Help children born unable to swallow - www.tofs.org.uk
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
Finally, do you really think that there is a 'wrong button' out there that will dl large numbers of images on to your machine? If so, imo, you're some kind of fool.
You're an idiot. I've downloaded tons of kiddie pr0n by accident because some fucker mislabels his posts, or posts to newsgroups meant strictly for over 18 models. You never know what it is till you download it these days. Not to mention the dickheads on P2P networks who get their jollies by mislabeling anything from trojans to viruses to child / animal porno as something somebody would actually download.
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Being a close friend of the the man's son, Alex Green, I can attest that his story is true - but there is more to it than that. Mr Green's older daughter (14 at the time, I think) had a vendetta against him for several years. She was the one who reported it to the police, and most of the Green family believe she put the porn on there to incriminate him. Of course Mr Green wouldn't testify against his own daughter, although he doesn't consider her a daughter any more...
"Studies have shown that people who eat peanuts live longer than those who do not eat."
Unfortunately those who should know about computers don't. Former CIA head John Deutch was found to be using his non-secured home PC to store sensitive government files, despite the fact that the CIA set him up with a secured PC at home. This is the former freakin' head of state intelligence for the US. He probably isn't a total idiot, but his lack of computer savvy extends to most of the population.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.