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?

Comments

Reg Free Link

[FannyMinstrel]

Here

Re:From Star Tribune

[gujo-odori]

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.

Re:Virus?

[another_henry]

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...