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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."
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.
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.
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.
Striking fear in the authors of godawful fanfiction, I am here, appearing in darkness, Tuxedo Jack!
That would require some form of intellegence at the justice department.
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.
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.
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.
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!"
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
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)
What if this signature were clever?
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.
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
This reminds me of the saying "Nobody ever got fired for choosing Windows".
"No, but it did get someone registered as a sex offender."
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
what's the best way to get rid of this crap?
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.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
It's Pornzilla
The Best Porn Browser
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
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.
I use lynx for all my porn needs
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.
Life is not for the lazy.
Well the image rendering library is named libpr0n :)
Ok, here's what prolly happened:
- Dude with his drive in two partitions downloads a bunch of pr0n and stores it on
/dev/hda2 (or Windoze equivalent) - Porn-viewing dude decides to sell his computer on eBay.
- 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
- Nukes
/dev/hda2 partition and thinks "ok, it's gone now. I'm in the clear". - Sells it to "Jack"
- Jack gets his computer analyzed by the cops.
- Jack gets fucked by the system.
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
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.
I asked for a refund - and got my monkey back.
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
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.
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?
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
"Oh man, check out the META tags on her!"
Either that, or Ascii Pr0n NSFW
Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers.
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.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
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.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
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?"
This gets past the Mozilla/Firefox blocker by using target="_blank" which somehow bypasses it.
// disable target="_blank" (open in same window):d ow", true);
p s.html#beh_blank
Add the following to your user.js to stop it:
user_pref("browser.block.target_new_win
Stolen from Texturizer.net:
http://texturizer.net/firefox/ti
Here you go, buddy.
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.
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!!
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.
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.
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.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
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.
- I'd prefer not to.
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.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
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.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
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).
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
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.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
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.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
The guy should sue Amazon, they have the patent on that
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
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
A serious (and somewhat general, since you're here) question:
/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.
How much ignorance do/have you seen with regards to somewhat obscure computer knowledge such as browser caches (or tmp files, or
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
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
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.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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:
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.
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.
The journey is better then the end.
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".
Maybe we DID take the blue pill. You wouldn't remember anyway.
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:
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. HTHIt 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".)
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.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!