Man Reportedly Jailed for Using Lynx

wezzul writes "A Londoner made a tsunami-relief donation using Lynx on Sun's Solaris operating system. The site operator decided that this 'unusual' event in the system log indicated a hack attempt, and the police broke down the donor's door and arrested him." Honestly, though, aside from a BBC article about a tsunami fund hacking probe that doesn't mention user agents there's little to corroborate this. Hopefully Lynx users need not worry too much yet.

Comments

And for good reason!

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats right; He shoulda been using "links" anyhow!

Where's the buggy-eyed smily when you need it?

[PreDefined]

What's next? Sometime in the near future: Man tries to buy chocolate bar with paper money! Shock! Horror! Maybe this is just a little too random but that's where my mind travelled to.

Re:Where's the buggy-eyed smily when you need it?

[Associate]

The problem with US$2 bills is that people are hording them. The banks and federal reserver have plenty. But people won't use them.

Re:Where's the buggy-eyed smily when you need it?

[maxwell demon]

Anyway the euro notes all look incredibly bland and boring.

You know, people like to get money even if it looks boring. There's no need to make money look interesting in order to get people interested in it. :-)

Re:Where's the buggy-eyed smily when you need it?

[Molt]

I must have been lucky when I bought my laptop then, the discussion over payment went pretty much like this:

"And how would you like to pay for this?"

"Do you accept anonymous white envelopes stuffed with cash?"

"That'll do nicely, Sir"

This was in one of the more reputable shops on London's Tottenham Court Road (Micro Anvika). Was impressed that not only did he not bat an eyelid, but he was actually able to make the funny.

Re:Where's the buggy-eyed smily when you need it?

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

You know, I have the same complaint about the gears in standard automobiles, whether they are automatic or manual transmission. They don't feel any different from one another at all... how does any blind person manage to drive?

WHY!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why oh why wasnt it "Man Reportedly Jailed for Using IE"

Re:WHY!

[Hoagy]

what about "Man Reportedly Jailed for Creating IE"

Thank God for people....

[Homology]

actually reading logs, now, if only they could understand them.

Bonus Browser

[orangeguru]

Lynx - the adventure browser ...

Man Reportedly Jailed for Using IE

[SpikyTux]

In an unrelated news, A Londoner made a tsunami-relief donation using Internet Explorer on Microsoft Windows operating system. The site operator decided that this usual event in the system log indicated the user has zero clue on how insecure Internet Explorer is, and the police broke down the donor's door and arrested him.

Technical in-joke

[Neo-Rio-101]

So the police saw "Lynx" and busted him? Just as well he didn't script a PERL WWW-lib useragent:-

#!/usr/bin/perl

use LWP::UserAgent;
$ua=LWP::UserAgent->new;
$ua->ag ent("I p0wnz j00 d00dz hax0r/v.10 rev. fuq2 ");

Did he file a bug report?

[node 3]

BUG 6397: "Save As..." dialog doesn't work properly under certa...
BUG 6398: Lynx unexpectedly quits when Japanese text is...
BUG 6399: When browsing tsunami relief site, users are arrested by the police...
BUG 6400: Choosing "cyan" for visited links causes all links to show up as cyan...

Re:Did he file a bug report?

[js7a]

Ha! "Works for me, can you attach a scan of your police report?"

What's that ?

[Liquid Len]

Hopefully Lynx users need not worry too much yet.
You mean the three of them ?

Re:What's that ?

[lachlan76]

You mean the three of them ?

Two of them now ;)

call an @ an @

[MorboNixon]

I'm sure it wasn't the fact that he used Lynx, but all the ascii child pr0n they found on his hard drive that prompted his arrest.

Probably a fake story but if it were true...

[Slashdot Insider]

Serves him right for not using a digitally signed and approved Internet! How could he trust Lynx?

Re:I had to use Lynx once

[Anonymous Coward]

Using Lynx is just plain wrong!!!

No, using Lynx is just plain text.

Another conspiracy by M$?

[Hido]

Whats the chances of his door being broken down if he was using Windows XP with IE instead of using lynx?

This just goes to show that in the long-run, the TCO for M$ products are a lot lower then using other alternatives. :)

The real headline...

[bani]

BT, astonished by having seen the first correctly formatted HTTP request ever in their logs, reported the incident to police.

"Nobody follows RFCs these days -- microsoft has firmly established that standards are there to be ignored. Anyone following the HTTP RFCs as strictly and to the exact letter as this individual did is obviously up to no good, so we reported the incident to police as an obvious terrorist act.".

I am so paranoid

[tearmeapart]

I am so paranoid that I use lynx.
I am even more paranoid that I use BSD. (Security is more important than speed, new developments, a friendly environment, etc.)
The paranoia continues because I use BSD's jail to secure lynx.

My command to open lynx:
'/usr/sbin/jail -U poor_england_guy /dev/null dummy233 192.168.2.233 "/usr/local/bin/lynx -disable_cookies -ssl-only -referrer='http://www.google.ca' -nocolor https://www.dec.org.uk/"'

So lets see:
1. You cannot save data about me because I disabled cookies.
2. You cannot see data that I receive or send because I use ssl.
3. You cannot use somekind of frame trick to send me to a site where I do not want to go.
4. You cannot use popups on me. Lynx does not exactly have any windows.
5. No frame tricks either. Lynx does not support frames.
6. If some hole is found in lynx, my automatic secure update (/usr/ports with freebsd) with fix it. It's secure and uses ssh2-like things, so it will take a few thousand/million years to get past that security.
7. Even a virus gets on the machine:
a. I can just restart lynx.
b. I boot off a CD. The filesystem is read-only. Really read-only.
c. Virii are unheard of on bsd.
d. I can switch to links or wget.

Conclusions:
1. I find it a good probability that this system admin saw the person's lynx setup (comparable to mine) and was extremely jealous. After a few minutes of being stuck on "hostname#", the system administrator just gave up and decided to sue this guy.
This jealousy is similar to SCO's jealous of Linux.

2. Everyone should switch to a similar setup. I am sure everyone would enjoy the interface, and some would especially enjoy the ASCII pr0n.

Re:Well I think JWZ put it best for Lynx users.

[Ober]

Lynx users might remember this from www.jwz.org

#
Greetings, Lynx users. There is a reason this page doesn't use ALT tags
on the images. The reason is that the bozos responsible for both MSIE
and Netscape Confusicator 4.0 decided that they would display the ALT
tags of images every time you move the mouse over them -- even if the
images are loaded, and even if they are not links. The ALT attribute
to the IMG tag is supposed to be used *instead of* the image, not *in
addition to* the image.

This looks absolutely terrible, so I don't use ALT tags any more in
self-defense.

If they wanted to implemented tooltips, they should have used the TITLE
attribute to the A tag. That's in the HTML 1.2 spec and everything.

I had to decide between making this page look good for the vast majority
of viewers, or making it be readable by the miniscule minority of you
stuck in the 70s. Those of you in the retro contingent lost. Sorry.
#

reference:

http://web.archive.org/web/20000303115840/http:/ /w ww.jwz.org/

Have Your Say via UA String Extension Mozilla

[new500]

. . .

Now, I am trying to think up something appropriately insulting of their intellect to write to their logs with the UA spoofer extensions in Mozilla.

Any suggestions? :-)

. . .

Re:Have Your Say via UA String Extension Mozilla

[SeaFox]

How about
'Mozilla/5.0 (Not Lynx/Do not arrest user) Gecko/20041107 Harmless/1.7.3'

Re:First Post - CowboyNeal called the cops

[Anonymous Cowherd X]

First post with Lynx!

And your last post here, you hax0r, you!

Re:I don't believe it

[koi88]

Police would never arrest someone just because of the browser he was using.

I hope you're right. The link provided in the article doesn't provide much information about the nature of the attack.

Searching on BBC for "lynx" shows that this browser is very popular in Britain, they even named a real animal after it.

mandatory script

[wooby]

cat /var/log/httpd/access.log | grep lynx > /dev/authorities

Purple Monkey Dishwasher

[astrosmash]

Dev Lead: "Hey! Monkey! What's this Lynx thing about?"
Web Monkey: "It's a web browser that old-school Unix hackers used to use."

-- later ---

Middle Manager: "Sir! An old hacker has comprimised our system!"
CTO: "Release the monkeys."

Re:No, *I* am Spartacus!

[minus9]

"When was the last time you purchased taylor made shoes? "

Who's this Taylor guy?

Re:I don't believe it

[slavemowgli]

I use lynx regularly, as do many others, any sysadmin who has never heard of it is inexperienced.

It must have been a windows sysadmin, then. But yeah, that probably is equivalent to "inexperienced", anyway.

Perhaps...

[TeknoHog]

..this is just a clever way of getting all the geeks to donate

</tinfoil>

Re:Wait a sec

[t_allardyce]

It occurs to me that they would have had his name and address from the donation, a break-down of communication would have gone something like this:

Log: Lynx - - 195.245.14.212
Windowz Admin: OMG WTF!?
Log: Lynx: Error 255 Is_not_IE
Windowz Admin: OMG WTF!? 0w3n3d? h4x0rd?
PHB: Whats all this then?
Windowz Admin: Hackers
Phone: Ring Ring, Ring Ring
Police: Metropolitan Police?
PHB: Hackers, Tsunami, Help!?
Police: Yes sir, the address?
PHB: The address?
Windowz Admin: [tap tap] 34 Solaris Road

Police: POLICE!
Lynx User: Okay?
Police: Down on the ground! down on the fucking ground!
Lynx User: Ahh? WTF? 0w3nd?
Police: 0w3nd h4x0r mother fucker.
Lynx User: Lawyer!
Lawyer: WTF?
Lynx User: Yes, WTF?
Judge: WTF is Lynx?
Lawyer: WTF is Solaris?
Expert: Shut up n00bs
Bail: Money
Lynx User: Poor
The Sun(tm): Hacker, lynch mob, page 3, Sun readers are tards.

BB: WTF?
Slashdot: WTF OMG?

Re:Just tried it out...

[Anonymous Coward]

# BT will get the message that there are still lots of people who use lynx
# more money for the tsunami victims :-)

You forgot one:
Police get lots of free hardware

Jailed for IE?

[digitalgimpus]

Jailed for IE? Why not?

It's insecure (your computer could be hijacked and used for malicious purposes)... national security risk.

Re:Stupidest mod ever

[ALpaca2500]

i hereby complain that this post that i made yesterday was modded up incorrectly. it is in no way interesting. hopefully i will be modded offtopic for bringing this up here, to balance it out.