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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.
Thats right; He shoulda been using "links" anyhow!
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.
Why oh why wasnt it "Man Reportedly Jailed for Using IE"
actually reading logs, now, if only they could understand them.
Lynx - the adventure browser ...
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.
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...
Hopefully Lynx users need not worry too much yet.
You mean the three of them ?
Using Lynx is just plain wrong!!!
No, using Lynx is just plain text.
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 that I use lynx.
/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/"'
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
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.
Lynx users might remember this from www.jwz.org
/ /w ww.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:
First post with Lynx!
And your last post here, you hax0r, you!
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.
I don't need a signature.
How about
'Mozilla/5.0 (Not Lynx/Do not arrest user) Gecko/20041107 Harmless/1.7.3'
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."
ENDUT! HOCH HECH!
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?
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