Slashdot Mirror
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.
Just because he was using lynx does not mean he was not trying to break into the site.
While not fair by any means, to me this is clearly an example of one faction of the governments: Setting examples.
;]
I would speculate that the browser inadvertently sent some malformed HTTP POSTS or otherwise made some "usual" as in "unusual garbage posts to credit card processing engine" and spooked the sysadmin who had far to much time on his hand and the local police number on speed dial.
poor bastard..I bet if he was using linux this wouldn't have happend
We *so* need to name a 'Lynx' day in protest. Hit all your favorite sites with a text-based browser in a non-windows OS for one day.
Of course, with all the embedded Flash around, some sites will be totally inaccessible... which would maybe teach them a lesson about accessibility.
There is something more going on here than just using a different browser. Police would never arrest someone just because of the browser he was using. Was he trying to hack into the website? If he did that, then it is a crime and the police had the right to arrest and jail him (hopefully for a long time).
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
"Just because he eats apples doesn't mean he is not a child molester"
Where is the connection of the two? Parent puts some claim in the room, based on a connection which doesn't exist, and is modded up?
So far there is a single, mostly unknown, source for the portions of the story pertaining to Lynx. This is notable more for how opposite the Blogsphere and mainstream media positions are on the story. Currently, only the man arrested knows the real story and I have even seen a quote from him yet. We certainly haven't been exposed to any decent journalism yet.
imagine how many non-standard user agents will be showing up in bt's logs tomorrow.
I bet there's a ton of LWP requests hitting BT as we speak.
It seems the good thing is we're now getting uncorroborated news stories from sites called "Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things". The BBC article makes no mention of lynx user-agent lines as the culprit.
Can we up the bar a LITTLE?
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.
We are already at the point where making a large purchase with paper money is unusual.
About two years ago, I decided I wanted a dishwasher. I went down to my bank, took out some money, checked a few places, and finally paid for a small dishwasher in cash.
Had some extremely strange looks from the salesperson.
Avant is the equivalent of the scented beaks doctors were using during outbreaks of the Black Death in the middle ages ... sure, you might be lucky and not get the plague, but it had nothing to do with your fancy accessories.
oh come on. Get off your high horse and wonder how many donations you made to Sudan where over 2 MILLION people died in the last few years.
Yes, the tsunami is a disaster, but unfortnualtely there are many countries that are fare worse off. Just because you don't go there on holiday doesn't make it right to ignore it.
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
Yes, your own IP still shows up in the Received headers of the mail, but anybody who spots it there has to have at least a minimum of understanding how the network works (Microsoft Outlook (tm) doesn't show these headers by default)
Same reasoning as for change of address notices, really: if you inform some business that you changed addresses, make sure to never mention your old address (or at least not completely...), or else you can be sure that some drone will attempt to confuse old and new, and revert back the change that one of his colleagues already did...
There's an easy solution to that: just make more of them. When they're common enough, people will stop hording them since they don't have any novelty value anymore.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
urgh, yes unfortunnatly. All greem, and all the same size. How any blind people in the US manage with money I don't know!
Apparently someone thought it was funny HA HA. Not only do you have a browser that acts like Firefox but you've also have the added bonus that it could screw you over at any moment like IE.
Actually, there's nothing obliging them to accept them at all. Technically, they're not legal tender, and they're only accepted as such by convention, as far as I know.
Yeah; as far as I know, this is the truth.
And I used to get annoyed about the English not accepting Scottish banknotes; but later on I grew up and realised that since most English (or Welsh or people from Northern Ireland for that matter) wouldn't be familiar with Scottish notes, they would have trouble differentiating the real thing from fakes.
If *I* was running a business in England, I'd be quite happy to let my staff refuse Scottish banknotes if they weren't familiar with them, for that very reason. Pissed off customers could talk to me about it...
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
The reason for spreading the news about something like this is that whether it's true or false, more information may come to light about it. That's how something like the recent faked documents scandal in the U.S. was exposed - by bloggers who questioned CBS news, and who had or were able to discover more information.
IOW, you no longer have to sit back and suck your news from the BBC's tit, nor should you, unless that thin and sour milky substance is all you can handle.
But he was using Solaris. For some reason, 'lynx' is commonly installed on Solaris 8 & 9 systems, but not 'links'.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
"when you've never seen the real one before?"
Never seen a piece of your own currency issued from a bank less than two hundred miles away? As an American I have a hard time believing that.
Has the automobile not yet been introduced to the UK?
Why don't the bills circulate more? I've got in my wallet two American notes, (A $10 and a $5), If the serial numbers still run the way they used to then neither of them was issued by the nearest federal reserve bank; One of them was issued by the next one over, and one of them was issued halfway across the country!
Do people go out of their way to segregate the money?