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

Because everyone knows

[L.Bob.Rife]

That hackers would never think to forge a browser agent tag.

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

[ActionJesus]

Up here in Scotland, we have our own paper money. Although its legal throughout the UK, a lot of english shopkeeps will give you funny looks if you give them a scottish fiver.

However, wheres fivers and the like merely look different, apparently the english dont have a paper £1 note (and we do, although they're much rarer these days).

How long until we get arrested for paying for something with "funny money"? Remember, every time you use a non-standard currency, your funding terrorists!

Re:I don't believe it

[gnuorder]

I'm sure there could be more to the story, like perhaps there were repeated log entries as if he had lynx in a script loop to do something as innocent as collect donation totals or something evil like password guessing. I wouldn't put it past the police/judges in any country of being largely ignorant of what a browser agent really means. It wouldn't take them much convincing to go busting down doors. The suspicious part of the story is the sysadmin thinking something odd with the user agent of just that one person and calling the authorities. Looking at the logs from fairly small web sites you are lible to see all sorts of odd user agents. If something did stick out, I would think a sysadmin's first step would be to do a google search.

Just tried it out...

[ArsenneLupin]

Just made a small donation to the DEC site, using lynx.

Now let's wait and see what will happen next...

If lots of people do the same:

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

comon everyone, use lynx to go to bt.com

[cheekyboy]

I just tried lynx to go to their donation form

https://www.donate.bt.com/bt_form.htm

via http://www.bt.com/index.jsp

So I hope everyone does it and makes BT see 100000x increase in LYNX usage

So this is what you get when you hire A+ grads from 'prestigeous' institutions.

So everyone, fire up lynx, lets make em look even dumber.

Re:Thank God for people....

[Stephen Samuel]

Sometimes they have complete idiots reading the logs.

Back when the nimda worm was running around, I wrote a home-grown IDS to watch web hits, identify nimda-type probes and, if I could find a reporting address for the offending IP email a complaint off to the responsible ISP.

We were being serviced by Shaw Cable at the time, and every once in a while, they'd misread my complaints, and figure that my box was the source of the attack, and they'd send a nasty email to my roommate (who the connection was registered to) threatening to cut off our internet if we didn't delete the viruses install a firewall, etc. (we each had our own BSD firewall).

I got to know one of the supervisors there reasonably well, modified the letter I sent out to make it all but impossible for the people who read the email to confuse the attacking box with the defender, and he even added a note to the file for our connection, which resulted in a period of quiet after which we got yet another threatening letter.

I responded with this letter. My roommate (who took this very seriously because he was paying business rates to be allowed to run servers on the line) thought that I was being a bit flippant about something so important (flippant?! It took me an hour to write the damn thing!), but the supervisor at shaw said that he got a bit of a chuckle out of it when he phoned me to apologize for the error and promise a fix. His explanation was that shaw had installed a new abuse reporting system and that the note about our account had been lost in the transition (but would be added back in).

If you read my letter, (which includes the original autocomplaint) then you'll understand just how far people are willing to go to misread log files.

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

[andynz]

There was a story late last year about an elderly couple who tried to use a Scottish £20 note in woolworths. Not only did they not accept it, they called the police and held them there.

I have recently moved to Scotland, and think that the scottish money is awesome. I particularly like the latin motto on the pound coin, "NEMO ME IMPUNE LACESSIT", translates to "no-one provokes me with impunity". That is just so Scottish.

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

[displaced80]

Some eagle-eyed cashier is a local newsagent rejected a 20 pence piece I tried to pay with, and I had no idea why.

Turned out it was a Gibraltan coin. Basically identical to regular 20p. However, there's an image of (who I presume to be) the enthroned Queen, staff in hand, on the reverse. The text around the picture reads "Our Lady Europa - Gibraltar".

A really, really beautiful coin. Glad it got turned down so I could keep it I suppose!

It's geeky, but sometimes the artistry in currency design is pretty amazing. Some of the British banknotes are really fantastic. I'm not particularly opposed to the Euro, but it's a shame that the banknotes are a unified design (bridges & windows... the modernity of which increases as the value of the note increases). On the other hand, some of the national designs on the reverse of the coins are interesting.

Kinda weird to think how long these things stay in circulation... I've got a penny piece from 1978 in my pocket.

Re:Thank God for people....

[skahshah]

I think they have complete idiots reading not only the logs, but the mail too. Or maybe idiots who don't read at all :

One day I couldn't access to many sites I'm used to visit, I did some traceroute and found 2 nodes down, 1 in NY, another in South California. I wrote to the companies. The first one answered within an hour, saying they hadn't found any problem (it was working again), the second never answered, but the server was up within an hour too.

I had sent a third mail to my ISP, before anything had been fixed, explaining the problem, with the same traceroute attached, saying that I knew they hadn't anything to do with it, but that it could be useful to know, with the precision that I was running Mozilla on FreeBSD, and personnally hadn't any problem.

Two days later I received a mail explaining that I had a bad configuration and had to check some option (forgot what it was) in Internet Explorer !

Banned for using DOS

[Aliks]

Completely off topic I know, but a couple of years ago my 11 year old son was banned for a week from the school computer lab after being found using DOS.

Apparently the school authorities had decided that any type of command line smelt of hacking and subversive tendencies.

Re:And for good reason!

[DjReagan]

CSS support could work on a text browser by doing things like left and right alignment of text and justifying text. Making things bold or not. Possibly also setting the text colour if the terminal supports it.

Woz and the "$2 Bill Incindent"

[caveat]

Shameless Karma Whoring