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!

Re:And for good reason!

[Anonymous Coward]

Links is garbage, it doesn't use terminfo or even termcap, it just sends out Linux Console escape codes, no matter if the terminal supports it. Which a Wyse-50 or Wyse-30 doesn't, so everything is just garbage.

At least lynx works.

Re:And for good reason!

[grandmofftarkin]

I think you mean elinks. It has every thing Lynx and Links has plus a lot more. including Frames, tabs, basic javascript, some CSS support, etc. They are even in the process of adding bittorent support right into the browser. Best text-only browser going!

Re:And for good reason!

[CastrTroy]

The whole point of using links is that we don't want all that extra crap. How exactly does CSS work on a text browser anyway?

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.

Re:And for good reason!

[drsquare]

But that elinks isn't any good for us slackware users. It has debs and rpms for download, but no tgz packages, and no source code unless you have cvs set up. That seems very unreasonable, even the simplest of programs these days come with a simple source download or a non-distro-specific binary download.

I think it's a shame that writers of Linux apps generally assume that if you're not using Redhat/Mandrake then you want to compile the program from source.

Re:And for good reason!

[sepluv]

As far as I can see most visual CSS properties are applicable to the tty CSS media type (text-mode UAs).

That's why tty and screen both come under the visual group.

Re:And for good reason!

[lachlan76]

Unless you use the framebuffer.

Re:And for good reason!

[EnronHaliburton2004]

But he was using Solaris. For some reason, 'lynx' is commonly installed on Solaris 8 & 9 systems, but not 'links'.

Re:And for good reason!

[dorzak]

I think it's a shame that writers of Linux apps generally assume that if you're not using Redhat/Mandrake then you want to compile the program from source.

It is also sad that many Linux users believe that developers should have a machine, or at least hard drive partition for every Linux distro. Why not CONTRIBUTE to the project with non-distro specific binaries yourself, or binaries for your favorite distro.

NOTE:I like Slackware, and have provided binaries for it before, but I have heard this complaint too many times, for XYZ distro.

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?

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

[zebs]

Well the shop my girlfriend (yes I have one, and I read /.) no longer accepts your "funny money" simply because of the number of fraudulent scotish bank notes they have seen recently.

I can understand the problem though, how can you spot the difference between the fake and the real note when you've never seen the real one before?

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

[dasunt]

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.

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

[Drantin]

You've heard stories of the infamous $2 bills still floating around the US, haven't you?

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

[zebs]

With different designs on the coins theres still plenty of room for fake coins.

Anyway the euro notes all look incredibly bland and boring.

Would make life easier to have the same currancy though.

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

[despe666]

We have 2$ coins in Canada. 2$ bills too but they're pretty much collector's items by now. I bet we'll have 5$ coins soon.

I can imagine the face of a kid clerk getting handed a 2$ or even 1$ bill... ;-)

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?

[batemanm]

I find that it gets worse the further south you go. Some of the problem could come from that multiple banks are allowed to print money in Scotland so the fiver you got last week could look completely different from the fiver this week which is a little confusing if your not used ot it. I can understand why shopkeepers could want to steer clear of that.

There used to be an English £1 note but it was phased out sometime in the 80s.

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?

[ray-auch]

In the UK (and probably accross the EU) large cash transactions are unusual partly because they already come under the money-laundering regulations.

See quote below (from here).

Generally, dealers must make a "suspicious activity report" to NCIS on any cash transaction of more than 15,000 euros (about £10,000) - although smaller transactions must also be reported if they arouse any suspicions.

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

[hawthorne]

I take great pleasure in collecting as many £1 notes as I can whenever I'm in Scotland - and then using them sparingly (one per transaction) back in England.

Most cashiers realise that they should accept them, but then have to try to work out what to do with the note - there's nowhere in the cash register for it to go.

Maybe I'm just evil!

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?

[rpjs]

Although its legal throughout the UK

Um, not exactly. According to this Wikipedia article Scottish banknotes aren't even legal tender in Scotland!

"Legal tender" is a bit of misleading concept though in that it only really applies to the settlement of debts - i.e if you owe somebody and pay them in legal tender they have to accept that payment, but they don't have to accept payment by other means. It's worth noting that buying something in a shop does not constitute settling a debt as you pay before you receive legal title to the goods, so "legal tender" does not apply.

Ultimately you can pay for anything with anything if the other party agrees. Shops in Scotland will of course accept Scottish banknotes because they're familiar with them and trust the Scottish banks to back them. Many shops in England will similarly accept Scottish banknotes for the same reasons. Some shops in England and Scotland will take Euro notes, and a few at airports US dollars and other currencies. You're unlikely to find a shop that will accept Bhutanese Ngultrum, say, though I suppose it's possible if the shopkeeper happens to be about to go on holiday to Bhutan and can't find a bureau de change that carries Ngultrum...

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

[Bertie]

That's there for a reason. Back when coins were actually made of gold, those mottos were put there to stop people filing flakes of gold off before using them again. It's warning them not to deface the currency or they'll get bitch-slapped. How they'd have got found out I don't know, but still...

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

[Bertie]

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.

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?

[1lus10n]

You have never seen USA's money have you ?

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

[fireman sam]

I guess I will have to open a bank account and stop carrying my money around in a guitar case.

But seriously. What are you to do if you don't like banks.

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

[zootm]

Thanks for posting this, it saves me the trouble! Another interesting point is that, although it's true that we do have a £1 note, only one (RBoS) actually still print them, which is part of the reason they're so rare.

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

[Kokuyo]

It's also known, by me, as a way to kill off unliked and, most importantly, unprepared victims... the amount of CO2 in that beverage has left me breathless the first time I drank it.

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

[91degrees]

How they'd have got found out I don't know, but still...

Double purpose perhaps. Much like a milled edge, the absense of the motto means that someone has filed the coin.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

I like 'em, but they are considered "unlucky"......to remove that you are supposed to tear the upper right corner off the bill.

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

[Jonner]

The two dollar bills are not infamous, just rare. I have gotten one from a customer while working as a cashier. I still have it.

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

[91degrees]

In England, a 5 pound coin exists, but I don't know if anyone has ever made a transaction with one. They're usually comemorative coins, of interest to collectors.

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

[slavemowgli]

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.

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

[zebs]

urgh, yes unfortunnatly. All greem, and all the same size. How any blind people in the US manage with money I don't know!

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

[Ian Action]

They give change with $2 bills at strip clubs, at least where I live. Not that I hang there.

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

[eraserewind]

More than £10,000? That better be one hell of a dishwasher.

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

[ckaminski]

I've never seen paper money with braille on it, so I'm curious how blind people ANYWHERE manage paper money?

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?

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

[mider]

Actually, all the new Canadian notes have braille on them.

I've never seen paper money with braille on it, so I'm curious how blind people ANYWHERE manage paper money?

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

[iainr]

Coins are legal tender (with limitations on amounts for some values of coin).

from silicon glen

Scottish bank notes are not legal tender in Scotland. English bank notes of denomination less than 5UKP were legal tender in Scotland under Currency and Bank Notes Act 1954. Now, with the removal of BoE 1UKP notes, only coins constitute legal tender in Scotland. English bank notes are only legal tender in England, Wales, The Channel Islands and the Isle of Man. In Scotland, 1 pound coins are legal tender to any amount, 20ps and 50ps are legal tender up to 10 pounds; 10p and 5ps to 5 pounds and 2p and 1p coins are legal tender to 20p (separately or in combination). 2 pounds coins and (if you can get hold of one) 5 pound coins are also legal tender to unlimited amounts, as are gold coins of the realm at face value (in Scotland at least).

and

The lack of a true legal tender in Scotland does not cause a problem for Scots Law which is flexible enough to get round this apparent legal nonsense, as was demonstrated some time ago when one local authority tried to refuse a cash payment (in Scottish notes) on the grounds it wasn't "legal tender", but lost their case when the sheriff effectively said that they were obliged to accept anything which was commonly accepted as "money", and that should their insistence on "legal tender" have been supported, it would have resulted in the bill being paid entirely in coins, which would have been a nonsense; stopping short of saying that the council would have been "cutting off their nose to spite their face", but seeming to hint at it.

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

[Nick Harkin]

I work in England, and judging by one of the tills left on before me, at least one person has used the large silver £5 coin for a transaction.

I don't think I'd have had much luck in giving it to someone as change however, so we just sent it off to the bank.

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

[I confirm I'm not a]

Although its legal throughout the UK

Apparently it's not even legal here in Scotland! There was a "your money"-type programme recently that featured this, and a Royal Bank of Scotland "expert" was asked to comment on the grief Scots get in England with our funny money. He basically said it wasn't legal tender, even here in Soctland, and it was up to individual shops, etc, whether to accept it. (And Wikipedia supports this view).

Not that that changes anything; I'm still going to act all petulant when my Clydesdale notes get rejected all the way down the Tottenham Court Road...

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

[zakezuke]

I can imagine the face of a kid clerk getting handed a 2$ or even 1$ bill... ;-)

I get told that I should keep 'em my self. During the Expo '86 in Vancover many tourists tossed their money in the street after leaving. Either they didn't understand that this script was legal tender or perhaps they were going back to the states and knew how much of a pain it is to exchange. Needless to say I collected a a bit of the paper $1s and $2s that I run across in odd places.

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

[ckaminski]

Wouldn't that wear off after a certain period of time? Having not seen new Canadian notes, I'm interested in knowing how robust they are...

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

[bicho]

You know? That already has happened, and to none else than John Arbuckle, Garfield's owner.

I guess I did watch too much tv...

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

[zero_offset]

You didn't mention where you live, but around here a dishwasher is maybe $350 and that isn't a terribly large cash transaction, unless you're act like a choad and whip out a wad of ones and fives. Handing the cashier seven fifties at somewhere like Home Depot wouldn't get you a second glance.

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

[The Phantom Buffalo]

Maybe the shop where your girlfriend works should train their employees properly. This would include identifying any legal currency they might have to deal with.

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

[Mesaeus]

Just about every european money, and now the Euro too, has a different size for every denomination. The denominations get bigger as they increase in value, which makes it easier for blind people to recognise them. Doesn't the US use this concept too ?

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

[MaynardJanKeymeulen]

Belgian banknote used to have braille on them, some sort of..
Then came the euro, they have some things ont them for blind people, but not braille actually.

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

[stm2]

Even if the money don't have braille on it, in some countries it has little circle or square printed in relief. It works in new bills, most bills are so wear out the the relief can't be felt.

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

[thatnerdguy]

They do wear off after a while, if the bills have travelled a lot. Don't know how a blind person could tell the difference between the bills. Also its only the new bills that have braille, so if they get an old $20 then they're stuck.
See here for more info. (It's not quire braille, just a raised symbol) http://www.bankofcanada.ca/en/banknotes/accessibil ity.html

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

[Dogtanian]

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...

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

[aamcf]

Over here in Northern Ireland, we have 4 different banks who issue money. It gets very confusing if you travel between England and Northern Ireland a lot. Once, in a fit of confusion I tried to oay for petrol with a Marks and Spencer voucher. Recently, one of the banks' headquarters was robbed. So the bank is now withdrawing all their notes so the thieves can't spend them any more.

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

[Winkhorst]

Why not just use the system they use with graphic arts film? Have little notches in the upper right-hand corner that vary with the denomination?

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

[clarkcox3]

Nope, all US bills are exactly the same size and shape (2.61 inches by 6.14 inches).

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

[zebs]

In the UK all coins and notes are distinctly differnet, none have braille though.

For full details see:

http://www.royalmint.com/talk/default.asp, and

http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/index.htm , and finally

http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/knowyourn otes.pdf

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

[HBI]

I suppose that this is what motivates coin and currency collectors, ultimately. Well, some are in it for the bullion value, but most, like my father, were into it because the coins were pretty.

His trick was, in the 1950s and 1960s, to pull rolls of 90% silver US coinage and cherry-pick them, then return them to the bank. It was very effective then, and got a wide swath of coinage all the way from Barber dimes and quarters (pre-1916) to 1964. He also picked out almost complete sets of good-quality nickels and cents - many Indian cents, Liberty nickels, that kind of thing. Then the US removed the silver from coins.

Everything old suddenly disappeared. Worse, when silver topped $40 an ounce around 1979-80 timeframe, much of the old coinage was melted for scrap. The government had done things like that in the past as well, mass meltings, which explains the scarcity of certain coins today.

Strangely enough, if you want to find a 90% (or 40%) silver coin still in circulation, get a few rolls of US half dollars. Generally, even today you'll find 90% and 40% coins in those rolls. People don't realize a 1964 Kennedy half is a 90% silver coin, and that the 1965-1970 coins were 40% silver.

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

[csteinle]

She's as Scottish as she is English, being Queen Elizibeth the First of Scotland.

Of course, she's more German than either Scottish or English...

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

[say]

Buying a dishwasher is reaaally suspicious. Terrorists wash their clothes all the time.

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

[the_mad_poster]

Very, very carefully?

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

[I confirm I'm not a]

Typcial fucking jock...

You know, as a New Zealander living in Scotland, I sometimes wonder why so many Scots have issues with the English at times. Thanks for reminding me.

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

[biglig2]

Time for my usual pedantic pointing out that legal tender is nothing to do with buying something in a shop.

Legal tender defines forms of payment that, when used to pay off a debt, the creditor cannot refuse. This rule prevents an evil creditor from bankrupting you by not accepting anything you offer as payment.

In a shop, however, you are negotiating a contract, and so the shop can demand, as a term in that contract, that you pay in any way they want. If you don't like it, don't agree to the contract.

Scotish bank notes are indeed not legal tender anywhere, including Scotland, and for that matter English notes aren't legal tender in Scotland.

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

[I confirm I'm not a]

She's as Scottish as she is English, being Queen Elizibeth the First of Scotland.

...and head of the Church of Scotland (as well as the Church of England). That one's always confused me - Episcopalian South of the Border, Presbyterian North of the Border. I'd hate to be the kids, getting dragged off to church twice each Sunday ;)

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

[biglig2]

I should point out that, while withdrawing all their notes sounds a bit excessive, they were robbed of about £26.5 million, and so it actually makes sense.

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

[alangmead]

When I saw this, I thought of this quote.

This planet has - or rather had - a problem which was this: most of the people who were living on it were pretty much unhappy most of the time. Many solutions where suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy. -- Douglas Adams

And then thought that maybe it isn't the Euro notes that are bland and boring.

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

[Phragmen-Lindelof]

When I was in Australia in October, I took the new US $50 bills I had picked up before flying to Canberra. The bank looked at them for about 20 minutes before exchanging money. (Waiting in LAX for my flight to Sydney, I had no trouble exchanging money, of couse.)

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

[RadioTV]

I was at a strip club and my friend was handing out $2 bills. One of the strippers came up and said that she had been looking for one to show her kids. We all looked at her funny and then she explained that she was a third grade teacher.

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

[AndrewRUK]

You forgot to mention that Irn Bru is made from girders. Yes, it's true.*




* Note: may not be an actual, literally true fact, in the most pedantic and technical sense of the word.

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

[mwood]

IIRC Dutch money has had Braille markings on it for years. And to the sighted USian it all looks like Monopoly money: bright colors (every denomination a different set), all different sizes, etc.

I wouldn't like money any less myself if it were printed in dark gray on light gray paper with no pictures or scrollwork and "DULL BORING DULL BORING" watermarked all across it, so long as it works. I do think that the Braille imprinting is something we ought to be doing, though.

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

[Rev Wally]

The clubs in my area do the same thing. So one of the local video stores started giving $2-bills as change as well.

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

[peterpi]

In Japan, high-value transactions with 'real' money are still common.

A japanese friend of mine thought nothing of buying a new sports car with a briefcase full of cash. When I went over there a shopkeeper had real trouble accepting my Visa/Delta for about £20 of souvineers.

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

[mwood]

I'm told that the physical design of the U.S. banknote was based mainly on the dimensions of a man's shirt pocket, so what do you expect? Nope, all bills are the same size. Usually, though, the larger denominations (which see less use) tend to still feel like paper, while the $1 bill usually seems more like a strip cut from old underwear. :-)

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

[mwood]

Just about all of the $2 bills disappeared into collections immediately since it was widely believed that nobody would ever use them.

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

[mr.newt]

Grandparent did not say legal tender, it said legal, and it was quite correct. Scottish notes are not illegal in the UK.

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

[BoomerSooner]

In Europe the notes are different sizes. The 5 is the smallest, 10 is bigger, ... You get the picture. So when they are in a cab they can determine which bill to pay the cabby by size instead of him saying that 100 Euro note is a 10 Euro note.

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

[niskel]

All Canadian money has braille on it for the blind. It is also color coded for the almost blind.

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

[jspoon]

They probably thought it was part of a money laundering scheme.

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

[Catbeller]

They only have to last a year. Paper money wears out after a year in circulation, and is sent to paper heaven. (They used the shredded bills for upholstery and insulation, back in the day).

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

[emilymildew]

It's funny, because people who weren't born / raised in the US often wonder how sighted people can tell the difference among the bills.

All I can say is that they are really really different, even just in the corners. I can tell the difference between bills below a fifty without having to see very much of it, just from use.

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

[RichardX]

You have never seen USA's money have you ?
Yes, and WTF is with that all seeing eye atop the truncated pyramid, anyways? That's just bizarre

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

[RichardX]

Just about every european money, and now the Euro too, has a different size for every denomination. The denominations get bigger as they increase in value, which makes it easier for blind people to recognise them. Doesn't the US use this concept too ?

Actually, another reason for this is if they got smaller with bigger denominations you could take a £5 note, bleach it, cut it down a bit, reprint it, and turn it into a £50 note.. whereas if the bigger denominations are physically bigger notes, you'd have to add area on to a note to reprint it at a higher value, which you can't really do.

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

[Snaller]

Now if only we felt the same way about women, we'd be set! ;)

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

[Pig Hogger]

I was at a strip club and my friend was handing out $2 bills. One of the strippers came up and said that she had been looking for one to show her kids. We all looked at her funny and then she explained that she was a third grade teacher.

Did she, at least, picked it up with her snatch?

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

[mwood]

Ha, try renting a car with cash. You can't do it. I found this out the hard way when I arrived by plane about 70 miles from my destination and tried to pick up the car I had reserved. I thought it was beyond odd that they wanted a credit card and wouldn't take cash on the barrelhead. I eventually figured it out, but I'll never again feel trust, sympathy, or any certainty toward any car rental company after having to walk across some of the less interesting parts of Knoxville, TN to find the bus station. The (very) occasional car rental is the only earthly reason I have for maintaining a credit card. (They won't take debit cards, either. Found *that* out in time, but had to make very hasty arrangements.)

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

[RichardX]

I realise this is a joke, but it seems a strange thing to pick (gears, not blind driving), as it's about the only aspect of driving that actually WOULD be easy for a blind person - You should know what gear you're in from the your speed and engine revs / sound, and if you have to look at the gear stick when you change gear then you're doing something very, very wrong. Heck, that shouldn't even be a consideration for anyone who can type any better than two finger hunt-and-peck.

On this subject though... why the heck do drive-up ATM's have braille on the keypads in the US? I used to think this was a joke until I actually saw one

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

[gurnb]

The best part about $2 bills, is that in a strip club, they look like $20's to the ladies on stage. ....or so I hear

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

[Pig Hogger]

You know, as a New Zealander living in Scotland, I sometimes wonder why so many Scots have issues with the English at times.

That's because you're from New Zealand.

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

[Toresica]

Actually, all the new Canadian notes have braille on them.
They do? The ones in my wallet don't...

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

[Pig Hogger]

"I prefer cash"

- Bond, James Bond in Octopussy.

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

[JCMay]

They wash their clothes in a dishwasher? That is suspicious!

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

[KlomDark]

Here's a link to all the secret meanings on a US Dollar Bill.

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

[Abreu]

Strange, here in latin america $2USD notes are considered "lucky" and are even used in some santería rituals...

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

[An Ominous Cow Erred]

Actually plenty of smaller not-national-chain car rental places will rent with cash deposit. I rented a car in San Diego once using cash. Check the ads in the yellow pages, some places advertise that they take cash deposit.

Also, unique among the national chains, some Enterprise locations will accept cash deposit -- I've done that as well. (This is entirely up to the manager of that particular Enterprise location. You may need to take a utility bill with you.)

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

[I confirm I'm not a]

Nope, it's a common misconception that she's the head of the CoS. The CoS doesn't have a "head", just a elected moderator who serves as a spokesperson for one year.

Live and learn! I knew about the Moderator, but I was equating the Moderator with the Archbishop of Canterbury (which is - roughly - correct), and assuming the Queen had a similar role in both Church and Kirk. You're quite correct, however: The Queen is a member of the Kirk with the same rights as any other member except that she, or her representative, normally declares the General Assembly of the Kirk formally open.

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

[Ricwot]

In Britain, coins are all different sizes, as is paper money, ranging from the smallest £1 note, and gradually, yet noticably increasing in size. It makes it handy for picking out denomenations from your wallet, though £100 notes rarely fit in any space in a cash register.

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

[Rhsqueak]

Usually they fold each denomination of bill into a differant shape. For example: A $1 bill might be folded across the width, a $5 bill might be folded length wise, a $10 might have one corner folded down and a $20 might not be folded at all. I believe that part of an ATM's braille instructions tell the user what type of bills the machine gives out.

As much as I hate to say this, Daredevil shows how the blind handle money pretty well. Look for it in the scene where he is getting up and getting ready for work.

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

[GTRacer]

Are you serious?

Assuming the blind driver in question isn't changing cars at red lights, it should take maybe 30 seconds to suss the pattern (auto or manual) in that car and use it.

For example, in my (auto) car, I know it's two clicks down from Park to Neutral. Then one up is Reverse or one down is Drive. Easy peasy. When I'm done driving, it's easier than that - just shove the selector all the way up.

For a stick, it's still easy, as long as you remember which side Reverse is on. When in doubt of the gear, just clutch out and pop it in Neutral and waggle the stick a bit to feel where the gear is.

Drive any car long enough and muscle memory will take over. of course, there's a larger issue with this discussion...

GTRacer
- Needs nore stick time

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually the `German' gag has been out of date for about a hundred years. If you go by grandparents, the queen's about half English and a quarter each Scottish and German, with some other bits and pieces in there at more distant removes. Sorry to be picky...

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

[DavidHumus]

A liquor store in the East Village (NYC) accepts euros at 1:1 for dollars. The owner claims he started doing this a few years ago when the exchange rate was not in his favor.

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

[Kombat]

I've never seen paper money with braille on it,

Canada's does.

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

[Fjornir]

why the heck do drive-up ATM's have braille on the keypads in the US? I used to think this was a joke until I actually saw one

OK, here are the reasons, in no particular order!

It provides work for comedians.

Mass production. Why would anyone take the cost of a special run of no-braille ATM keypads?

The Americans with Disabilities Act

Blind people use them too -- back seat, driver-side is where a blind friend of mine rides pretty much every time he gets in the car with us, and always when we're going to hit an ATM.

Whew. I hope I answered that fast enough. I'd hate for this to become another "Er. I'm too lazy to think about my question or do the least bit of research so I'll just make it into an 'Ask Slashdot'"

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

[sepluv]

Don't you really mean, "if they felt the same way about us/you"?

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

[sepluv]

It was reported on the BBC World Service in the main news headlines the other night that someone had "attempted to hack" into the DEC WWW site (which is actually on *.bt.com.) (in order to steal money) but had been caught thanks to the resourcefulness of "their ISP, BT".

As well as the IMO very dubious bit about BT ever being resourceful (which I didn't mention), I did contact the BBC World Service and ask them not to (mis)use `hack' in its journalistic sense.

On second thoughts maybe the word wasn't so inappropriate.

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

[protohiro1]

Reputable electronics shop? Tottenham Court Road? Does not compute...

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

[D'Sphitz]

I don't think they're rare, people just don't use them. I've cashed my paycheck in $2 bills before. If you asked at any bank I'm sure you can get as many as you want.

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

[csteinle]

Well, it's still the House of Hanover, although they did change their name to Windsor during the First World War.

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

[cayenne8]

" Now if only we felt the same way about women, we'd be set! ;)"

Well, if you spend enough of that "bland" looking money...you will get a girl that is not bland looking....

:-)

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

[cayenne8]

"Just about every european money, and now the Euro too, has a different size for every denomination. The denominations get bigger as they increase in value, which makes it easier for blind people to recognise them. Doesn't the US use this concept too ?"

Nope...we insist they use credit cards....

:-)

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

[Ced_Ex]

US currency has introduced other colours into their paper bills. This is to make it easier to identify the different denominations. Primarily it is still green, but with highlights of other colours.

I remember when Americans used to laugh at Canada's funny money with different colours. Now they conveniently forget that thought whilst they add colour to their own money.

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

[afidel]

German Mark's used to have a series of raised lines which were applied during printing which gave the denomination. Add to that the fact that different denominations are physically different sizes as are the coins and it's not too difficult. Now American blind people have to rely on money and the kindness of strangers to remember which bills are in what order in their billfold and hope that unscrupulous people don't take advantage of them when they make a mistake.

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

[M1FCJ]

I have a Botswana currency which exactly looks like a quid. Someone must have slipped it to me sometime, I tried to pay for a newspaper with it and the guy didn't accept it, me just like you wonders why and then figure it out! Now, this is just brilliant, last week someone gave me a half a penny! It has King George VI's picture on it and was minted in 1941! It looks exactly like a 2 penny piece and that's how I managed to pick it up!

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

[Anonymous Coward]

I worked on bill identifiers a while back and one of the problems we had was the number of torn corners on $2 bills. As I understand it, horse bettors consider these quite lucky! The idea is to place a bet with a $2 bill, but keep one torn-off corner for luck (maybe it is supposed to return to the torn-off corner?)

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

[Suidae]

We USians love our blind people too... Thats why the notes are all the same size and color, its much easier to 'help' our blind people tip well for services that way :D

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

[Slayback]

Oh, you mean like this?

http://www.digiserve.com/eescape/closet/silly/2- at -Taco-Bell.html

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

[RichardX]

Well, at least it wasn't a washing machine.. then he could've used it for... laundering money! *boom boom*
geddit? washing machine?... laundry?... laundering.

Never mind. I'll get my coat.

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

[bwy]

That was one of the things I liked about Scotland when I visited. You have your own money and your own way of doing things. I hope you guys stick to this- you don't have to be just like England and by the same token the whole UK doesn't have to be just like the rest of Europe.

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

[Suidae]

Enterprise and Alamo (owned by the same company I think?) were also taking debit cards for a while. They'll also let you take a car without much hassle if you've got a previous rental receipt from them.

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

[Ctrl-Z]

Like this one? $2 at Taco Bell.

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

[lixlpixel]

at least the EURO notes all have a beveled sign on them so you can feel the value.

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

[d.hawk]

I went with my grandmother to buy her new condo a few months back. They ran the regular credit cehck and then a very embarrassed sales person came out and said there was a problem. "We're sorry mrs, you um....dont have any credit. You probably wont be able to get financing." Grandmother: "Thats ok, I'lll pay cash" as she pulls ~$100k out of her purse and stacks it on the desk. I laughed, the sales person must have shit a brick.

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

[Ayaress]

People would stop hording them, but they'd still have value. When you re-issue currency (or a video game, car model, or whatever), you create an "original issue" and a "remake/imitation/etc" second issue. A 1933 Buick isn't as valuable as you'd think, because while they only made around a half dozen of them originally (most of GM's production was being used to produce military vehicles, only a few shops were building cars on special order), they reissued the model later and made a number of them after the war. The originals are some of the most expensive classic cars you can find, but the reissue is worth a fraction as much.

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

[fd0man]

Eh. "The unfinished pyramid means that the United States will always grow, improve, and build. In addition, the 'All-Seeing Eye' located above the pyramid suggests the importance of divine guidance in favor of the American cause." I personally think that's a load of crap, but that's what Ask Yahoo found. Check that page and you'll see where they found it from.

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

[Fenris Ulf]

They're not rare, you can request as many as you like from your bank for example. They cost... $2 each.

The BEP continues to print them whenever their stock gets low.

$1 -> $2 -> $5 -> $10
$10 -> $20 -> $50 -> $100

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

[Fenris Ulf]

No, you can still get as many as you want from your bank. When your bank runs out, they ask the Fed for more. When the Fed runs out, the BEP prints more for them.

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

[nuser]

used in some santería rituals...

At first I thought this was joke,suggesting that you wipe your arse with them but wikipedia tells me this means animal sacrifice, and now I'm really confused...

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

[HTH NE1]

As long as the bank has them. My local bank rarely has $2 bills, and I've wanted to get a whole pack ($200 worth).

I find I have to go to the post office vending machines these days if I want dollar coins.

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

[nigelc]

I think a reputable electronics shop in Tottenham Court Road counts as anywhere where the salesman doesn't have to open the boot (trunk) to give you your purchase.

"Honest, officer, I bought the whole lot from a man I met in a bar, the name of which for the moment escapes me"

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

[all your mwbassguy a]

when i was working in retail, someone paid a large bill entirely with susan b. anthony dollar coins and j.f.k. half dollars.

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

[eric76]

In 1977 or so, I was on the train between Lake Bennett and Whitehorse in Canada. A cook from the station at Lake Bennett was on the train.

The cook said that he hated U.S. money because when he was drunk, he couldn't tell the difference in bills and has on more than one occasion accidentally tipped the barmaid with a rather large bill ($20 if I remember correctly) rather than the $1 he intended.

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

[displaced80]

Hehe... still, worth trying it in a vending machine!

I was in France (pre-Euro), and gasping for a drink. Didn't have the right change on me in Francs, but it turned out the vending machine would take a £1 coin thinking it was 10F. Bloody expensive drink, but worth it at the time :)

I thought ha'pennies were small? They were certainly very thin. But I only really remember the late-70's/early-80's 1/2 pence pieces... they'd probably shrunk 'em by then.

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

[Paul Crowley]

As the AC below notes, those coins are found throughout the UK. For a long time pound notes still circulated in Scotland after they'd been withdrawn from England and Wales; I don't know if that's still true, or what the NI situation is.

Royal Mint on pound coins

My favourite thing around the side of the coin is DECUS ET TUTAMEN, because it is referring to itself rather neatly :-)

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

[justins]

Um, not exactly. According to this Wikipedia article

You should really just stop there.

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

[poot_rootbeer]

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.

And then they came to the United States and went to Taco Bell and tried to pay with a $2 bill...

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

[jessecurry]

they fold it in different ways unique to the denomination. And if you look at coins(US) they have different sizes and different textures

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

[NuclearDog]

Because the parts are mass-produced so the bank company just uses the same keypads for the indoor ones as the outdoor ones, as it's cheaper?

ND

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

[hawk]

>why the heck do drive-up ATM's have braille on the
>keypads in the US?

Same reason as the cruise control of the Ford they drove up in . . .

hawk

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

[sumdumass]

There was a blind guy down the street that had been arested for public endangerment and driving without a license. Evedently he actually tried to drive and had his dog bark when he needed to speed up or slow down. turning corners and such.

I guess the story goes, he attempted to train the dog by pushing him in a wagon and told him home were he got the dog to react. I don't remeber if he crashed or not while driving but he didn't make it verry far from his starting point before getting pulled over.

Don't get this confused with the other story about a man who tryed to plead not guilty for a DUI charge by claiming his dog was actually driving and he was telling him were to go. BTW, that was not a good idea, he got the max penalties allows for it.

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

[sql*kitten]

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.

I love TCR. Was buying some laptop memory the other day, the dude didn't have it, so he sent me to a "rival" store - what did he care about the lost business, it was his cousin! I wouldn't be surprised if the whole street was run by 2 or 3 families.

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

[mutterc]

This happened to my grandmother once. She was buying a field that adjoined her property, for about $5k. When she was talking to the closing attorney, he said the terms of the sale were "cash". This, of course, means that the seller isn't going to finance the sale themselves (by allowing the buyer to pay them over time).

She got some weird looks showing up at the closing with a shoebox full of paper money.

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

[deathazre]

if the gears in your manual transmission do not feel different from one another, your vehicle is not sufficiently old and broken.

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

[Ulven]

Here in the UK the different denominations are different sizes.

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

[Snaller]

Not really.

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

[Snaller]

What is that thing called money you speak off? :)

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

[bomfog]

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.

It's also the motto of the Montresors in Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado".

Useless information a speciality.

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

[phyphor]

Where to start?

"Up here in Scotland, we have our own paper money."
Yes, you do. Because all Scottish banks have the right to print their own money.

"Although its legal throughout the UK, a lot of english shopkeeps will give you funny looks if you give them a scottish fiver."
Actually, Scottish notes are not legal tender in the UK, although they can be used as money (there is a significant legal distinction).

See http://www.siliconglen.com/Scotland/1_7.html

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

[AndyL]

When you say "Still floating around", you mean "Still being issued by the treasury department" right?

Contrary to popular belief $2 bills are not some relic from the ancient past that needs to be cherished and protected. You can get them from banks at face value. (Although some smaller banks will make you buy an entire lot of them, because they can't get rid of loose $2s)

They print more whenever the Treasury runs out of them. They're not in high demand, so I think the last series was 1996.

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

[AndyL]

"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?

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

[Thu25245]

I always wanted a $2 bill.

Wow, finally a good reason to go to a strip club.

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

[noidentity]

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!

Using a two dollar bill in the U.S. can result in something close to it.

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

[Phreakiture]

I had a similar thing happen in college. I think this was in the spring of 1992, IIRC.

After returning to college from a break, I discovered that I had left my chequebook home (some 450-500km away) and that I needed to pay my tuition bill at the end of the week.

For the next three days, I went to the ATM each day and withdrew $300 (which was the daily limit). At the end of the week, I went into the Bursar's office, and paid my tuition bill (one of the four installments of $890) entirely in $20 bills.

Got a good laugh from the clerk, though!

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

[The One and Only]

How do they read the screen?

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

[Sloppy]

That's brilliant!! It basically doubles what the girls make in their small tips (not counting stuff like lap dances). And since the suckers will go through their small bills twices as fast, they'll have to visit your ATM (make sure to have it include an outrageous service charge) more often.

Damn, just hearing this one idea, makes me want to get into the strip club business.

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

[Sloppy]

The BEP continues to print them whenever their stock gets low.

I'm pretty sure that every $2 I've seen is series 1976. Do the newly printed ones still say 1976, or do they actually have newer years on them?

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

[Col. Bloodnok]

I love TCR. Was buying some laptop memory the other day, the dude didn't have it, so he sent me to a "rival" store - what did he care about the lost business, it was his cousin! I wouldn't be surprised if the whole street was run by 2 or 3 families.

I hate TCR, it's a crap place to shop for anything (with one exception - the little basement HiFi shop, which is superb). nobody knows anything about the products, the prices are fixed (and vastly inflated compared to internet shopping), the range is crap and God help you if you need to take anything back.

The place has a dingy, untrustworthy feel about. I'd certainly think twice before using a credit card in one of those shops.

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

[the pickle]

They *already* don't have any numismatic value, because they've been "common enough" for years.

The reason they still have "novelty" value is because no one uses them.

The only way to get around this is going to be for the Fed to force them out into circulation, which they won't do.

p

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

[Jonner]

Mine's a 2003 model.

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

[FrostedWheat]

Northern Ireland also have there own notes, and it used to be almost impossible to use them in the rest of the UK where people would think it was Punts - the currency the Republic of Ireland used before switching to the Euro. Before travelling you'd have to try your best to get all 'Bank of England' notes.

I was at the Linux Expo in London last year and I noticed things have improved a lot. Only once did anyone ask about it and they accepted after having a closer look.

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

[Cobralisk]

I don't know, but there's a blind guy at a shop near where I work. You buy a pack of cigarettes from him, he grabs them off of the shelf behind him without turning his head (he always gets the right pack), and he always makes correct change when you hand him the money. He kind of feels the money staring off into the distance (well, I guess not really staring). Anyway its kind of amazing to watch a blind guy behind a cash register.

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

[tanner_andrews]

How any blind people in the US manage with money I don't know!

The texture is discernably different between the different denominations. This surely helps.

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

[Cobralisk]

Series 1976 ones mean they were designed in 1976. Also, they put a star in the serial number to indicate the bill is a replacement for a destroyed bill taken from circulation. Hence, I have a few bills printed in 1991 that say series 1976.

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

[Col. Bloodnok]

Not only did they not accept it, they called the police and held them there.

Which they were obliged to do in the case of a suspected forgery. I repeat; obliged to call the police, you can't just say 'that's a suspicious note, I'm not going to accept it'. You accept the note or you call the police.

The Woolies manager did what he thought was the right thing, but since scottish banknotes aren't legal tender (as has been mentioned), what is the correct procedure for dealing with suspected forgeries? Arguably he was right - a strange note with a face value of £20, passed as if it were a real Bank of England £20?

What does a genuine scottish banknote look like? I last saw one (a fiver) 10 years ago, English fivers have changed since then at least once. I have no idea what security features Scottish banknotes sport, what artwork they employ nor the feel of the paper and printing. How could I possibly spot a fake?

From a security perspective - Scottish banknotes should *never* be accepted by English, Welsh or Northern Irish merchants because when used outside of Scotland they actively weaken the security of the entire currency system, which is bad news for all of us.

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

[AndyL]

Yay! -1 Flamebait.

But seriously, how come the bills from Scottland are so unknown in England? They're diferent notes for the same currency, right? So why don't they spread far and wide?

After a while you'd think they'd be pretty well mingled together. The UK is a relativly small island(s), afterall.

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

[Random Web Developer]

I don't normally point out spelling or language errors as I am not a native english speaker myself, but it does tickle me when someone tries to be fancy talking french but doesn't get it right.

"on holiday to Bhutan and can't find a bureau de change "
it's a "bureau d'échange".

fyi, I'm not a french speaker either, I live in the dutch-speaking part of belgium and we have those chique french people with their poodles here too :)

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

[stfvon007]

A blind friend of mine dosnt carry anything more than a 5 (so all the change will be in 1's) and folds the 5 differently than the 1's. for the most part though he uses a credit card so he dosnt have to deal with cash.

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

[Ian Bell]

A pre-decimalisation ha'penny was about the size of a decimal 2p piece.
Decimal 1/2p pieces were tiny and thin. And penny sweets were 1/2p then aswell.

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

[sparkz]

Heh - tell me about it, I've just got back to England from a few days in Glasgow, and realised that I've still got a Scottish fiver in my pocket (despite my best attempts to spend all "funny money" while north of the border!)

I can see that small shopkeepers find it difficult to train their staff to check English money carefully, let alone Scottish money, too, but it's all legal tender; what next? "Can't take that Mint card, it's got a bit missing off the corner"?!

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

[Fjornir]

How do they read the screen?

Did you even think about this before you asked the question? Consider googling for it? Jesus. They don't need to read the screen. Sure, they can't get balance information or whatever, but they can navigate the standard menus. Call your bank -- request a copy of instructions for using their ATMs in braille. Also, I don't know if this is still pending or if it's already been implemented, but I believe there's a 'disabled' flag that can be set on the strip on your card which will request all ATMs to use a standard sequence of menus.

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

[cHiphead]

$2 bills are considered very good luck by strippers.

Cheers.

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

[boarder8925]

The latest series of U.S. two-dollar bills was printed in 2003.

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/28/03 1248

"The newest bills are Series 2003, with the signatures of John W. Snow and Rosario Marin."

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

[boarder8925]

Sorry, I obviously posted the wrong URL.

Here's the Wikipedia LiNK:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._two_dollar_bill

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

[qwertyphobia]

I don't ever recall seeing a Bank of Scotland note issued by a cash machine in England so I guess the banks sort out the Scottish notes and send them back home.

Notes won't stay in circulation for long anyway as once you've spent them in a shop they'll more than likely get cashed into a bank at the end of the day and taken out of circulation then.

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

[Maulkin]

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.

That's because scottish bank notes are NOT legal tender. See Tha Bank of England and the The Scotland Guide for more information.

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

[rpjs]

Er, I'm not saying I'm right and you're wrong, but I spelt it exactly the way everyone else in the UK spells it.

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

[Drantin]

Exact story I was thinking of, although I think I read it elsewhere...

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

[arwel]

Yup, the amount of money stolen from Northern Bank represented somewhere between 5% and 10% of all the money issued by that bank.

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

[ball-lightning]

I consider my $2 my "lucky" bill. Parent is defintely correct, peopel hoarde the things though, I actually traded mine from a person who somehow got a whole bunch from a bank...

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

[augustw]

how come the bills from Scottland are so unknown in England? Becasue English banks (including Scottish bank branches in England) are not allowed to hand them out; if they get one in, they must return it to the Scottish bank that issued it. So all Scottish notes end up back in Scotland pretty quickly.

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

[Associate]

The actual value of anything pales in comparison to popularity. Think high school or pop music. The American greenback is accepted in more places world wide than American Express, Master Card, Visa and any other currency.

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

[Abreu]

Animal sacrifice is only a part of santería rituals... there are other things they do that are just as ridiculous, like putting the statuette of the saint upside down in its altar if your petition hasnt been granted yet (thus "punishing" the lazy bastard).

The 2USD bills are used in the preparation of amulets that bring prosperity (read: $$$)

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

[armb]

> you can't just say 'that's a suspicious note, I'm not going to accept it'.

You can, however, just say "I'm sorry, we don't accept Scottish notes" if you have no particular reason to think it is a forgery and couldn't possibly spot one.

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

[say]

Oops. I blame that one on being foreign to this english language thingy :-) Although I keep messing these two devices in Norwegian as well -- "vaskemaskin" and "oppvaskmaskin".

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

[drinkypoo]

I used a US$2 bill at a McDonald's once. The cashier thought it was counterfeit because there was "no such thing" as a $2 bill. I had them get the manager, who looked at them like they were a fucking idiot - which should not be a surprise when they are working as a peon at McDonald's.

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

[Filecore]

Yes, also *three* different banks print notes:

Bank of Scotland
Royal Bank of Scotland
Clydesdale Bank

Pretty crazy when you've got a mix in your wallet! The banks do agree to keep the same colours for the denominations.

There's also the £100 note also. The Bank of Englands highest note is the £50.

I've had trouble spending £5 Scottish notes in England, most small places won't take them. Larger RBS and BoS notes I haven't had a problem with. Clydesdale notes are the least recognised in the UK so they don't get accepted more than most. Forget about any £1 notes, get them changed at the bank.

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"

Re:WHY!

[learn fast]

They were going to, but he just replaced the Justice Department with one that had a different mind about the matter.

Re:First Post

[Anonymous Coward]

First post with Lynx!

Thank God for people....

[Homology]

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

Re:Thank God for people....

[gl4ss]

it's like the people reporting at some lan that somebody is "HAXORING MEEEE" when all that's happening is that the games played are sending broadcasting when looking for servers...

"informative" firewalls and IDS's in hands of fools are bad news.

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:Thank God for people....

[ozmanjusri]

Just a quick heads up on this, the symptoms you're describing point to a condition called nasal polyps. They're a benign tumour and are faily common, so your doc should have checked for them.

If that's what you've had here (and even if its not), you should get to a decent doctor and get them to have a look. Polyps commonly recur even after the proper surgery, so its unlikely you've fixed the problem for long.

Re:Thank God for people....

[iwan-nl]

Who the hell modded this funny? As far as I can tell he's being dead serious. Polyps are quite dangerous. The parent tries to warn the grandparent he might have a serious medical condition. There's nothing funny about that. Go figure.

Re:Thank God for people....

[mge]

3rd (at least) time i've seen this OT crap posted - almost exactly same word for word.

Re:Thank God for people....

[fireman sam]

Or do what I did...

Back in 2001 I was porting rdesktop to nano-x for my company and I got two of the hex values around the wrong way. Running this program on any version of Windows up to 2000 with terminal services running would cause a BSOD. (I still have the code if anyone wants it) When the viruses started hitting my gateway at home I decided to write a script that would listen on port 80 and if it detected a virus it would ping the host, execute this program and then ping the host again.

I took about 8 servers down in the first day. Just doing my bit to prevent the spread.

Re:Thank God for people....

[ArsenneLupin]

Solution: don't ever put your own IP address anywhere inside the complaint. Leave the tcpdump log away, and only keep the Apache access.log which is sufficient enough to "prove" that an intrusion was attempted. Nobody can misinterpret your IP address as the attacker if you don't even mention your IP address in the complaint.

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...

Re:Thank God for people....

[Bert64]

Haha, send me it!..
Is it still vulnerable on 2003?

Re:Thank God for people....

[parliboy]

When I was part-timing with one server, it was always a pain trying to convince people they were the source of an attack. A number of times, I decided to be extra courteous and try to verbally pass along information to the IT departments of certain institutions.

So the conversation would go like this:

Me: One of your computers is spewing worms / virii / bad mojo.
Them: No I don't think so.
Me: I'm quite certain by the log.
Them: Yeah... have you ever heard the term spoofing?
Me: Yeah... have you ever heard of (offending IP address)?
Them: (Silent cursing.)

The silent cursing was really the fun part, especially one time when the offender was an internationally known cathedral.

Re:Thank God for people....

[brunogirin]

Surely, as an IT professional, you should know it is *mandatory* to misread instructions and information and then blame it on the third party who provided said information?

I can't remember the number of times I've had suppliers and customers who were alledgedly professional IT people fail to properly read clear instructions, let alone log files. They then come back to you and tell you something is wrong, only for you to discover that they forgot a step that was explicitly marked as important or failed to read the word NOT, written in capital, bold, red letters.

So misreading a Lynx access in a log file for a hack attack seems highly plausible. Of course, at the moment, we don't know much about the matter so when the investigation comes to a conclusion it could be a "Clued On IT Staff Saves Tsunami Relief Web Site From Vile Attacker" or "Stupid Moron Gets Innocent Tsunami Disaster Benefactor Jailed" headline. Either way, tabloids will have a field day.

Re:Thank God for people....

[ArsenneLupin]

Me: Yeah... have you ever heard of (offending IP address)?
Them: (Silent cursing.)

Them: Have you ever heard of IP spoofing?

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 !

Re:Thank God for people....

[Dogtanian]

The silent cursing was really the fun part, especially one time when the offender was an internationally known cathedral.

How did you know they were cursing if it was silent? Did they use telepathy?

Re:Thank God for people....

[Snaller]

Well, these logs are very confusing and not really readable. Apache should start writing more readable logs.

Re:Thank God for people....

[cbreaker]

I don't know what Shaw is like, but Comcast seems to be similar.

I really like Comcast. They don't block any ports and none of the pushing from the big companies has forced them to do so. You pay for Internet service and you get it, full service with no restrictions.

When Nimda was around, they'd run automatic probes to check if someone was vulnerable. If their script came back as yes, they'd shut off your connection, and you could make a quick phone call and have it turned back on after speaking with someone. They did the same thing with open relays, although this doesn't seem to stop malware from sending out spam (since you don't need to be a relay to send out a set of spam.)

Even though there's a lot of really terrible technicians at Comcast, at least the don't inhibit your full use of what you pay for.

My provider, Cox, has taken another route. They block Outbound 25, and they block inbound: 53udp/tcp, 21, 23, 110, 143, 25, 80, 443, and several others. While this does stop spam from being sent, it also allows them to charge 10x more for an "unrestricted" service at the same speed and service level (ie no guarentees.)

I'd rather deal with a little more spam filtering then have my access restricted because of people that don't protect their systems.

Re:Thank God for people....

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

Perhaps they wanted you to set the Security level for the Internet Zone to "Low". ;)

Re:Thank God for people....

[RomulusNR]

Some of them have/had idiots reading SpamCop reports, too.

I was threatened with a $500 "cleanup fee" by Faradic a couple years ago when some email harvester selling website search engine placement services pulled off the email addresses of people on my quote list page, and sent them ads offering to sell them placements services for *my* page. Since my URL appeared in the email, it was of course *me* that was sending out spam. I had my primary account turned off for a week while I fought via email and phone tag with the idiot on the front line. (Eventually I got a hold of an actual sysadmin who got me set back up, but the front line idiot insisted that I was getting a "one time reprieve".)

Of course, it doesn't help that SpamCop is clearly brain-dead as well, but at least some people *know* that, and research the reports, before they make accusations against customers.

Re:Thank God for people....

[Kymermosst]

I read your automatic complaint, and really, you failed to make it verbose enough. Keep in mind that first-level support (and that is sure to include some lackey who is the one opening the mailbox for abuse@whereever) is a minimum-wage phone/e-mail monkey who's job is to decide who to forward the complaint to (or ignore it in some cases), quite often assisted by an expert system.

Your complaint could have been worded in a much better (although more verbose and nontechnical manner) style that would have created much more desired result. Here's a sample:

Dear Support,

My computer system has recently been under attack by viruses! We're just sitting here minding our own business (with our business service), and suddenly the alarm bells started going off. A quick look at the firewall revealed a virus attack!!! This attack has been disrupting our service and it is causing us to reconsider having my internet service with you.

I looked at the log, and it said:

# 08/07/2002 17:26:56 10.161.0.88.3549 > 192.168.93.250.http: S 1976574437:1976574437(0) win 16384 <mss 1460,nop,nop,sackOK> (DF)
# 08/07/2002 17:26:57 10.161.0.88.3597 > 192.168.93.250.http: S 1979108571:1979108571(0) win 16384 <mss 1460,nop,nop,sackOK> (DF)
# 08/07/2002 17:26:58 10.161.0.88.3602 > 192.168.93.250.http: S 1979506844:1979506844(0) win 16384 <mss 1460,nop,nop,sackOK> (DF)

These times are in GMT. The firewall also said:

possible nimda scan detected from IP 10.161.0.88 (alb-10-161-0-88.attack-domain.com.) at 08/07/2002 17:26:56

It looks like the computer whose IP address is 10.161.0.88 has a virus.

I did a quick look at the log of our web server, and it said:

# 10.161.0.88 - - [08/Jul/2002:10:26:57 -0700] "GET /scripts/root.exe?/c+dir HTTP/1.0" 404 281 "-" "-"
# 10.161.0.88 - - [08/Jul/2002:10:26:58 -0700] "GET /MSADC/root.exe?/c+dir HTTP/1.0" 404 279 "-" "-"
# 10.161.0.88 - - [08/Jul/2002:10:26:58 -0700] "GET /c/winnt/system32/cmd.exe?/c+dir HTTP/1.0" 404 289 "-" "-"

That sure seems to settle it as a virus attack. I hope this information is useful to you!

Sincerely,
Me

Your problem is that your attack log that you sent automatically looks like a bunch of mumbo-jumbo to a first-level e-mail monkey.

Key ideas behind my letter: (1) It looks like a human being wrote it. (2) It conveys a human attitude. (3) It implies that it is causing a great disruption. (4) It threatens that you will take your business elsewhere if they don't do anything about it. (5) It still has all the relevant log information, so when it makes it past the first-line monkey, someone who *can* read a log will know what to do.

Re:Thank God for people....

[TechyImmigrant]

>Two and a half inches long, dark green/brown and stained with a little blood on the end, it was close to the consistency of a pencil eraser in parts, moving to the consistency of jello at one end.

Will you be auctioning it on Ebay?

Re:Thank God for people....

[Stephen Samuel]

I have a couple of problems with your 3 and 4:

First of all, never lie. That can come back to bite you. In this case, if they paniced and misread the log, they might cut off our connection and then send the threatening email. This would be very bad.
The second issue is that these emails did not only go to shaw.They went to whichever ISP claimed responsibility for the offending IP. Sometimes they sent the complaints back to shaw tryin to pin the error on me. It just doesn't work to threaten to stop dealing with someone who you're not dealing with them to begin with.

Re:Thank God for people....

[temojen]

I think a better response than

Yeah... have you ever heard of (offending IP address)?

would be

Yeah... have you ever heard of TCP?

Most of the modern (non-mail) worms spread through TCP services, and TCP is much harder to spoof than UDP as doing so would require control of 1 or more routers between the spoofed and the target.

Re:Thank God for people....

[parliboy]

Good to know -- thanks for the tip.

Re:Thank God for people....

[fireman sam]

XP has been patched. Not sure about the rest but MS does know about it.

Re:Thank God for people....

[rhuntley12]

Kinda funny thing happened to me. Right before I moved my Xbox with my second xbox live account blew up. My CC expired that month and I cancelled my phone service. Well Microsoft will only let you cancel an account if you call them. At the time it was just a free account due to a game I bought, I guess you can cancel those before billing starts, no luck for me, xbox is gone. Well I hadn't heard anything for a couple months and I recently got a letter saying they couldn't charge my credit card and I owe them something like $15. Well I wrote them an email explaining I didn't have a telephone and the time I do have access to one at work are outside their regular hours. Their response was to please call them. I really hope it was just an automated response....

Re:Thank God for people....

[Kymermosst]

First of all, never lie. That can come back to bite you. In this case, if they paniced and misread the log, they might cut off our connection and then send the threatening email. This would be very bad.

Well, depends on what you consider a "great disruption" and whether or not you are willing to go through with #4, but I suppose you're right.

The second issue is that these emails did not only go to shaw.They went to whichever ISP claimed responsibility for the offending IP. Sometimes they sent the complaints back to shaw tryin to pin the error on me. It just doesn't work to threaten to stop dealing with someone who you're not dealing with them to begin with.

Ah, well, that makes a big difference. I take back #3 and #4 completely and would reword that opening paragraph.

I hope you saw the points with #1 and #2, though. I've seen people react to something they didn't quite understand right off the bat with a reaction completely opposite from what you expect.

Actually, people quite often misread new law that way. They skip over a word due to the legalese, and suddenly they think the gov't is crashing down on top of their way of life. In reality, they just overreacted to a misunderstanding of what they were reading.

Re:Thank God for people....

[Stephen Samuel]

1 and 2 are a choice of style. many sites do NOT want conversational filler. It just gets in the way of finding the facts needed for the investigation.

These people probably go thru hundreds of complaint emails a day. My system is automated, so they sometimes will get 3 or 4 emails from me in a day. There's no real value in pretending that I sat down to write the thing in person. Again: Don't lie. It just gets in the way of the real work. I did deal directly with the supervisor at Shaw, and he didn't even vaguely ask for conversational patter.

As one TV investigator was prone to say: "Just the facts, mam."

I'm actually coming from the point of view that they intend to respond. If they're intending to respond, then I just want to get out of the way as much as possible. If they don't intend to respond, then I'm not going to waste my time on them. They're not going to hear from me again unless they email to ask me for more data or I get another attack from a machine in their IP range.

More important is to remove the ambiguities -- any opportunity for them to misread the heart of the message. For example: Looking back at my original letter, I see the line:

possible nimda scan detected from IP 10.161.0.88 (alb-10-161-0-88.attack-domain.com.) at 08/07/2002 17:26:56

'Possible nimda scan detected from' can be read two ways... I could be read that '10;161.0.88' is Detecting the attack. I would now change remove the word 'detected' and go with:

possible nimda scan by IP 10.161.0.88 (alb-10-161-0-88.attack-domain.com.) at 08/07/2002 17:26:56

Bonus Browser

[orangeguru]

Lynx - the adventure browser ...

Re:Bonus Browser

[ninji]

LOL wish I could mod this up! Text based and still more adventure then a full 3d game!

Re:Bonus Browser

[mkosmul]

A text-based adventure, that is. Just like ... nethack. Could the name be a coincidence ?

He could still have tried to break in...

[Essef]

Just because he was using lynx does not mean he was not trying to break into the site.

Re:He could still have tried to break in...

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet it's a mickeysoft admin and he just googled what Lynx was and thought "jipes" a geek and pushed a big red button like it says on page 6534 of his Mickeysoft web admin book...

Re:He could still have tried to break in...

[odyrithm]

The kids intuitive, you can lean allot from him people of slashdot.

But aside from the joking, being a brit and having used BT for ADSL; yes I would say they are moronic enough to have done something as stupid as this.

Re:He could still have tried to break in...

[jim_v2000]

True. I'm sure whoever the guy was checking hte logs knew what Lynx was, unless he was Indian or something, then I could understand. Anyway, I doubt anyone would get nailed for as simple a transaction as clicking a donate button. I'm sure hte logs would show that, and it wouldn't stand out. This guy was probably up to something...maybe trying to reroute donations or something.

Re:He could still have tried to break in...

[mwood]

You should see what some sites look like in Lynx. You have to fish around for a long time to find out where they hid the page you want.

Of course, some sites look like a rubbish heap no matter *what* browser you use.

Re:He could still have tried to break in...

[NuclearDog]

Some sites look _better_ in Lynx, actually.

Lynx doesn't display background images.

ND

Re:He could still have tried to break in...

[mwood]

Can't argue with that. No noise from the speakers, no annoying "shoot the whatever" animations, no Flash, no most of the gunk that makes the contemporary WWW a painful, enervating experience.

Oh, yeah, no fancy mouse-overs. That alone is worth the trouble to build lynx from source.

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 ");

Hope he gets the sysadmin locked up

[Anonymous Coward]

for false imprisonment, and sued for slander, liable, an anything else he can think of.

Re:Hope he gets the sysadmin locked up

[raehl]

for false imprisonment, and sued for slander, liable, an anything else he can think of.

He'll have a tough time on the false imprisonment and the slander without the liable.

Re:Hope he gets the sysadmin locked up

[Eivind]

Not quite, but almost.

If you are wrongfully jailed you'll get compensation. BUT they'll subtract "housing and food", i.e. the value of the bed and the food in prison from your compensation. Which lead some journalists to report that you're supposed to "pay for jail".

Re:Hope he gets the sysadmin locked up

[eraserewind]

If you are wrongfully jailed you'll get compensation. BUT they'll subtract "housing and food", i.e. the value of the bed and the food in prison from your compensation. Which lead some journalists to report that you're supposed to "pay for jail".

How else would they report it? It seems like paying for jail is exactly what is happening.

Re:Hope he gets the sysadmin locked up

[DrSkwid]

It is the police whom one prosecutes for wrongful arrest and false imprisonment.

You get about 600 pounds per hour minus the cost of the coffee and food.

The Hunt Saboteur's Association and it's members were avid claimants which brought about a shift in policy for the police forces attending hunt meetings once the cost of blanket arrests starting reaching the tens of thousands of pounds.

On the flip side the police invented something they called "de-arresting" whereby you would spend an hour in the van and then be let go, with no police paperwork it is almost impossible to sue.

Then the govt. made protecting wildlife illegal and the balance of power was restored to the blood sport participants. That is until new legislation which might be introduce this year banning hunting with hounds, though not other forms of countryside carnage.

Re:Hope he gets the sysadmin locked up

[Eivind]

It's a matter of definition I guess. The idea is that you get two different forms of compensation. First you get compensated what you've "lost" in real cash. This typically means something like your salary for the time you where imprisoned minus what you saved by having the state give you food and a bed.

Then there's compensation for the suffering of being imprisoned. i.e. the fact that being in prison is less desireable than being a free person, even if you get the same cash for it.

A person wrongfully imprisoned in the UK gets compensated for this from the state. Yeah, he gets compensated a tiny bit less than he would be if he'd had to buy his own food in jail. If "the compensation is smaller than it'd otherwise be" is what you mean by "pay" then I guess he does pay for being in prison.

But that's a bit like saying if I get paid a bit less from my employer because I have free lunch at work (i.e. the value of the lunch is subtracted from my salary) then I *pay* to work for my employer. The situation really is quite parallell. I get compensation for being at work. This compensation is a bit smaller because I also had a benefit at work (i.e. food). Similarily you get compensated for being wrongfully imprisoned, said compensation gets a bit smaller because you also had benefits in prison (i.e. food)

He doesn't pay for being imprisoned -- on the contrary he *gets* paid for being wrongfully imprisoned. He does however pay for food.

Re:Hope he gets the sysadmin locked up

[Tooky]

The whole problem with this argument is that the only reason that person has eaten the prison food and used the prison bed is because they were wrongfully imprisoned.

Re:Hope he gets the sysadmin locked up

[MPolo]

Don't you understand marketing? How else are they going to get people to pay for prison food? This is just an extremely well-marketed product that people buy without even thinking about it.

Re:Hope he gets the sysadmin locked up

[AndrewRUK]

Maybe, just maybe, this one uncorroborated report nght be not entirly accurate. It could be a hoax (either with boingboing.com being an active participant in that, or with them having been tricked, too), it could be that the person really was trying to crack the site, and happened to be using Lynx in the process.

At the moment, all we know is that someone was arrested for allegedly trying to crack the DEC website, and that boingboing.com have posted a copy of a message sent by an unknown person to an unknown mailing list saying that somone who accessed the DEC site using Lynx was arrested, and that they hope to have more details soon.

Re:Hope he gets the sysadmin locked up

[thej1nx]

At least it can't be as bad as it was for the birmingham six chaps... http://theearthcenter.com/Members%20Area/membersar eaarticle13.html

One of them acknowledgedly wrongfully jailed for 25 years, was actually made to pay more than £3000 to the government, for every year he spent in jail.

Re:Hope he gets the sysadmin locked up

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

The "food and board" charges aren't even the most abhorrent thing. If you work out the timeline, it took years for the compensation payment (almost a million pounds) to arrive. During that time, the government made some temporary payments adding up to around 300,000, but then they charged over 70,000 interest on those when they made the final payment...

Re:Hope he gets the sysadmin locked up

[Riddlefox]

When I was in college, the food was notoriously horrible. Everyone who ate at the cafeteria got the runs, every time. The food was simply awful.

After a bit of searching on the web, we found out that the company our college contracted to do the food for our campus did most of their business with federal and state prisons. A bit of dumpster diving behind the cafeteria revealed boxes that indicated that the company served the same food to us college students as they did to the murderers and rapists in prison.

And the worst thing was, if you lived on campus, you were required to have a meal plan! That's how you get people to pay for prison food.

Re:Hope he gets the sysadmin locked up

[DrSkwid]

you don't have to wonder, I'm pretty sure you can guess I was a sab !!

Re:Hope he gets the sysadmin locked up

[arekq]

But, does the compensation include OT?

governments are funny.

[ctime]

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 ;]

Re:governments are funny.

[tonsofpcs]

The site operator has most likely never seen a proper HTTP request.

Re:governments are funny.

[L.Bob.Rife]

But the real question is, did this request go through a judge to get a warrant, or was it simply some sysadmin making a claim (which could be easily refuted by an expert) and the police arresting somebody on one mans word.

Will police arrest somebody if I claim they killed somebody, or do they still need evidence?

Re:governments are funny.

[James Fryer]

If someone makes a statement to the police, that is evidence, and they can arrest on the strength of it (in the UK at least).

Re:governments are funny.

[ContemporaryInsanity]

As an example, I once had a phone call from the police (uk) informing me that someone (an ex) had made a (false) complaint of harrasment against me. They explained that if another complaint were to be made they *would* arrest me, even with no evidence! It turned out that she was the one who ultimately got arrested though, but not for making a false claim...

Re:governments are funny.

[James Fryer]

Just to reiterate, a statement to the police *is* evidence.

Re:governments are funny.

[slavemowgli]

Well, I think they will at least investigate when you do that, and I wouldn't be *too* surprised if they arrested that person, too. Of course, without a judge's warrant, they'd have to release him again after 24 hours (or a similar amount of time, depending on where you live), and if it turns out that you were just playing a prank or something like that, then I'd predict that you'd be the one in trouble.

Of course, appropriate measures in case of an accusation of murder may be different from the appropriate measures in case of an alleged hacking attempt, but ultimately, yes, the police *does* have the ability to arrest people without obtaining a judge's warrant first. And usually, that's a good thing, too, because when a cop sees someone rob a bank (for example), you want them to be able to arrest that guy right away (or try to) instead of having to ask for a warrant first. :)

It *is* a system that can be potentially abused, of course, but the fact that you can only be arrested for so long without a warrant (unless you happen to on the receiving end of the usa's paranoia and end up in camp x-ray, of course) is one safeguard meant to prevent abuse.

Re:governments are funny.

[Molina the Bofh]

So you'd better mod me up or else I'll take these evidences to the police.

Re:governments are funny.

[demondawn]

I don't know about in the UK, but I got arrested here in the US because someone said I stole money from them. It turns out she had the money with her the whole time, and I was released, but the point is that the police needed nothing more than an accusation to go ahead and arrest me.

Oh com'on!

[LewsTherinKinslayer]

I'm normally the kind of guy who moderates these kind of comments -1 offtopic, but for the love of god, how is this news? Its not even corroborated.

Re:Oh com'on!

[Zentac]

I would have modded you off-topic, but than I read the commend below about teaching flash sites about accessibility by hitting them with Lynx...
Geuss where my modpoint went :)

Re:Oh com'on!

[Leo McGarry]

It's been a slow news day. If the increasingly inaptly named "editors" don't generate a certain minimum number of page views per day, they go on short rations.

Re:Oh com'on!

[AndyL]

Ooo! Ooo! I know! I Know! Your mod point was canceled when you posted in the same story as you moderated?

I had to use Lynx once

[LardBrattish]

I say jail 'em all
Using Lynx is just plain wrong!!! :)

Re:I had to use Lynx once

[grolschie]

Exactly!!!.... err... well... unless of course X is broken again... damn this meddling in /etc, always breaking stuff...

Re:I had to use Lynx once

[Anonymous Coward]

Using Lynx is just plain wrong!!!

No, using Lynx is just plain text.

Re:I had to use Lynx once

[wertarbyte]

You are right, (e)links is much better! :-) (Also support mouse control through SSH with PuTTY)

Re:I had to use Lynx once

[kbielefe]

Scoff if you will, but page render times on lynx are lightning fast even on a 486! Not to mention the fact that everyone who stops by my desk doesn't instantly recognize the slashdot color scheme when I'm supposed to be working.

Re:I had to use Lynx once

[bronaugh]

Dillo is faster. Dillo rocks.

Re:I had to use Lynx once

[AndroidCat]

Doesn't it use Curses? (Library for handling different terminal types.) Bummer if it doesn't work with my QVT-102.

Re:I had to use Lynx once

[JessLeah]

How the hell does it manage to do THAT? That's nifty.

No, *I* am Spartacus!

[cliffiecee]

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.

Re:No, *I* am Spartacus!

[Drakonite]

How is this different than any other day for a lot of us?

Sad thing is, it doesn't matter how many times I hit a flash based page with a text based browser it doesn't teach them anything, it only teaches me how bad so many webpage "programmers" are.

Re:No, *I* am Spartacus!

[oliverthered]

It should teach you that people can ignore you and still function perfectly haply and even make and probably make more money that if they had catered for you.

When was the last time you purchased taylor made shoes?

Re:No, *I* am Spartacus!

[Zentac]

I understand that you would like to be able to use everything everywhere, but you should understand that a lot of flash sites try to offer a visual experiance, much more than offer you information. You could argue that they are still ignorant, witch is probably tru, but I think most people will just disregard it, even if you explain to them and get them to understand that there still are some people who use text based browsers

Re:No, *I* am Spartacus!

[Skuld-Chan]

I don't see what Windows has to do with anything. Besides Lynx runs on Windows too.

Re:No, *I* am Spartacus!

[Drakonite]

Flash for a "visual experience" might be one thing, but when flash is required for me to navigate an informational website, they screwed up.

I've lost track of the number of times I've went to a companies webpage to checkout a product before buying it, only to find it requires a horrible flash setup to see even the small bit of product information.

And yes, as a good nerd should I refuse the buy the product from that company, but since they have no way to know it doesn't do anything to change the problem.

Re:No, *I* am Spartacus!

[shanmuha]

Why shouldnot I use a windows based Lynx...or even change the browser identification string in Mozilla? Even that would be sufficient to get 'attention', I believe.

Re:No, *I* am Spartacus!

[oliverthered]

It also costs them nothing more if you use a screen reader or IE instead of Lynx.

Show me a Dev who can code something that's got a good look and feel to bobby and 902 compliance etc... as quickly as a web monkey can knock something up in flash.

Oh, and they have to cost 'less' by you mark.

"And less to hire web devs...."

So, it begs the question What the fuck are you on about?

Re:No, *I* am Spartacus!

[oliverthered]

They wouldn't be in business if it wasn't good.
Microsoft screwed up, look how much money they make.

Re:No, *I* am Spartacus!

[minus9]

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

Who's this Taylor guy?

Re:No, *I* am Spartacus!

[millwall]

with all the embedded Flash around, some sites will be totally inaccessible... which would maybe teach them a lesson about accessibility.

How can you using Lynx - not being able to access a website - teach anyone else about accessibility?

The result is simply going to be that you're not going to see the website.

Re:No, *I* am Spartacus!

[pjt33]

I'm a Taylor, but I don't make shoes.

Re:No, *I* am Spartacus!

[Tim C]

No, you need to calm down and wait for all the facts to become available before going off half-cocked and protesting something that may not even have happened.

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof"; the claim that the guy was arrested for using lynx to access the site is extraordinary, and yet so far, I see no proof at all.

Re:No, *I* am Spartacus!

[pgilman]

"How can you using Lynx - not being able to access a website - teach anyone else about accessibility?

"The result is simply going to be that you're not going to see the website."

no, there's another result; hits from lynx browsers will appear in the site's web access logs, and any statistics (cf. webalizer) derived therefrom.

the hope is that the site operators will see this and realize that they need to make their sites accessible to such browsers.

whether this is a realistic hope is another question. i'd guess that the vast majority of website operators are completely ignorant of such things. it's not that they don't care about accessibility to text browsers, but worse: they don't even know such things exist.

Re:No, *I* am Spartacus!

[NamShubCMX]

Chuck.

Re:No, *I* am Spartacus!

[AndroidCat]

When was the last time you purchased taylor made shoes?

I buy taylor made shoes, and my barber makes my suits.

Re:No, *I* am Spartacus!

[AndroidCat]

Change the UserAgent to "iDidit". Then when the police ask who was hacking... (Using "iDiot" works too.)

Re:No, *I* am Spartacus!

[mwood]

If I want a "visual experience" I will step outside to admire the sunset, or go to a museum. If I'm at your website, I want information. I make my own experiences.

Not to mention that Flash experiences are usually negative.

Re:No, *I* am Spartacus!

[Riddlefox]

Hmm, seeing as how I don't play golf, I don't buy Taylor Made shoes.

Re:No, *I* am Spartacus!

[oliverthered]

'but there was a dot.com company'

Like this one

Re:No, *I* am Spartacus!

[oliverthered]

that's what they said about Jesus, absolute genius when it came to spelling.

Re:No, *I* am Spartacus!

[Aardpig]

Who's this Taylor guy?

f(x+a) = f(x) + a f'(x) + a^2 f''(x)/2 +...

Re:No, *I* am Spartacus!

[hunterx11]

So people should ignore Google? Yeah, I'm sure that's going to make them wads of cash.

Re:No, *I* am Spartacus!

[oliverthered]

Well, this is how <A href-"http://www.powerquest.com/">this</a> site looks under lynx + /. lameness, not like <a href="http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/dailysucker/ ">the suckers</a> <a href="http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/powerquest.j pg">will have you think</a>...

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Re:No, *I* am Spartacus!

[Sloppy]

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.

Every day can be Lynx day. I'll just change this line in my squid.conf:

fake_user_agent Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.66; Zapitron 27-trit personal computer; InterContinental Ballistic Modem)

to

fake_user_agent Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.66; Zapitron 27-trit personal computer; Lynx hack attack - server successfully compromised)

Heck, do this at work, everyone, and let your whole company participate in Lynx day. ;-)

As for Flash, I never see that stuff anyway. I use the "Flash click-to-view" extension in Mozilla, and I hardly ever bother to click. Losing flash is like losing javascript -- you end up not missing it.

Re:No, *I* am Spartacus!

[Drakkenfyre]

I'm in! Name a date.

Re:No, *I* am Spartacus!

[Kirth]

When was the last time you purchased taylor made shoes?

Actually not from a taylor, but a shoe-maker. And it was yesterday.

You don't get medieval shoes off the shelf; so they're all handmade and specially tailored for you.

Re:No, *I* am Spartacus!

[assassinator42]

What about hitting it with my windows xp lynx?

Re:Morons.

[ganhawk]

I agree. If true, then this man should sue BT for the false alert!

How is this diffrent from arresting a customer going in to buy something getting arrested for theft.

Because everyone knows

[L.Bob.Rife]

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

Re:Because everyone knows

[ArsenneLupin]

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

They may think of it, but many would be too lazy to bother (because they assume, often correctly, that sysadmins at the vulnerable sites are too dumb to interpret the logs anyways).

Case in point, many crackers don't bother using open proxies when just "scouting out" SQL-injection vulnerable sites. They will use the proxy for the actual attack, but the "scouting" phase would still burn them, if the sysadmin were smart enough to check for blund and unsuccessful trials occuring a couple of days before the successful attack...

But then, if sysadmins were more paranoid about unsuccessful SQL injection attempts, lots of fine Irish people would end up being jailed innocently because of their last name...

Re:Because everyone knows

[Ford Prefect]

But then, if sysadmins were more paranoid about unsuccessful SQL injection attempts, lots of fine Irish people would end up being jailed innocently because of their last name...

That's O\'Reilly, you insensitive clod! ;-)

Re:Because everyone knows

[cerberusss]

It's not just hackers. I use Firefox on Linux, but I set the user agent to IE6 on Windows XP. I reason that this buys me a little more anonimity. I'm not doing anything "wrong", but it's always possible that I click on a non-office-safe link while browsing at a client site.

Re:Because everyone knows

[Bert64]

But by doing this, you are reinforcing certain webmasters belief that there is no other browser out there and that theres no reason why they shouldnt make sites using propriatory crap that consequently won't display on firefox, or on your linux box atall, forcing you to buy an expensive commercial os if you want to browse the web.

Re:Because everyone knows

[cerberusss]

I agree, it's a choice. But given the choice beteween advocacy and a little more security, I choose the latter.

Also, I'm a fulltime Linux user but whenever I encounter an IE-only site, I just fire up IE using Crossover Office, the Wine that works :D

Re:Because everyone knows

[emilymildew]

Yes, it is your responsibility, GP, to make Firefox known.

In other news, what? That's really stupid. He's not reinforcing anything.

Re:Because everyone knows

[Taladar]

Could you give an example for one of these "IE-only sites" I keep hearing about. I never found a single one of them with Opera in Linux in the last years (except for those that checked the ID String and told you you should use IE but the last one of those I had about 2-3 years ago and they are easy to fool by changing the ID)

Re:Because everyone knows

[Kwantus]

This is true. However, there are websites that go balls up if they don't see M$ or Netscape. What do you do with those but change the user-agent? (And try to complain to a human webmaster, but the standard response is "we can't support everything" and there is no #%$*^@ way to convince them that making a cripplesite is actually more work and more expense.)

But, regardless, I think I'll change my Konqi string to something like Lynx or curl or Ayame Emaya =)

Re:Because everyone knows

[ArsenneLupin]

I manage a big site. If I followed up on every probe attempting to crack passwords or connect via telnet, ftp or ssh, I would be spending all my time on the phone to the FBI. As it is, I just send an occasional email to abuse@ when there is something obvious. Scripts trying to login as "root" or "guest" I just ignore.

Interesting. Could you post the URL of your site? Thanks ;-)

Re:Because everyone knows

[|<amikaze]

ca.ingrammicro.com has checks to give you sane code if you identify as one particular brand of netscape (mozilla), and otherwise gives broken code that only works in IE. The Firefox team has identified this in the "advocacy" forum or whatever it was, but refuse to properly implement a parser that'll work with it because the code is hideous.

Re:Because everyone knows

[cerberusss]

Oracle its E-Business suite has a couple of modules (timesheet application, expenses declaration) which heavily relies on JavaScript. Last time I checked, it didn't work reliably with Netscape/Mozilla/FireFox.

Also, Oracle its webmail client (it's part of the Collaboration Suite) doesn't work reliably on any Mozilla version.

But you're right, there's not a whole lot that still only works in IE.

Re:Morons.

[ganhawk]

oops. I meant "how is this diffrent from a customer going into a shop to buy some, getting arrested for theft without proof"

I don't believe it

[John Seminal]

Thursday, January 27, 2005
Jailed for using a nonstandard browser

A Londonder made a tsnuami-relief donation using lynx -- a text-based browser used by the blind, Unix-users and others -- 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. From a mailing list:

For donating to a Tsunami appeal using Lynx on Solaris 10. BT [British Telecom] who run the donation management system misread an access log and saw hmm thats a non standard browser not identifying it's type and it's doing strange things. Trace that IP. Arrest that hacker.

Armed police, a van, a police cell and national news later the police have gone in SWAT styley and arrested someone having their lunch.

Out on bail till next week and preparing to make a lot of very bad PR for BT and the Police....

So just goes to show if you use anything other than Firefox or IE and you rely on someone else to interogate access logs or IDS logs you too could be sitting in a paper suit in a cell :(

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).

Re:I don't believe it

[bani]

the police arrested him based on a complaint from BT.

you see, BT = big corpration. big money. police = BT bitches. what BT says, police does. no questions asked.

though it looks like in this case, the unquestioning obedience of the police to BT is going to backfire in this case.

this is not too different from what happens in the usa. police being at the beck and call of big business. and every once in a while a PR disaster as some big corp makes a mistake and the police get a black eye for unquestioningly following it without any investigations.

Re:I don't believe it

[GreatBunzinni]

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).

According to the news, the guy was indeed jailed for using a different browser. What happened was that the site operator read the access logs and because he found the access logs a bit unusual (didn't recognized the browser identification and all), he reported them to the police, who raided the guy's house.

I am not absolutely sure if that is the whole story or if it is missing something (journalists... bah....) but if it isn't, it is quite alarming.

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.

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.

Re:I don't believe it

[gl4ss]

they don't do investigations before confiscating the computers and the evidence.

and if bt says that they were tried to hacked by some uber hacker.. then that's how they're going to act untill they got some other information on it.

it's not that unheard of that clueless admins think all kinds of normal activity to be abnormal and call in the cops.. especially if it makes for a good excuse why their system has been down or whatever.

Re:I don't believe it

[Anonymous Coward]

Police are a little like robots. Once you let them go they WILL follow instructions. As they interpret them, not as their Creator might intend for them. Also they're only going to sensitive to the elements of the enviroment that directly pertain to their function. So sometimes funny things will happen. Such as shooting someone to death with a non-leathal weapon.

Re:I don't believe it

[dbIII]

I wouldn't put it past the police/judges in any country of being largely ignorant of what a browser agent really means

I see it as being "the expert says this guy is a hacker, so we arrest him" - while the reality is that the "expert" isn't an expert and is not under adult supervision.

I think we'll see a lot more of this sort of thing. Hopefully we'll get more info so the words "you got a customer arrested because you were too ignorant to do your job properly?" follow this guy around for his entire career - if justified.

I use lynx regularly, as do many others, any sysadmin who has never heard of it is inexperienced. If someone in a workplace is browsing pr0n for eight hours a day, the only safe way (grannies doing what?) to confirm that the URLs have dodgy content is lynx or similar things, or it's the simplest way to see if your web server is up or not from a console in the cold depths of a server room.

Re:I don't believe it

[d_strand]

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

BWAAAHAAAAAHHAAAAA!!! No wait, this is not even funny.

1) The police arrested him because they thought he was hacking stuff, not because he was using Lynx.

2) The police arrest people for insane reasons all the time in 99% of all countries. While I firmly believe there was no evil intent from enyones side in this particular case, you really need to wake up: The police are only human and most of them do whatever the people who pay their bills tell them to (that means the government, not the taxpayer).

3)The fact that the guy was released in a few days shows us that the system is limping along OK. The "sysadmin" making the hacking claim OTOH, should now be arrested for criminal negligence/incompetence or something

Re:I don't believe it

[dasunt]

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).

Assuming that the story is legit, it does seem odd that someone clueful enough to read logs would be ignorant of other browsers to the point of believing that it was a hacking attempt.

What if they were using some sort of turnkey intrustion decection software that falsely flagged lynx as a hack attempt?

(Proudly posted with w3m. Look ma, I'm *hacking* Slashdot!)

Re:I don't believe it

[ErikZ]

Seriously. My site gets many hits from non-standard browsers and people who mask their browser.

Re:I don't believe it

[basingwerk]

Also, the coppers in Britain are sensitive to tsunami hacking issues, because they found a bloke who had sent 40 false emails out to the familes of missing people and told them that thier relations were dead! He pretended he was in the government Home Office. The bloke got 6 months inside.

Re:I don't believe it

[0x0000]

the police arrested him based on a complaint from BT

As you say - which points up yet another possiblility:

Does the complainant (the BT employee who reported the incident) know the individual that was arrested?

Maybe sysadmin had some grudge against the user and used the fact that the user is not using "approved" software/hardware in order to - what, avoid paying off a wager? Providing support for a non-approved OS/browser? Revenge for getting beaten in a game or dissed in a net post? Could be a social vendatta, or a personal grudge. A sysadmin trying to protect his job. Lots of possiblities there... had teh guy arrested and gotten his equipment confiscated for some reason that had nothing to do with what the guy was doing or what s/w he was using ... I hope the British cops have sufficient technical expertise that they don't have to depend solely on BT's "expert" to make a case - or not, as the case maybe.

There were some articles about Britians efforts to acquire and use IT expertise within the law enforcement community. That expertise should definitely be applied in a case like this.

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.

Re:I don't believe it

[Threni]

He's been arrested, not jailed. Even if he's remanded into custody that doesn't constitute `jailing`, in the sense that practically everyone understands `jailing` to involve keeping someone in custody after being found guilty, unless perhaps this happened in a country which doesn't bother with trials before jailing someone.

Re:I don't believe it

[vidarh]

unless perhaps this happened in a country which doesn't bother with trials before jailing someone

Well, that part does seem to apply to the UK at the moment, even though the Law Lords found it illegal.

Re:I don't believe it

[Council]

My first reaction was:

This has all the markings of a story retold by someone who grabbed a few selective details and made them into a blog story that is so good that no one questions it. I'm really hoping that someone comes up with the actual facts here; I see boingboing has a note that they'll have more details soon. Hopefully it'll be explained then.

I asked around, and from what I hear, he was using both lynx AND nmap. So right away he's doing more than he should be. I can't find the sources, but some friends who have dug in further say he was in fact simply trying to hack it. Again, someone should corrobarate soon, and I hope it doesn't get swept aside by the blog flood.

As I said when this story first came up on boingboing,

"Well, this will hit /. eventually, and it won't matter what the facts are, we'll get to sit back and watch the thread pee its collective pants with joy at the perfect victimization story."

Re:I don't believe it

[wraith0x29a]

Yup, Just try downloading 'McAfee Anti-Virus Command-Line for Unix' from NAI's website without IE or Firefox. About three times a week I have to download it from a GUI, upload it to an ftp site and download it to the server from there. Grrrrr.

Re:I don't believe it

[I confirm I'm not a]

unless perhaps this happened in a country which doesn't bother with trials before jailing someone

Well, that part does seem to apply to the UK at the moment, even though the Law Lords found it illegal.

Dude, be fair! Currently it's only Johnny Foreigner who can be detained indefinitely without trial! And it's only in the interests of fairness that the Government are changing the law to allow anyone in the UK to be detained indefinitely!

(Disclaimer: humour. And I'm planning to emigrate before Straw-Blunkett-Clarke does anymore damage to our freedoms).

Re:I don't believe it

[hattig]

Sucks for the guy though, he is going to incur lawyer fees, lost wages, the fact that he was jailed for being generous, etc. I hope he gets the arrest annulled, otherwise every job application in the future is going to be fun for him - "I was arrested for making a charitable donation online."

He is currently out on bail, that means that the investigation is still ongoing as well. Hopefully it'll be dropped, but who knows!

Re:I don't believe it

[AK Marc]

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.

The really suspicious part is that there is suposedly a sysadmin that actually checks logs.

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?"

Re:Did he file a bug report?

[Reorax]

Try re-installing or running Lynx as root. If that fails, delete your ~/.lynx/I_PWN_JOO directory.

Re:Did he file a bug report?

[Aardvark99]

That's not a bug, it's a feature!

I understand why the admin was so suspicious...

[Jaidon]

...Lynx has that oh-so-scary Y and X in there. It looks very L33t and hacker-friendly. Now, if that poor guy had only used Links instead, this whole mess wouldn't have happened. There's nothing scary about an I and a K is there? Though I guess you could use them to say Mikrosoft. That's kinda creepy I suppose.

Re:I understand why the admin was so suspicious...

[zwei2stein]

not that there is nothing scarry about Myxrosoft ... :]

Re:I understand why the admin was so suspicious...

[wraith0x29a]

"Though I guess you could use them to say Mikrosoft."

Errr, no you couldn't 'cos they would probably sue you

You might eventually get a free X-Box and tour of Microsoft HQ out of it though.

Cool hack

[farmhick]

I didn't even know the Lynx was able to go online. And then to be arrested just because you use old technology, what a bother.

Re:Cool hack

[koi88]

I didn't even know the Lynx was able to go online.

I have a similiar device. I've never used it for web browsing, though. Am I safe?

Re:Cool hack

[farmhick]

Well, maybe he tied a couple of bills to it and threw it through the charity's front window. Then they could say he crashed their Windows with something called Lynx. The reporter could have just gotten a little confused in the details.

What's that ?

[Liquid Len]

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

Re:What's that ?

[kaedemichi255]

Four, you insensitive clod!

Re:What's that ?

[EsbenMoseHansen]

It's allegedly quite common among the blind....

Re:What's that ?

[j1bb3rj4bb3r]

You mean the three of them left.

Re:What's that ?

[l3v1]

Funny how's that got mod to funny. These days, I guess, it's just fashionable to pity the good old days. Not that many years ago (and I mean not that many, I'm myself under 30 for a few more years) I remember quite well how I used lynx on a regular, well, everyday basis. And it was good. After you had known, mastered, even exploited all the quirks and peculiarities, it was quite good. Then came links, which was even better.

Well, I clearly also remember that after my first experience with IE (knowing Netscape for a while before that) I very heavily felt the urge to go back to my lynx days, that's for sure.

Now what's the stuff that matters ? That there are sysadmins who don't even know what the darn lynx is, better, send the police on some poor guy.

May the holiness of doom's frag eat all those despising lynx :P

Re:What's that ?

[TeknoHog]

You mean the three of them [Lynx users]?

The rest of Lynx users have migrated to w3m, as it's lighter and more capable (e.g. frames). Thus only three are stuck with Lynx.

Re:What's that ?

[lachlan76]

You mean the three of them ?

Two of them now ;)

Re:What's that ?

[BiDi]

You mean the three of them ?
Only two now...

Re:What's that ?

[strider44]

You obviously haven't fucked up your X-Server yet have you? They try to make it as idiot-proof as possible, but I am a very strong idiot it seems.

Re:What's that ?

[Bert64]

Atleast one site i host (A game site called BNT = http://bnt.burmeseonline.net) has 1% of hits coming from lynx users, atleast a few hundred hits per day most days..

Re:What's that ?

[Bert64]

Oops, that should be http://bnt.burmeseonline.org Not .net

Re:What's that ?

[wraith0x29a]

I still use Lynx all the time. The servers we build have a web-front-end but no X-server.
Lynx is perfect for configuring them and for grabbing stuff for the servers from websites when there is no client machine running a graphical browser available.

I still make all my personal websites Lynx compatable because there is no compelling reason not to and it saves me making a parallel 'blind friendly' version of the site.

According to my server stats there ~are~ a few people who browse my sites with Lynx but as we all know you can't trust useragent strings so I haven't called the police. Yet.

Re:What's that ?

[jellomizer]

A Lot of blind people do like using lynx. It is a much affordable system telnetting or ssh to a Unix/Linux server with some cheap text to voice software. It gets the work done. Even on old computers.

Re:What's that ?

[grandmofftarkin]

Surely, you mean elinks!!! ;-)

Re:What's that ?

[millette]

w3c even supports images in an xterm as seen in this debian screenshot.

Re:What's that ?

[mwood]

lynx is also great for those times when the fancy-schmantzy browser just sits there running the throbber, or the maladjusted sites that mark detached signatures in some way that makes them just disappear when you try to download them.

wget is even better for the latter, however.

Re:What's that ?

[BVD]

I use lynx just because it gets rid of frames. If you set your slashdot settings correctly, /. looks better in lynx than any other browser. My typical style is firefox when surfing, but once I have a mental image of the site in my mind, I start viewing it in lynx.

Re:What's that ?

[archen]

I'm not sure I get these "har har, no one uses a text browser" posts either. What do you think blind people use? Do people really think IE and it's pop-up/Active-X haeven are conductive to a user who can't see the screen? I'd be surprised if a blind person would use lynx over 'links' or 'elinks' but these are up to the user.

Different users have different needs, and not everyone needs to see pictures. Some people may prefer a text interface, for others its an important feature.

Re:What's that ?

[strider44]

what I was doing was recompiling the kernel to specifically add some modules that I wanted in there. It was not a "normal" activity. But yes, I forgot to install then imediately when I had the X-Server to use download and install the nvidia drivers, but I didn't do that so I had to go through lynx.

Stupidest mod ever

[mirko]

That idiot doesn't know that besides Lynx, there is also Links.

Parent is not offtopic !

Re:Stupidest mod ever

[Anonymous Coward]

People don't seem to compalin nearly as much when their posts are modded UP incorrectly.

People do not compalin at all.

Re:Stupidest mod ever

[bicho]

It was probably the admin staff from BT that cought that "bogus" entry on their servers who first modded the comment offtopic

Re:Stupidest mod ever

[Kehvarl]

People don't seem to compalin nearly as much when their posts are modded UP incorrectly.

People do not compalin at all.

That's what you think. I compalin all the time.

Re:Stupidest mod ever

[Nodar]

I'm capalin, but I'm still gellin'

Re:Stupidest mod ever

[FCAdcock]

Ok, so who's got mod points to mod this person down for making such a dumb post? Honestly people, I think Slashdot needs a "lame" modifier of -5 for posts which mention

"gellin'"
"in Soviet Russia..."
How good the next Star Wars flop will be
"RFTM"
or just about any other comment we see 5,000 times a day...

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.

Re:Stupidest mod ever

[Kehvarl]

RFTM! In soviet russia the next Star Wars flop will be gellin! Like old people in korea, you insensitive clod. /me prays this gets ignored or manages a +1 funny, because his karma won't survive much else

Re:Stupidest mod ever

[Pharmboy]

People don't seem to compalin nearly as much when their posts are modded UP incorrectly.

Sure they do, but when they do complain about their posts being modded up, the complaints are always modded down below your threshold, so its a self correcting system.

Irony works.

Re:Stupidest mod ever

[Pharmboy]

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.

Actually, you are correct in your assessment of your prior days post being offtopic, and as such I would recommend your current post be modded Insightful due to the nature of the content as well as the usefullness of the supplied link...

Re:Stupidest mod ever

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

Overrated (and underrated) are immune from metamod.

Re:Stupidest mod ever

[Kent Recal]

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.

Actually, you are correct in your assessment of your prior days post being offtopic, and as such I would recommend your current post be modded Insightful due to the nature of the content as well as the usefullness of the supplied link...

While I agree with parents' reinforcement of grandparents yesterday-post being in no way interesting I propose to mod parent down (e.g. Overrated) due to the misleading confusion of "interesting" and "offtopic". Grandparents yesterday-post was in no way "interesting" (not offtopic, as parent stated) and grandparent asked for his todays post to be modded "offtopic" to balance it out. Parents malapropism implied grandparents' yesterday-post would offtopic, that's no fair as in fact it was only "not interesting".
In summary I propose to meta-moderate grandparents' yesterday posts "Interesting"-mods as "unfair", to moderate grandparents' post of today "Insightful" (agree with parent), parents post as "Overrated" and this post "Redundant".

Re:Stupidest mod ever

[SCPRedMage]

Actually, Read The F***ing Manual is quite old.

Re:Stupidest mod ever

[raybob]

When's the last time you meta-complained ?

Re:Stupidest mod ever

[julesh]

I just found this post through meta-moderation. It occurred to me that I was moderating a moderation of a post about the moderation of a post about the moderation of another post. This makes it meta-meta-meta-meta-moderation.

Re:Stupidest mod ever

[MikeDX]

In that case, you may as well always mod using those two and never fear the meta-moderators wrath!

Maybe there should be an option in user settings whereby you can choose to show or hide who you have modded up or down, or how much you mod up rather than down.. or.. ahh forget it, bye bye karma, I knew thee well!

The really shocking news is

[Advocadus Diaboli]

how can it be, that because some idiot of operator doesn't know how to read logs a police squad is going after someone and arresting him?

This is no fun at all. If its that easy to get someone in trouble and if there is no control instance (usually a judge) that approves such actions, then we are in greater danger than we ever exepected.

Re:The really shocking news is

[DrSkwid]

it goes like this :

"hello, police? yeah. This is Dve from the British Telecom security dept. (you know, the world's largest telecomms company). We have a suspicious person attacking our tsunami donations site, probably trying to steal credit card numbers. His address is ......., thanks bye"

It would be the same in any country I can think of.

"Hi buddy, this is Chuck from the security dept. at AT&T, someone's trying to break into our computer systems, his address is ......"

"Hey mate, this is Noleen from the security dept. at Telstra, someone's trying to break into our computer systems, his address is ......"

"Buenos dias Senior, this is Jose from the security dept. at Telefonica, someone's trying to break into our computer systems, his adobe is ......"

etc. etc.

(apologies to the world for my stereotypes !)

Re:The really shocking news is

[wraith0x29a]

I'm shocked that you are shocked.

Presumption of innocence : 0wn3d
Right to fair trial : Own3d
Freedom of speech : Own3d
Human rights : Own3d

All your freedoms belong to U.S.

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.

Re:call an @ an @

[Mr Guy]

Hey, if there's *** on the field, play ball.

Re:call an @ an @

[An Onerous Coward]

It does make me wonder what this guy's legal status would be if he was cleared of the original charge, but there was something unrelated on his hard drive that incriminated him.

Insightful???

[Anonymous Coward]

"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?

Re:Insightful???

[Eric604]

slashdot needs smily icons :P

Re:Insightful???

[LarsWestergren]

I actually thought it was pretty insightful, but I'll post instead of mod.

So far, all comments are supporting one of two hypotheses:
a) The story is a hoax, no one was arrested.
b) The story is true, OMG they are after us just for using Lynx!

Grandparent pointed out a possible third alternative:
The person was using Lynx, the bastard really tried to hack the tsunami relief site, and that's why he was arrested.

Re:Insightful???

[oliverthered]

Man found molesting child was eating apples.

That's head line new, a man was arrested whilst eating apples.

You watch too much FOX.

Re:Insightful???

[ArsenneLupin]

Or a fourth hypothesis:

• Most crackers are geeks.
• Many geeks use non-IE browsers.
• Therefore, among the population of non-IE using people, the percentage of hackers is slightly larger than in the general population.

So there might be indeed a weak correlation between lynx usage and cracking activity, even if this particular user was not trying to do anything wrong. Think of it like "browser profiling"...

Re:Insightful???

[slavemowgli]

The truth is, though, that it is unknown to us whether a connection exists or not. If someone eats apples, molests a child and is arrested for that, would you be outraged if they say "I was arrested for eating apples"? Probably not - rather, you'd point out that the very fact that there is no connection between the two things (eating apples and molesting children) means that their assertion is rubbish.

So, if someone is arrested for attempting to hack into a site and happens to be a lynx user, then why do you believe him when he's saying "I was arrested for using lynx" instead of point out that that's rubbish, too?

Now, of course, I don't *know* he was trying to hack into the site, and it may very well be that his statement (namely, that he was solely arrested because someone thought lynx was so unusual that it must have constituted a hacking attempt) is actually true. But I don't know he definitely wasn't, either, so I don't go about and ridicule those who point out that we do, in fact, not know which version is true.

Re:Insightful???

[ray-auch]

OK, except for confusing hackers and crackers.

Hackers are more likely to be using an unusal browser, granted.

Crackers are most likely script-kiddies these days, I see no reason to suppose they might be using unusual browsers

Re:Insightful???

[TeraCo]

No, that's pretty much the second hypothesis, just reworded a bit.

Re:Insightful???

[Antonymous Flower]

"Just because he eats apples doesn't mean he is not a child molester"

what if he eats apples while riding the ferris wheel in his back yard?

Re:Insightful???

[ghjm]

The hackers/crackers thing died 10 years ago. The problem with it was that "crackers" is a dorky word, so nobody wants to use it. If RMS had invented a better word for it back in 1983, it might have caught on. But the fact is, today, people who break into computer systems are called "hackers." If you want to distinguish between malicious ones and allegedly-nice ones, you now have to say "black hats" and "white hats."

Re:Insightful???

[ghjm]

It depends on whether you are a knight or a knave.

Re:Insightful???

[oliverthered]

I think I'm serious.

Woman drivers, what do you expect.

Re:Insightful???

[ktistec]

a) The story is a hoax, no one was arrested.

Well, anything could be a hoax, but I find this eminently believable. I heard somewhere (maybe even here ;-)about a fellow who got in trouble for using the 'find' command...

...You know all those 'permission denied' messages you see for all the directories you don't have permissions for? (Or rather, that you would see if you didn't redirect stderr...)

Well, don't you see, that's trying to break into those directories, isn't it?

Right?

Anyway, that's the view that was taken by the 'sysadmins' at whatever institution this was...

Then there are the librarians who believe that they've been 'hacked' when some student changes the wallpaper on one of the machines...

On the Windows machine I use at work, I've got a copy of my text editor. This... how to put it? ..._freaks_ my boss out. He hasn't told me to delete it, (some bosses would, though!) but it _disturbs_ him... Software he's never heard of on the machine! What if it does something weird in the middle of the night?

A lot of people have deeply irrational attitudes towards any aspect of computing beyond their knowledge -- there's something almost occult about knowing how to change wallpaper; using lynx, not using Notepad[1], y'know?

Heck, come to think of it, I've got a copy of lynx itself on the work machine, too. (Hope the boss doesn't find out! ;-) I was doing a little browsing during a break using lynx... A co-worker says, "what are you doing?"... "Looking at [whatever site]", I reply.

"So," she says very slowly, "you're... reading a story... OK..."

I tried to explain the concept of a non-graphical browser... Even showed her the same page in IE... I still don't think she grasped that I wasn't engaged in some fundamentally different -- and weird -- activity.

So, hell yeah, I believe someone sicced the cops on that guy!

1. Or, FTM, using a text editor at all. A lot of folks have no idea what a text editor is...

Re:Insightful???

[BitterOak]

randparent pointed out a possible third alternative: The person was using Lynx, the bastard really tried to hack the tsunami relief site, and that's why he was arrested.

I agree. A good analogy to the grandparent's post regarding the child molestor eating an apple is this. Suppose you read a newspaper headline and article about a man arrested on charges of child molestation. Suppose the article was light on details, but a picture is shown of the accused who happens to be eating an apple at the time the picture was taken. Who in their right mind would jump to the conclusion: "Oh my God! The police think he's a child molestor just because he's eating an apple!" I think that's the point the great-grandparent was trying to make, and I think he was rightfully modded Insightful.

Re:Insightful???

[Random832]

I'd believe it - not many other ways to explain the CS department's current policy that 'find' on directories not owned by you is explicitly forbidden

let me try

[delirium of disorder]

knoppix@ttyp0[usr]$ lynx http://www.dec.org.uk
[screen changes to ncurses mode]
[lynx output exited to pass lameness filter]

Tsunami Earthquake Appeal (p1 of 5)

Logo - Click to go to home page

Click here to continue to DEC website for more information

Click here for FAQ's

BT Logo

Tsunami Earthquake Appeal

DEC TSUNAMI EARTHQUAKE APPEAL

YOU CAN HELP - DONATE ONLINE

-- press space for next page --
Arrow keys: Up and Down to move. Right to follow a link; Left to
go back. H)elp O)ptions P)rint G)o M)ain screen Q)uit /=search

Re:let me try

[chrome]

In other news, famous slashdot dilettante "delirium of disorder (701392)" was arrested by the BT SWAT team earlier today for attempting to hack the dec.org.uk website using a one line command from his Linux machine. Linux is well known in the computer industry as the operating system of hackers, and all people who use Linux are evil hackers. Especially those using KDE.

Re:let me try

[wraith0x29a]

Konqueror->Tools->Change Browser Identification->Internet Explorer 6.0 on Windows XP

Phew. Safe again.

Seriously, any real webserver admin knows useragent strings mean nada, the only people who pretend to take them seriously are the people trying to prove their browser's market share is biggest.

Inexperienced techies shouldn't run big sites

[grundie]

Apart from the obvious hole BT have dug themselves in to, this goes to show that perhaps BT should employ more experienced staff to look after their high-profile websites. If the techie concerned thought Lynx was dodgy then clearly he hasn't been using the internet all that long.

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?

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. :)

Re:Another conspiracy by M$?

[sharkey]

Very low. Why break down the door when the Windows are wide open?

That's a bit scary

[Omniscientist]

I'm not a user of Lynx, but I use links quite often. The thought of being jailed due to my using of a text browser that makes the world of popups and the loading of images a world in another universe makes me laugh and slightly worried. I hope I don't decide to make a website about something relatively useful and get canned for it. Thinking that this is jail-able is an idea so exotic I'd never think of it.

https?

[beuges]

Last i used lynx (which admittedly was years ago), it didnt appear to support https connections. Is this still the case? I'd be more concerned about a "tsunami relief website" that accepted donations over a non-secure protocol.

Re:https?

[Dicky]

Lynx has (optionally) supported https for many years now - I used to use it for my online banking (one of the reasons I'm impressed by my bank's service - it uses javascript and stuff, but works fine without it) before I caught this nasty GUI bug...

Re:https?

[lachlan76]

It has HTTPS.

Re:https?

[ErikZ]

Red hat supports it out of the box. FreeBSD you have to make install the lynx-ssl port.

My new web host uses freebsd. Little things like "Yeah, lynx used to be able to connect to secure sites, but for some reason on FreeBSD it doesn't." has made me appreciate Red Hat and Cpanel.

Re:https?

[Boodlums]

Funny, I don't remember having to do a separate make install for ssl support on FreeBSD. I could just be going senile at 45, but I don't think so. :)

Re:https?

[ErikZ]

That's because you didn't do a seperate make install for ssl support on FreeBSD.

But if you just installed plain lynx it won't go to encrypted pages. You have to deinstall it and install lynx-ssl.

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:I am so paranoid

[interstellar_donkey]

Why do I have a feeling you wear a mask and non-descript dark clothes when you go to taco bell so you can't be identified by their security cameras. Pay only in cash, which you only handle with gloves on to avoid them finding your fingerprints, and simply point to what you want on the menu so nobody can get a voice print on you.

Because, you know, it's important that nobody ever knows what you do.

Also, you may want to consider purchasing a tin-foil hat. That would compliment your BSD setup perfectly.

Re:I am so paranoid

[berglin]

> 5. No frame tricks either. Lynx does not support frames.

Yes, it does. It will display a page that asks you which specific frame you're interested in.
Look at this:
http://wp.netscape.com/assist/net_sites/example1-N F.html
Or try this:
lynx http://wp.netscape.com/assist/net_sites/example1-N F.html

Re:I am so paranoid

[MyHair]

Amazing. Now please explain how you posted using a Slashdot account with no cookies and mandatory SSL. :-)

By the way, gotcha:

This virus works on the honor system:

If you're running a variant of unix or linux, please forward
this message to everyone you know and delete a bunch of your
files at random.

Re:I am so paranoid

[mwood]

I looked it up. Nope, virii is not a Latin plural of anything I could find.

vir (man) : viri
virus (poison, slime) : viri

"virii" would have to be plural of something like "virius", but I couldn't find such a word.

Re:I am so paranoid

[viperblades]

6 and 7b conflict each other.

Re:I am so paranoid

[madprof]

That would be so cool.

Re:I am so paranoid

[Renegrade]

Don't worry, we've extracted samples of your DNA, and tagged you with several redundant (classified) tracking devices that will track you anywhere in, under, or above the Earth. We've also implanted your brain with devices that can monitor your thoughts, as well as disable you should you become violent or make fun of the President.

We've installed keystroke loggers and patched your I/O stream functions, and replaced your copy of lynx, wget and links with an especially insecure version of IE running in text emulation mode.

We have all the private keys for all your encryption protocols, and have added special extra backdoor features to all protocols as added insurance. Most of these backdoors have the password or pass-phrase of 'password' and/or all-zero hex keys.

Our next plan will be to abduct you in the middle of the night, and place you in a simulated reality where you can do no harm. Once you commit your terrorist acts there, we can proceed to arrest, detain, question, and dissect you.

Yours Truly,
The Central Intelligence Agency.

PS. Don't give us any 'jurisdiction' crap. This is OUR planet. You are only here until we arrest you. And stop making 'the finger' at that camera. That's rude to our operators.

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/

Ask the horses mouth

[gtoomey]

The site is dec.org.uk

Theres an email link on the home page & I'm going to email them & ask if its true.

Re:Ask the horses mouth

[Ubi_NL]

I'd rather suggest we all check that page with lynx from all over the world and let them scream DDos attack to CNN

Re:Ask the horses mouth

[ArsenneLupin]

I'd rather suggest we all check that page with lynx from all over the world and let them scream DDos attack to CNN

Better yet: not just access the site, but actually make a (small) donation! Then something good will come out of this, other than just showing that there are still plenty of lynx users around.

Re:Ask the horses mouth

[Ubi_NL]

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.

Re:Ask the horses mouth

[syukton]

Actually, just because I don't go there on holiday, or live there, or have anything to do with there, does indeed make it right to ignore it. They are their own people with their own problems. If they can't be civil amongst themselves and bring themselves out of their pit of despair, are we supposed to go in and rescue them? How many times? Once? Twice? Every day? There's an old addage: give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for life. They don't need us to give them food or shelter, what they need is good old fashioned knowledge, education, wisdom, and all of that so that they can do their own farming, build their own houses, and so forth. Until they're ready to start being members of the civilized world, though, those that think they're helping out will keep giving them the fish, furthering their (the Sudanese people) dependence on us. We do more harm than good when we think we're helping. Ignore it. They'll either solve their problems themselves or somebody who has the right idea will come along and help to pull them past their challenges, but they'll do it themselves and there's a certain amount of pride to be had by a nation for doing such a thing; we should not rob them of that. We robbed Afghanistan of that; we robbed Iraq of that.

Just leave people alone I say, unless they ask for our help. But then, you need to help them, don't just serve them or make them dependent. You need to actually do your part if it is requested, but stay the hell out otherwise.

Re:Everyone is always connected.

[Narcocide]

Lain is the goddess of the internet. Wherever you go, she is with you always.

We have no confimation of the Lynx bit

[Kris_J]

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.

Re:We have no confimation of the Lynx bit

[davmoo]

Currently, only the man arrested knows the real story

At this point, we don't even know someone really has been arrested.

Re:We have no confimation of the Lynx bit

[I confirm I'm not a]

At this point, we don't even know someone really has been arrested.

We do. We also know s/he's been released on bail.

Re:We have no confimation of the Lynx bit

[sparkz]

We certainly haven't been exposed to any decent journalism yet.

You did check the URL first, right?

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'

First time using Links...

[YowzaTheYuzzum]

I just downloaded Links for the first time to try it out, headed to Slashdot, and the first article I see is how using Lynx can land you in jail... I guess I picked the right browser, didn't I?

Re:First Post - CowboyNeal called the cops

[Anonymous Cowherd X]

First post with Lynx!

And your last post here, you hax0r, you!

Lynx is *so* handy...

[McDutchie]

...in case of near-slashdotting. :p

martijn@grote5:~$ lynx -dump -nolist "http://www.boingboing.net/2005/01/27/jailed_for_u sing_a_n.html"
#Atom RSS

[stuff cut to pacify lame(ness) filter]

Copyright 2004 Happy Mutants LLC. Some rights reserved. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States [and other countries].

Thursday, January 27, 2005

Jailed for using a nonstandard browser
A Londonder made a tsnuami-relief donation using lynx -- a text-based browser used by the blind, Unix-users and others -- 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. From a mailing list:

For donating to a Tsunami appeal using Lynx on Solaris 10. BT [British Telecom] who run the donation management system misread an access log and saw hmm thats a non standard browser not identifying it's type and it's doing strange things. Trace that IP. Arrest that hacker.

Armed police, a van, a police cell and national news later the police have gone in SWAT styley and arrested someone having their lunch.

Out on bail till next week and preparing to make a lot of very bad PR for BT and the Police....

So just goes to show if you use anything other than Firefox or IE and you rely on someone else to interogate access logs or IDS logs you too could be sitting in a paper suit in a cell :(

Link (Thanks, Patrick!)

Update:: The source that told me about this has corroborated it with more detail in private email, but is leery of going public. I hope that more publicly available details appear soon, and will post them when I have them.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:08:00 AM permalink | Other blogs commenting on this post
Sponsored by:

Interested in advertising on Boing Boing? Email us

[stuff cut to pacify lame(ness) filter]

Click here to place a text ad like the one above.

[addtomyyahoo.gif]
martijn@grote5:~$

what os?

[POds]

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.

And what OS was the site running?

Take one guess :)

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 :-)

Re:Just tried it out...

[ArsenneLupin]

Oh, and I forgot to mention: my Street address has an apostrophe (single quote) in it, so I think I might really need to worry about police knocking down my door...

Re:Just tried it out...

[MartinG]

I just tried the same and got this mangled error ..

p_success=F&p_error_msg=ERROR_000056_-_Invalid_P la tform_ID&p_donation_amount=0&p_donation_reference=

.. printed on the screen. I wonder if they changed something to reject lynx now?

It could just be that I have an old version? (Lynx Version 2.8.5dev.7)

Re:Just tried it out...

[PurPaBOO]

I also get:

p_success=F&p_error_msg=ERROR_000056_-_Invalid_Pla tform_ID&p_donation_amount=0&p_donation_reference=

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

imagine how many non-standard

[Evets]

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.

Re:well

[nametaken]

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?

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:comon everyone, use lynx to go to bt.com

[dev!null!4d]

Tried this, all I get is:

"p_success=F&p_error_msg=ERROR_000056_-_Invalid_ Pl atform_ID&p_donation_
amount=0&p_donation_referen ce="

Re:comon everyone, use lynx to go to bt.com

[md81544]

I'm on Linux(FC2) and I just attempted to donate £10 via Lynx and after pressing submit all I got was:

p_success=F&p_error_msg=ERROR_000056_- _Invalid_Platform_ID&p_donation_amount=0&p_donatio n_reference=

Invalid platform????

Re:comon everyone, use lynx to go to bt.com

[Random Web Developer]

Is it ok if I use elinks?
I like it because my scrollwheel works and i can click links inside my term window.

Or am I a lesser geek then?

Re:comon everyone, use lynx to go to bt.com

[mwood]

"Invalid platform????"

It means their server is lame. :-)

Re:comon everyone, use lynx to go to bt.com

[poot_rootbeer]

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

Um, what?

Where did this come from? What did 'prestigeous' [sic] institutions ever do to you?

Re:comon everyone, use lynx to go to bt.com

[Geoff-with-a-G]

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

Yeah!
If you want competent sysadmins, you should obviously hire people who failed out of notoriously bad institutions!

It's against the law (or will be)

[kellererik]

One of the undisclosed sections of the new EU patent-directive contains the following sentence:
Using non-Microsoft browsers to access the extended and embraced MS-Internet from any EU member state is a punishable offense.
The poor policemen simply didn't know that the intended waving-through at the last meeting of the agricultural ministers didn't happen, they acted according to future laws.

Let's see what they didn't tell us besides that....

Re:Everyone is always connected.

[Omniscientist]

Oh, would you say she's software created by Tachibani or perhaps a Gaia spawned by Earth itself...or maybe something completely different altogether?

Re:G. Orwell would be proud

[dasunt]

since when dose a "hack atempt" constitute hauling someone off to jail?

...1984 is today aparently

Ob Simpsons quote:

"ATTEMPTED murder, what is that!? Do they give a Nobel Prize for ATTEMPTED chemistry? Well, do they?!" -Sideshow Bob

Parent is a troll

[bersl2]

He claims to be paranoid, yet he runs FreeBSD, not OpenBSD. Therefore, I find him to be "security-aware" at best.

Re:Parent is a troll

[slavemowgli]

I'm not sure I'd call it a troll, but it sure would deserve a "-1, Clueless Wannabe". :)

Re:Parent is a troll

[Kethinov]

The idea of the grandparent's joke is that security through obscurity works. OpenBSD is more obscure than FreeBSD and is therefore more secure by this mindset.

mandatory script

[wooby]

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

Re:mandatory script

[PigleT]

[troll] anyone with such a spurious waste of a cat process deserves to go the authorities anyway for unauthorized waste of CPU resources! [/troll]

Serves him right

[wbraunoh]

Anyone still using Lynx deserves to be arrested!

DO KEEP UP

[Anonymous Coward]

2005-01-27 11:52:01 Arrested for using a nonstandard browser (Index,The Courts) (rejected)

Re:well

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Can we up the bar a LITTLE?

What? You are complaining about truth in advertising? Perhaps you would prefer it if the site called itself, "Sneaky Dog: Fair and Balanced" instead?

Fouth alterenative

[SPY_jmr1]

Maybe he DONATED a lynx, you know, the big, spotted cat type. And it ate someone. Childlike. And crippled. With chopsticks. Barbaqued. With Twice Baked Potatos. You know, or something, I don't know...

Re:Fouth alterenative

[interstellar_donkey]

And for all these years, I thought Lynx WAS a big magical spotted cat which was caged inside those big giant *nix main-frames. The magical part was that this captive beast would be forced to parse html into ASCII text.

Well, now that I know the browser isn't explotive towards our charmed feline friends, I may just start using it.

Learn something new every day.

Re:Morons.

[Anonymous Coward]

In many countries it's illegal to try to.. uhm.. buy some :)

Hmm...

[pixelcort]

lynx http://www.dec.org.uk/

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:Purple Monkey Dishwasher

[Steel_viper]

So the grease monkey asks the powder monkey for a monkey wrench, and the guy hands him a monkey pot instead. They were both promptly canned, as monkey business such as that is not tolerated around here...

Re:Lynx & https

[Anthony]

Lynx has supported https for years. [adavid@adavid work]$ lynx --version Lynx Version 2.8.4rel.1 (17 Jul 2001) libwww-FM 2.14, SSL-MM 1.4.1, OpenSSL 0.9.6 Built on linux-gnu Mar 19 2003 15:33:59 Copyrights held by the University of Kansas, CERN, and other contributors. Distributed under the GNU General Public License. See http://lynx.browser.org/ and the online help for more information. See http://www.moxienet.com/lynx/ for information about SSL for Lynx. See http://www.openssl.org/ for information about OpenSSL.

Re:Lynx & https

[Anthony]

Darn - where did that preview button go? :(

Lynx has supported https for years.

[adavid@adavid work]$ lynx --version
Lynx Version 2.8.4rel.1 (17 Jul 2001)
libwww-FM 2.14, SSL-MM 1.4.1, OpenSSL 0.9.6
Built on linux-gnu Mar 19 2003 15:33:59

Copyrights held by the University of Kansas, CERN, and other contributors.
Distributed under the GNU General Public License.
See http://lynx.browser.org/ and the online help for more information.

See http://www.moxienet.com/lynx/ for information about SSL for Lynx.
See http://www.openssl.org/ for information about OpenSSL.

Re:HAHA YES THAT IS VERY FUNNY

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Everyone is always connected.

[Narcocide]

A Gaia without a doubt, but humanity is Gaia's favorite tool.

Thats nothing...

[deft]

They do the same thing over here for dl'ing an MP3.

BoingBoing

[JimPooley]

Remember kids, BoingBoing is NOT a reputable source of news. It IS however a good source of complete and utter bollocks.

Ah

[Compact Dick]

He should've known better than to use Lynx.

*phew* that story scared me

[circletimessquare]

thank god i use gopher

Re:*phew* that story scared me

[sik0fewl]

What? You mean they have slashdot on gopher now?

Time to upgrade!

Cue the rumourmongering complaints

[Boiling_point_]

Is it just me or are these nonstory/rumours getting (even) more common? From just the current front page:

• Firefox books planned: "Could this be the end of lazy IE-only scripted webpages?"
• Speculation on the success of a newly released product: "...the Mac mini may shift consumers away from the larger tower style desktops to smaller ones"
• Factless 'clue sniffing' from HTML source viewing: "the Apple website has hidden clues that suggest the coming of the PB G5 very soon"
• On Intel filing obscure trademarks: "what does VIIV mean? Could this be the Roman numerals for 6-4 indicating a 64-bit chip, or could this be the Roman numeral five twice, separated by two lines, indicating the dual cores of the Pentium 5 chip?"
• A flaky pundit guesses at a business plan based on a few observed facts: "Dvorak speculates that a Firefox based Google browser and Google-OS may soon be coming to a cluster near you"
• This very article, where CBN even comes out and admits it: "there's little to corroborate this"

I know, I know, there's usually someone who pipes up at times like this and throws karma to the open seas - but this is a news aggregation site. This place exists because of eyeballs, and eyeballs are attracted to gossip - but is it so hard to filter the noise? Can we PLEASE have a topic for "mere speculation", so we can filter it, Caldera/SCOstyle? Alternatively - someone point me at a site with Truth for nerds, stuff that happened.

Journalistic integrity

[91degrees]

Well, this story has certainly been thouroughly checked using all the journalisitic resources available. As the original article says "From a mailing list". Now, we all know that mailing lists are totally reliable. I mean, only the other day I was warned about a virus. And the money from the Nigerian chap will arrive any day now.

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

[slavemowgli]

At the risk of being modded as flamebait, that just shows again that jwz is an idiot.

Yeah, he did some cool stuff like xscreensaver, but when you actually talk to him, you'll find that he's really just a hateful idiot who will insult you simply for being what you are - not a bit better than any racist, sexist or Rush Limbaugh.

I just had to say that. :)

Who to believe

[DrHyde]

So on the one hand we have a respectable news organisation like the BBC telling us there was an attempt to break in to the site. On the other, we have some loser with a blog telling us about third-hand rumours from a mailing list.

It boils down to two choices - either the blogger is making shit up; or the police are being their usual incompetent selves. I find neither option to be more believable than the other.

Corrections

[ozbird]

From the article, he was arrested and released i.e. bailed - not "jailed".

If he hadn't been released, he would have been remanded in custody - still not "jailed".

If he was point on trial and convicted, he would have been gaoled - did I mention not "jailed"?

Re:Corrections

[TeknoHog]

I thought "jail" is just the American spelling of the British "gaol".

Re:Corrections

[rjw57]

[troll]And president is the American spelling of the British 'dictator'[/troll] :)

Re:Corrections

[eraserewind]

If he was point on trial and convicted, he would have been gaoled - did I mention not "jailed"?

"Imprisoned", surely?

Re:Corrections

[barnacle]

you are incorrect. when you are thrown in gaol then you are gaoled. When you are thrown in jail, then you are jailed.

Got it?

Re:Corrections

[alienmole]

Whereas "Prime Minister" is the British spelling of the Amero-Austrian "girlyman".

Re:Corrections

[CrazyTalk]

"point on trial"? You mean put on trial?

Finally, if he was tried and convicted in Texas, he would have been executed.

Re:Corrections

[justins]

"point on trial"? You mean put on trial?

Spot on!

Re:Corrections

[pommiekiwifruit]

Helping the police with their enquiries.

On remand, awaiting trial.

Interned without trial (if foreign or Irish)

(new one) under house arrest without trial

Held at Her Majesty's Pleasure (kids)

Sectioned (under the mental health act).

etc. (umm special arrangements for young offenders, military folk)...

Re:Corrections

[AK Marc]

If he hadn't been released, he would have been remanded in custody - still not "jailed".

In the US, the place where people are "remanded into custody" is the jail. The place where they serve sentences once convicted is "prison." Thus, someone remanded into custody is "jailed." That is correct use of the word, even if not the word you would have chosen. Just like it is not incorrect to refer to the boot of an auto as a "trunk," even though that is not the word you would have chosen.

UK tech police: Cash-strapped and ineffective

[alanxyzzy]

This article at Silicon.com, written a couple of days ago, makes me want to weep. It only goes to show the general level of tech-cluelessness at all levels of the police, civil service and parliament.

UK tech police: Cash-strapped and ineffective January 26 2005 by Will Sturgeon A UK high-tech crime buster has warned that his investigations are being severely hampered by a lack of money and has said funding could still be pared down further to the point that police units such as his become untenable.

...

Noble said the funding available doesn't even stretch as far as providing him with a car

...

Noble also admitted the police still have a long way to go before they are up to speed on the various ways in which cybercrime can manifest. While each of the 45 constabularies in the UK now has a dedicated cybercrime investigator, Noble admitted these individuals may still be the only person who comes close to understanding a technical complaint, citing a "sorry, we don't do computers" culture among front desk and uniformed police.

And even if companies do get through to the dedicated computer crime investigator, they may be surprised by the level of expertise. Noble warned that many will be novices on many types of cybercrime and complete strangers to some.

"You might speak to an officer on one high-tech crime unit with a complaint about a DoS [denial of service] attack and he really might not know where you are going with it.

"You may have to help him out because he's going to need you to be the expert."

It is okay to jail lynx users

[andy_from_nc]

Lynx users are subversive and do not pay proper respect to Bill Gates. You see, using Lynx ought to be a violation of the digital millenium copyright act. It *could* subvert copyright protection that might be applied on websites. Internet Exploder er I mean Explorer is the only legal browser because it can integrate with Digital Rights Management. Firefox, lynx and other browsers are subversive and should not be used because they can be used to violate Intellectual Property. This brings up a question. Since you read this and it is my Intellectual Property, do I won part of your brain?

is there a psychotic drivel rating on Slashdot? Would that be a 6?

(WARNING: the above may contain sarcasm, author is not liable because he stated that he's not liable like those trucks with gravel in them that are improperly covered)

I only use Lynx remotely

[Sindri]

The only times I use lynx it's when I'm logged into a remote terminal (the remote box usually not on the same continent). Someone stupid enough to think I'm hacking just becaus I'm using lynx is probably to stupid to find me. :P

If only...

[slavemowgli]

To quote Professor Farnsworth from Futurama: "A man can dream. A man can dream..."

Yes, this is a HOAX

[Gordonjcp]

Sorry, but there seems to be no other evidence to suggest that any of this ever happened. Sounds suspiciously hoax-y to me. The BBC website makes no mention of Lynx. The boingboing site didn't mention lynx when I read it last night.

Perhaps someone who is a real, genuine journalist should attempt to contact the parties concerned to verify this.

Re:Yes, this is a HOAX

[Kosgrove]

Real, geniune journalism? This is Slashdot, my friend.

You must be new here.

False alarm.

[The Creator]

So what happens if it turns out that the information you gave was false, and that you put hardly any effort into making sure it was true?

Re:False alarm.

[James Fryer]

In theory the police can bring a case of 'malicious prosecution' against the complainant. In practise they will just drop the case.

Re:False alarm.

[pjt33]

There's an offence of wasting police time.

obligatory....

[l0ungeb0y]

$curl --user-agent 'OMFG! T3HY Ha>
yarrrr

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

[3riol]

Hmmm... But now, any browser not implementing the title attribute and misreading alt tags is stuck in the nineties, reversing this silly de-facto-standards argument.

Re:well

[essreenim]

Can we up the bar a LITTLE?

Yes, lets up the bar to Fox news and have completely uncorroborated bs....

Oh yeah?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm so paranoid that I throat sing tcp/ip over dmtf on a dial-up line and use my perfect pitch for parsing the response.

Hahaha

[mcrandello]

From the linked article:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/coventry_warwic kshire/3378445.stm

"Mr Nichols says he has spent £6,000 in bail and legal fees"
Apparently his Euros weren't good for that either.

Re:Hahaha

[Mesaeus]

The Uk isn't part of the euro zone last time I checked, so no need for euros to pay the lawyers.

Perhaps...

[TeknoHog]

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

</tinfoil>

Re:lynx = invalid platform?

[wraith0x29a]

lynx -useragent="Internet Explorer 6.0 on Windows XP" http://some.web.site.com

..should help keep the black helicopters away.

Wait a sec

[Britz]

I see ppl. saying that this is either

1. A hoax,
2. Outragious if it is true

or

3. He was really trying to break in and it was good that he was arrested.

Are there no admins that read /. any more? I used to read logs and tried to report serious attempts to break in with the latest root kit by some script kiddy to the isp that kid was using. That had absolutely no effect.
Now I can just trace an IP and tell the police and they will go out and actually contact that person or even arrest them instead of ignoring me altogether?

LOL

Yea right!

I call BS HOAX all the way!

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:Wait a sec

[TobascoKid]

Now I can just trace an IP and tell the police and they will go out and actually contact that person or even arrest them instead of ignoring me altogether?

Only if you're the following -

1) The major (or at least one of the major) telecommunications companies in the police's jurisdiction.

and

2) Running a high profile donation site. *

So yeah, I could see some paranoia around the DEC's donation site (after all, there probably are some people out there who would love to get all the personal/financial details going through that site). Combine that with an inexperienced person looking for something 'unusual' in the web logs and I could see this happening.

I'm just wondering if it turns out to be true and the guy is innocent (the BBC article doesn't go into anywhere near enough detail of what the guy is alleged to have done), I'd love to know if anyone from BT is going to get charged with wasting police time (I doubt it - but you never know). Even if they don't go as far as that, BT would deserve some form of 'rap' for being clueless - even if it's nothing but a bit of bad publicity. After all, do you really want to trust the security of your site to people who can't recoginze a ligitimate user using a text mode browser (the type of which some people have to use for accessibilty reasons and hence you have to cater for anyway) and actual malicious attackers.

*) I wouldn't be surprised if they take banks and credit card companies seriously as well.

Tk

Re:Wait a sec

[AndroidCat]

Tune in next week when 133t theater performs Who Shot BSD?

Re:Wait a sec

[RenHoek]

Lynch mob? Lynx mob! :)

Re:Wait a sec

[Vitriol Angst]

OMG, this post was so funny. This made my day.
The terse, clipped language and acronym newspeak are brilliant--so IM. Like the first "Wazzup" commercials.

I'm wondering if you would consider rewriting a Shakespeare play in this format...

Sun readers are tards.
Is this users of Solaris or readers of the Sun Times newspaper?

Re:Wait a sec

[SuiteSisterMary]

Ok, lets get them ALL out of the way.

In Soviet Russia, Lynx downloads YOU!

In Korea, only old people use Solaris.

Admin: What happen? Admin2: Someone set up us the user agent.
Admin2: We get GET request.
Admin: Main log turn on.
Admin: It's you!!!
LynxUser: How are you gentlemen???
LynxUser: All my donation are belong to you.
LynxUser: You are on the way to charity.
Admin: What you say???
LynxUser: You have some chance to do good, make your time.
LynxUser: Ha ha ha.
Admin2: Move Police.
Admin: You know what you doing?
Admin2: For great miscarriage of justice,
Admin2: take off every police.

Boy, imagine a Beowolf Cluster of Lynxs making donations!

Re:Why was this rejected ?

[wraith0x29a]

hmmmm, you didn't submit the story using Lynx did you?

Campaign for English spelling

[pjt33]

Besides, in England we gaol people rather than jailing them.

Re:Campaign for English spelling

[jazman]

That's when we're not locking the key up and throwing the prisoner away.

BT is the joke

[OwlWhacker]

So the police saw "Lynx" and busted him?

No, the article here says:

BT [British Telecom] who run the donation management system misread an access log and saw hmm thats a non standard browser not identifying it's type and it's doing strange things. Trace that IP. Arrest that hacker.

So, it's BT.

This isn't surprising. I've had run-ins with BT tech support plenty of times, and the staff can't even understand a simple SMTP transaction.

For a company that can't explain what its own SMTP server is doing, I can't say that this surprises me.

Obviously the support staff's check-lists only go so far.

Re:BT is the joke

[Ilgaz]

But I heard they invented the internet. You would know better than them? Hah!

Re:BT is the joke

[AndroidCat]

I'd love to see their problem resolution flowchart that ends with the box "Call police!". It can't as simple as "Read logs. Are you confused? Yes/No"

Re:BT is the joke

[Aldric]

Oh yes it can. The typical BT helpline monkey is incapable of even providing the IP addresses of their DNS servers, never mind anything more complicated.

Re:BT is the joke

[AndroidCat]

They might be able to provide the domain name. Would that help? :)

Re:BT is the joke

[sparkz]

On the plus side (OMG, I'm saying something good about BT!), back in the days before they outsourced their mail hosting to Yahoo!, they used Exim (www.exim.org) as their mail server.

I noticed this shortly after switching to Exim for our own mail server... gave me a few twitchy feelings, but Exim's been doing us good service for a few years now.

Re:BT is the joke

[sparkz]

It's not likely. Could be btinternet.com, could be btopenworld.com, or btconnect.com; when I use the dialup service provided with my BT ADSL account, I get redirected to a page on business.btconnect.com (or something like that) which (naturally) doesn't recognise my login credentials, as I'm a residential, not a business, customer!

Eedjits.

Interestingly, I phoned them last week to get a MAC code (necessary to migrate an ADSL connection) and - instead of giving me that, they asked why I wanted to move (download caps coming soon at BT) and they gave me a 512k->1Mbps upgrade, with a 30Gb/month (instead of the 1Gb/month) cap when they do bring it in. That'll do me, but if they're happy to do that (for no extra charge), why do they try to enforce these limitations for those who don't threaten to leave?

Re:BT is the joke

[julesh]

For a company that can't explain what its own SMTP server is doing, I can't say that this surprises me.

Nobody can explain BT's outgoing SMTP server system. Mail goes in at one end and (usually) comes out at the other, but between these events there is a mysterious lag during which rumour has it it is forwarded several hundred times by non-RFC-compliant store & forward agents until it arrives at its eventual and non-deterministic egress point, from where it is forwarded to a randomly chosen MX for the destination domain.

Unless it's going to hotmail, at which point it just disappears without a trace about 50% of the time.

I left as soon as my 12 month ADSL contract expired. Can you tell?

++dickwads

[t_allardyce]

WTF? I would have expected more from BT, if this is true then that guy deserves some compensation, and I would also demand that they double any figure and give the other half to the charity, on the condition that the fuck-face that started all this is fired.

Re:WHIGS

[wraith0x29a]

Too right! They should all follow your shining example of modernity; for a start they should cease all that old-fashioned, hippie-slime lovemaking shit IMMEDIATELY and get an MSN account, webcam and man-sized box of kleenex.

Thank-you for showing us the way.

Note pad of bills

[SgtChaireBourne]

Years ago, a retired restaurant owner taking some night classes where I worked explained one of his favorite jokes with US $2 bills: He'd get a stack of new ones from the bank and then attach the stack to cardboard backing like a pad of note paper in the time before stickies/post-its.

When paying for his meal or coffee, he'd make sure he had the attention of the waitress and then make like he was about to forget the tip. The at the last minute, he'd "remember" the tip and in full view of the waitress, reach into his jacket, pull out the pad of bills, rip off the top one (or two) and place the tip on the table. Some would get quite flustered and want "real" money.

You could probably do this with the Scottish 1 £ note or 5 £ note.

Re:Note pad of bills

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Unless your friend is Steve Wozniak, I doubt that he is telling the truth.

Re:Note pad of bills

[SgtChaireBourne]

What's all that got to do with Steve Wozniak?

I had no reason to doubt him. He was a joker but not a bullshitter. He was a straight forward person, a WWII bomber vet and ran a very stable pizzeria / beer garden for decades since before either was popular in the States. He even gave me a jar of the goo he used for the backing and showed me and my colleagues one of the pads he had made.

Re:Note pad of bills

[Mr Guy]

It's just that Steve Wozniak is probably where he got the idea. He's got a long story about it that is pretty old, if I could find the link to the write up on it.

I believe he nearly got arrested once.

Re:Note pad of bills

[chrisopherpace]

My uncle used to do the same thing, except he would ask the cashier if they accepted Legal Tender Notes, which is basically $. The cashier usually would just shrug, and my uncle would then rip out the $ and pay her. He did it to the cashier though, not the waitress.

Re:Note pad of bills

[Ilan Volow]

When he visited my school to receive an honorary doctorate, he handed out to everyone who came to the party two $2 bills joined together and told us the story about the casino.

Re:Note pad of bills

[johnwroach]

me and my dad do it all the time. With singles, though. Of course, you have to say "Hot off the presses!" when you do it, or it's just not corny enough.

Re:Note pad of bills

[bsharitt]

Didn't Woz actually take a whole sheet of printed money that hadn't been cut into individual bills yet an cut them out on the spot.

Re:Note pad of bills

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

iirc, he actually zigzag-cut them into individual bills. And then when the secret service investigated him, he presented a rather genuine-looking fake idea, that had him the Inspector General of the US Bikini Patrol or something. He's on my list of personal heroes.

Re:Note pad of bills

[SgtChaireBourne]

It's just that Steve Wozniak is probably where he got the idea. He's got a long story about it that is pretty old, if I could find the link to the write up on it.

When did Steve Wozniak do this? The joker I wrote about did this around 1988/1989. Now deceased at a ripe old age so there's no way to find out how long he'd been doing the pad of bills.

Re:well

[SillyNickName4me]

Hmm yes, lets argue about the quality of news on American TV...

This is a gamble

[ajs318]

I know this is at best very tenuously connected to the topic under discussion, but:

Is there some way to use lynx {or some other, similar text-only browser -- I'm not fussy} to render a HTML document as plain text? {And not just sed -e's///' either. I'm not that big a n00b.}

Re:This is a gamble

[pandrijeczko]

lynx -dump [URL]

You can direct it to a file or pipe it.

Great for using is shell-scripts to scrape specific data from a web page.

Re:This is a gamble

[ajs318]

That's it ..... I knew there was a way. You have earned yourself a blue dot by my nickname.

Re:well

[essreenim]

CBS:FOX::Linux:SCO

Urban Legends

[Council]

Sounds like someone spun off a silly version of it into a "we are victims of big brother for trying to help tsunami victims while using linux" story, which has a slashdot/blog popularity factor of 13/15. The only way it could go higher is if the story had claimed the guy had been arrested by SCO's thugs while trying to post a complaint to his congressman about the DCMA stopping him from helping starving tsunami victims to . . . download open-source software.

Seriously. Too good to be true, sounds exactly like an urban legend spun from someone's possibly false details about a real story. The reason this happens is that when you weren't there, you hear some parts and make up the details in your head, assuming you know the whole story. This is how urban legends, in general, happen.

Blind spenders

[cbr2702]

What would a blind person care if the money was all green or not?

Re:Blind spenders

[Haeleth]

What would a blind person care if the money was all green or not?

Most people who care about accessibility like to take the partially-sighted into account as well as the completely blind. And using banknotes becomes much easier for the partially-sighted when the notes are distinguishable by size and colour as well as by finding and reading a number.

Blind drivers

[cbr2702]

In my town the delivery truck for a curtain and venitian blind company says "Caution: blind driver!".

Re:HAHA YES THAT IS VERY FUNNY

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

So how about we all...

[joshv]

How about we all change our user agent to something strange and go poking around the BT web site.

Re:So how about we all...

[The MESMERIC]

nothing is stopping you :)

Re:So how about we all...

[Drakkenfyre]

Done. With both lynx and elinks.

Re:Lynx & https

[PhatAir]

I get the following error message when I try and access https:-

Alert!: This client does not contain support for HTTPS URLs.

This is the same version of lynx that's listed above - 2.8.4rel.1 (17 Jul 2001)

Do NOT donate to these guys! Sitting on the money!

[alienmole]

On the site's home page, it says "If your donation has not yet appeared on your bank or credit card statement, please bear with us. We hope to have all donations processed by the end of February".

Please, please pick a charity that is actually capable of responsibly handling the money, not a brand-new incompetent committee that's sitting on uncashed payments for up to a month before doing anything about them. (Not to mention allegedly having people arrested for trying to donate, possibly in a desperate effort to slow the flow of donations.)

Re:Do NOT donate to these guys! Sitting on the mon

[Neophytus]

They've been around for years, and represent the biggest dozen or so of UK charities. I trust them.

I am safe ..

[rakesh_iiith]

I use Firefox :))

Paying for prison

[cbr2702]

Imagine I made a special luxury prison with luxurious bed and excellent food. Now your logic would imply that I would have to then pay the jail to be wrongfully imprisoned. To use your analogy, imagine the "free lunch" offered by your work was both mandatory and amazingly fancy. And working for your employer was also mandatory. Does this not seem unjust?

Re:well

[the_mad_poster]

CBS:FOX::Linux:SCO

You've got that assbackwards.

SCO:Linux::FOX:CBS?

No, we don't know it's a hoax

[alienmole]

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.

Re:No, we don't know it's a hoax

[Anonymous Coward]

But it's not "news" if it's a lie, dammit, no matter how many facts come to light.

"EXCLUSIVE (AP, Tampa, 9:11EST): My car keys have been stolen!"

"CORRECTION (AP, Tampa, 9:20EST): Sorry, they were in my other pants where I left them."

Re:well

[essreenim]

heheh ;)

Change SUCKS! Well, small change does....

[Dogtanian]

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

This is horribly ironic.

The UK 1p and 2p pieces are the *only* members of the original early 1970s decimal line-up still in circulation, in spite of the fact that they are hideously oversized for their current value. Frankly, they should have been the *first* to be replaced.... but at any rate, they're the only coins that are going to date back that far.

The 1/2p piece was withdrawn in the early 1980s.
The 5p and 10p pieces were replaced with smaller and lighter versions in the early 1990s (the pre-decimalisation shilling remained in use until then, as it was the same metal, size, weight and value as the 5p piece).
The 50p was also replaced with a smaller clone during the 1990s.
The 20p piece and pound coins weren't introduced until the early 1980s.
The 2 pound coin is only a few years old.

But we still have the ******* original 1p and 2p coins. The 1p coin is so worthless now (less than the 1/2p was worth back when they got rid of that, I'd guess) that they should probably ditch it altogether. Only 2p is a weird choice for a 'base' coin, and 5p is just a little too much, so they'll probably keep it at 1p.

But why- at least- don't they shrink them down?

Probably not worth it now.. *sigh*.

I hate small change; taking into account the extra time I have to wait to get 1p back, sort through the worthless coins in my pocket when searching for 'real' change, stick them in the change jar, sort them, and take them to the bank, it's NOT WORTH MY TIME WAITING FOR THE 1P CHANGE!

Yeah, I *know* someone has proved you could make a living picking up small-value coins from the pavement. *But*... when you take into account their use in real-life, the overhead isn't worth their face-value.

Of course, since the US cent is worth less than the UK (new) penny, it would make real sense for them just to ditch everything below a nickel (5c IIRC).

Re:Change SUCKS! Well, small change does....

[mwood]

"Of course, since the US cent is worth less than the UK (new) penny, it would make real sense for them just to ditch everything below a nickel (5c IIRC)."

Not to me. I recently rolled up the contents of my penny jar and wound up with enough money to take the family out to dinner. (Okay, not a *fancy* dinner.) Not bad wages for a second or two a week chunking coins in, and five minutes counting and rolling them.

Re:Change SUCKS! Well, small change does....

[Politburo]

it would make real sense for them just to ditch everything below a nickel (5c IIRC).

A wish.

This is the way I make people play Monopoly with me. So much time is spent counting the fucking 1s, and then you never use them in the end (or one player somehow ends up with 25 ones). And yes, it means that rent on an unimproved Mediterranian Ave. is $0. You'll live.

The woman who runs the small sandwich shop in my office building also does this. It's the highlight of my day when my lunch rings up to $6.02 and she says "Six." Yeah, I know, I need to get out more.

Re:Change SUCKS! Well, small change does....

[Dogtanian]

You know that the current coins aren't the original? At some point in the mid to late 90s the copper in the coins became worth more than the coin, so they started making them of steel with a skin of copper. You can pick up the current 'copper' coins with a magnet. If you have ones that won't pick up, the copper is worth more than the face value of the coins.

So; let me guess. They'd have to update vending machines and the like anyway, and they still didn't take the opportunity to replace the 1p and 2p coins (and, presumably, get the value of the copper on the old coins)? Moronic.

Re:Change SUCKS! Well, small change does....

[Pig Hogger]

The woman who runs the small sandwich shop in my office building also does this. It's the highlight of my day when my lunch rings up to $6.02 and she says "Six." Yeah, I know, I need to get out more.

Whenever that happens, I'm very happy to get rid of the two pennies... :)

Re:Change SUCKS! Well, small change does....

[displaced80]

But why- at least- don't they shrink them down?

That'd be OK... as long as they made the 5p and 10p's bigger (or non-circular).

I'm not visually impaired myself, but just out of sheer laziness (not bothering to look at what I've got in my pocket), I find UK coins really easy to distinguish by touch alone.

Of course, if you've got a gazillion-and-one bits of shrapnel[1] in your pocket, that's still not much use!

The hexagonal(? I don't have one on me!) 50p and 20p's, and the £1 (thick, heavy) £2 (big, thick & heavy) coins stick out like a sore thumb. Anything circular and thin (1p, 2p) or stupidly small (5p) get left amongst the pocket fluff.

That's one thing that puts me off Euro coins. They're all round, albeit with notches in the edge (4 in the 50cent, lots on the 10cent IIRC). Still, I'd miss the old 20p and 50p's. But I do like the appearance of the 1 and 2 euro coins. Similar to the £2 coin, which is really pretty... when you've got one of those, it really feels like you're holding something that's got some value. They were the UK's first bi-metallic coins, and have one of my favourite phrases on their edge -- "Standing On The Shoulders of Giants" -- proud, but with humility.

There's site of UK coin images here.

[1] 'shrapnel' = slang for low-denomination loose change.

Re:Change SUCKS! Well, small change does....

[Dogtanian]

That'd be OK... as long as they made the 5p and 10p's bigger (or non-circular).

The 5p and the 10p are pretty indented; relatively even more so in their current shrunken form. They could make the 1p really tiny, as well.

Anyway, shouldn't it be the bronze coins getting lost in your pocket fluff?

'shrapnel' = slang for low-denomination loose change.

Never heard of that before.

"Standing On The Shoulders of Giants"

Naaah.... it's "Standing on the Shoulder of Giants", according to Noel Gallagher ;)

Re:Change SUCKS! Well, small change does....

[Dogtanian]

Not to me.

Well, that's a good point. How did you pay?

Did you sort them out into dollar piles, and then take them down to the bank?

Or did you just give your change to the restaurant? Poor sods....

My point is that, when you take all the overheads involved, including time taken by businesses (and remember, they have to get change in often, which banks charge them for) to deal with your money, the nuisance of it making your real change harder to deal with, and the time taken to stick it in the jar and sort it out, it probably comes out to less than minimum wage.

I still reckon the overheads must be *way* over any net benefit. No offence, but 1p is worthless, and just over half of worthless (1 cent coin) has got to be a joke...

Re:Change SUCKS! Well, small change does....

[hawk]

>Of course, since the US cent is worth less than the
>UK (new) penny, it would make real sense for them
>just to ditch everything below a nickel (5c IIRC)

The half-penny was worth more than today's dime when we dropped it. So maybe kill everything below a quarter :)

hawk

Re:Change SUCKS! Well, small change does....

[Blain]

There are, periodically, plans circulated to do things like remove pennies from circulation or to replace the $1 bill with a coin (as Canada has). Those don't take into account a key thing about American money.

The penny has the face of Abraham Lincoln, and the $1 bill has the face of George Washington. These are two of the most (if not just the two most) universally popular presidents in American history. Removing them isn't going to be a politically popular thing to do.

Also, cash handlers are highly resistant to denomination changes -- this is why the $2 bill and $1 coin don't circulate well. Usually once a year the Federal Reserve Banks will send a bunch of them out to the banks and post offices, and they will give them out in change or with withdrawals until they are gone. Then some folks will hoard them, thinking they are collectible, and the rest will take them to stores and buy stuff with them. Cash drawers don't really have a space for them, so they get set aside where they don't get circulated again much (I used to circulate them to Canadian folks when I knew I had them and I was paid in Canadian currency, because Canadian folks seem to rather like them). The stores deposit them back in the banks, and the banks seem to send them back to the Reserve Banks where they sit until next year.

Currency reform in the US is a political no-win situation. There's no sense ticking people off about it. Just give us funny looking quarters every so often and we stay happy.

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:Banned for using DOS

[DarkKnightRadick]

I think you mean suspended ;p, and it seems that technology will always be feared by those who don't know jack didly about it.

Re:Banned for using DOS

[MooseGuy529]

Please yell at the school!

At my elementary school we used to have an IBM network system (token ring--those were the days!) with a menu system in it. It was unfortunate, since a friend of mine and I liked to program in QBASIC, and all the menu allowed was Logo and Microsoft Works. However, Microsoft Works had a convenient "Launch Program" option on the File menu, whose first choice was a command prompt. That led to tons of fun in QBASIC. Fortunately my teachers weren't idiots, and didn't really care.

I just remembered, they had a really creative approach to "logging" superuser logins--the computer just made a loud siren noise when you logged on as SYSOP, making it impossible to do within earshot of a teacher.

I really can't stand the anti-geek (mostly anti-smarter-than-the-administration) sentiment in today's schools... people are idiots.

Re:Banned for using DOS

[bluGill]

Ahh memories. We were allowed access to the Dos prompt in school. Several idiots made a program that looked just like the novel login screen, but then printed some "Got ya" message when you tried to log in. I always assumed they were running a password logger when that happened to me, hit control-C, and then deleted all their files (which included their English papers due the next day...).

Re:Banned for using DOS

[kobaz]

When I arrived at college, part of tuition covered a thinkpad which was given to myself and also many other students en masse. We had to take these 30 minute training classes in order to keep the lappys.

The first thing I did was load up IE and try and download mozilla (firefox wasn't around at the time). I found out that for some reason ftp was not supported in that version of IE running on win98. I immediatly loaded up a commandline and used the console ftp.

While downloading, the instructor walked by and with a paniced and puzzled look on her face said "hey, what are you trying to find out?" And I casually said, "uhhh, I'm downloading mozilla". She quickly walked away without a word.

Its really pathetic how little you need to know in order to get a computer related position.

"You know word? GREAT! You can teach our incomming students how to use their computers."

Re:Banned for using DOS

[Aerion]

In junior high, my school's computers were set up so that they would refuse to run any program except for a select few. But this was done based on filename, so it wasn't difficult to circumvent.

I needed to FTP some stuff, but the shell FTP wasn't on the list of approved programs. So I renamed it to iexplore.exe (somebody else had already used my usual first choice, "winword.exe", put a prank program called winword in that directory - it was just a fake dialog that said "formatting C:" and a non-functioning "Cancel" button).

Some other students walked by and saw the black screen with the off-white text, panicked and ran to the teacher, who made fun of them and then told them to go away.

Re:Banned for using DOS

[null etc.]

Thank Hollywood for that. In the movies, all people who use the computer to hack and such only use the keyboard. They NEVER use the mouse. Which is funny because you'll see amazing 3D flying hallways and viruses flying around, and apparently they're controlling everything through key macros or somesuch.

Anyways, the teacher probably thought, "OMG he's using a keyboard, he must be hacking I'm sending him home OMFG ROFL."

Re:Banned for using DOS

[Ernesto Alvarez]

About those fake login screens.
A few years ago when I was in secondary school, we had individual unix accounts, but all students except a few ones had to share a novell one. A first year student (female, by the way), got her own individual novell account (and some prestige, of course) by doing exactly that. She coded a fake unix login specifically designed to trick some classmates that always did the same thing on the server.

Weird days, when by hacking (but not damaging) the system you could get prestige instead of getting you banned.

Re:Banned for using DOS

[Ernesto Alvarez]

Something like that happened in my university's central library.

Back in the nineties, they had computers there for the people to browse. One day they decided that they wanted to restrict the software being run there. The only allowed browser was IE (and remember, that was in the middle of the browser wars). The made the mistake of using W95 and a system like the one used in the parent poster lab, in a place where computer science is taught.

I guess that a big percentage of the CS students (myself included) messed all the time with those machines, just because they could.

Those machines were cracked within hours and netscape put in place as a default a few days later, not by an admin (my method was using the fact that IE is also a shell, to get access to c:\). Truly "death by 1000 paper cuts".

Re:Banned for using DOS

[PFAK]

At our school our administrator disabled Command Prompt on Win2k, I also got suspended for a week for using it in Grade 9 (4 years ago).

Last week I tried to hook my laptop up to the network and the network admin just about had a fit.

Re:Banned for using DOS

[julesh]

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.

The irony is that I used to have to hack my school's computers in order to get a DOS prompt, and nobody said a thing about it...

Re:Banned for using DOS

[http101]

Moose, you're absolutely right about this. The "anti-geek" culture is made up of two types of people. First, you have the "geek-killers" who like to charge us with stupid things like "information terrorism" or some other crocked up load of shit. The latter are the "pseudo-geeks" who like to think they're real geeks because they own f*cking iPods. Either way, the moment a command-line pops up, they think we're trying to blow up the country. Personally, I feel its the white text on black that makes them think we're up to no good. Try changing the background color to white and use black text just like the command window in AutoCAD. Turns out colors have an adverse affect on people that makes them think crazy things. Mischief managed.

Re:Banned for using DOS

[electronerd]

Once, in high school, my CS teacher got some computers in his classroom which came out of the library. The problem was that they were locked down my a program called Fortress, and were therefore useless as instructional tools in a computer science class. I hacked the machines for my teacher. All it took was rebooting with a DOS boot disk, and taking a couple of lines out of CONFIG.SYS. The ironic thing was that I gleaned the information I needed to disable Fortress from Fortress's own HELP FILE! Isn't it wonderful how IE works as a file browser too? Gotta love stupidity...

Re:Banned for using DOS

[inu_maru]

Got suspended for a week of the lab at my uni for writing HTML... That was in '97... seems like people still fear simple, barren text.

Salam Witch Trials

[CypherXero]

This story reminds me of what might happen if they decided to make a movie based on the Salam Witch Trials, but took place in the 21st century.

"Look, he's not using Windows, but something called Solaris! And he's not using IE, but LYNX! Kill him! Witch!"

Re:HAHA YES THAT IS VERY FUNNY

[northcat]

Many people infected with malware/virus don't even know it. Many malware/virus just consume your bandwidth. And not all malware can be detected by a single anti-spyware program... Maybe you've already been infected but just don't know it... Or maybe you dont use the Web as much as some of us and only visit popular websites...

wow

[stinky wizzleteats]

Maybe I should have looked twice at that strange hit in my web logs from a few months ago:

Nutscrape 1.0 running on CP/M

donation preferences

[Zirtix]

Difference is that the massacre of innocents in Sudan is a consequence of broken government and long-term ethnic/regional tension. NOT a consequence of statistically unlikely natural events. People in war-torn Africa are, by and large, being killed by *other people*.

Donors seem to think that $ spent trying to overturn these factors gets a much smaller return than $ in basic aid to those who are in immediate danger of starvation and disease. And I think they might be right.

Re:donation preferences

[Ubi_NL]

90% of the people of Sudan are dying of starvation. The political background of their death should not be a reason to not help them. Or are you, from your cosy chair, going to tell them it is OK that they die becaus it is because some fuckheads decided to have a war.
I'm going there next week. Wanna come so you can tell them that?

Freeze! Browser police!

[rlp]

Remove your hands from the keyboard and stand up slowly! Yeah, the dog too! Do it! Now!

This arrest brought to you by...

[pmike_bauer]

This arrest was brought to you by www.spreadfirefox.com

still will have novelty value

[mgkimsal2]

I'm not sure people can *use* them as much as 'regular' notes. I've run into many vending machines that don't accept them, and I've also had a couple cashiers that complain about accepting them because there's no sectioned space in the drawer for them (nevermind that many people put all 10s and 20s and higher *underneath* the drawer anyway to stop grab-n-run thieves from getting away with too much)

Re:still will have novelty value

[slavemowgli]

If a cashier does not take them, complain (or threaten to); AFAIK, they are required by law to take them if they are valid currency. As for vending machines... once they become common, vending machine vendors will start building machines that take them, too.

Re:still will have novelty value

[RFC959]

It is a common misconception that people are required to take any form of currency simply because it's legal tender. Actually, private businesses can make whatever rules they like about what they'll accept, which is why you see businesses with signs saying things like "No bills larger than $20", "No pennies", or even "No cash". See the US Treasury's FAQs.

Re:still will have novelty value

[bluGill]

Huh? Every bank I've ever been to is happy to take unrolled coins. They have a fancy coin counting machine that they dump the entire mess into, and a few minutes latter it tells you how much you have. No big deal. I know you can buy coin sorters, but most people just take the mess to the bank.

Make sure you get a good bank. Some will charge a small fee. Which is why I'm a member of a credit union.

Re:still will have novelty value

[alzoron]

You're required to accept for all debts public and private. When you're trying to buy something you're not in debt to them yet, so they don't have to take them. On the other hand if you owe someone $5,000 dollars, and you don't like them much, feel free to pay them in pennies.

Re:still will have novelty value

[shotfeel]

The really good ones will even return all your buttons and assorted other small items that were in with the coins.

I usually let them keep the lint though.

Re:still will have novelty value

[lgw]

IANALB, the sign is a *requirement*. Not taking certain bills is legitimate as part of the offer for sale. Once the sale has been made it's too late to decide you don't like silver dollars, or $100 bills, or whatever. If there is no contract restricting how payment can be made, the merchant must accept all legal tender.

Re:still will have novelty value

[lgw]

Rumor has it, though I cant find the law, that one is not required to accept pennies in payment for debts larger than 25 cents. This after too may jokers paid the IRS in pennies over the years.

Can anyone confirm or debunk this?

Re:still will have novelty value

[gatzke]

At nudie bars around here they give you change for a drink in $2 bills, thinking you pass twice as much to the strippers when you give them a tip, not that I would know ;-)

Re:still will have novelty value

[Lehk228]

the sale has not been made untill you have checked out and payed, now if someone refuses to take legal tender at its face value as payment for a debt they are breaking the law, but nobody is required to take any particular for of money for a sale.

Re:still will have novelty value

[JuggleGeek]

If a cashier does not take them, complain (or threaten to); AFAIK, they are required by law to take them if they are valid currency.

"We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone."

$100's are legal tender, too. But many places won't accept them because they don't keep enough change available to break them.

I think anyone refusing to accept $2 bills is foolish - but I hardly see it as worth suing over, and I'm not convinced you would win.

Re:lynx = invalid platform?

[The MESMERIC]

(Black and White War Propaganda Film)

It is one's dutey
to test one's governmental site
for good and proper accessibilitey

So therefore I assembled ELinks
And thus perused the site in question
When it came on offering one's humble generositey
One was instead sadley denied - the transaction.

Blimey Guv'nor, you do push your luck don't ya?

Quite so.

nope

[N3wsByt3]

He didn't offer an insightful alternative, he used specious reasoning.

1)Who claimed that *because* he was using Lynx, he wasn't hacking?

2)Where did he get the impression there was any causal relationship between the two?

The argument is ludicrous. If a guy says he was arrested because he weared a leather jacket when entering a bank, one could say: wearing a leather jacket does not mean he wasn't going to rob a bank. Well...DUH. WHATEVER you legally do, it does not mean you can't do something illegal too...how exactly is this insightful?

Re:nope

[sparkz]

I don't know, but it's much more like that he "wore a leather jacket" than that he "weared a leather jacket" - unless he took the jacket into the bank, where he scrubbed it briskly with a steel brush.

Re:nope

[N3wsByt3]

Ah well...using a steel brush wold be nice too!

As long as you understand what I meant to say I'm happy. :-)

Um, it's Cory Doctorow

[argent]

Cory Doctorow isn't exactly a random luser, he's a well-known commentator and online journalist.

Re:Um, it's Cory Doctorow

[Matt Perry]

he's a well-known commentator and online journalist

Which only strengthens the argument that he needs to back up his comments with facts.

Re:Um, it's Cory Doctorow

[argent]

Which only strengthens the argument that he needs to back up his comments with facts.

What does that have to do with the OP's argument that /. shouldn't have posted the article because BoingBoing was ... whatever he was trying to say it was?

I'm not saying "The fact that it's Cory Doctorow means it really happened", I'm saying "Cory has enough of a reputation that this is really news". Certainly it's news by slashdot standards, sheesh.

Re:Um, it's Cory Doctorow

[Matt Perry]

What does that have to do with the OP's argument

Everything. The OP's point is that with just a little bit of critical thinking you can see that there isn't any factual information to link the BBC story to something some unnamed individual said on a mailing list. Just because Cory Doctorow read it it somewhere doesn't make it true. With the information provided it just doesn't add up.

First a post about cops busting down a door for a user using Lynx. His only evidence is something he saw posted on "a mailing list." No link to this list so that we can read it for ourselves. We have no idea who the person is that gave the details quoted in Doctorow's blog. Doctorow is just repeating something he saw somewhere without giving any attribution to the original post. That doesn't make it believable no matter who Doctorow is. Meanwhile there's a link to a story that doesn't mention anything about browsers or operating systems.

Then an update stating that he has more information to corroborate the story but he refuses to share it. This is a non-story based on hearsay from an unnamed third party. Sorry, but I expect more information before I believe something like this. For all I know a troll could be playing a big joke on Doctorow.

I'm not saying "The fact that it's Cory Doctorow means it really happened", I'm saying "Cory has enough of a reputation that this is really news".

Wait a minute. You don't know if it really happened, but it's really news? I expect for my news to have really happened.

Re:Um, it's Cory Doctorow

[Mike Hawk]

Wait a minute. You don't know if it really happened, but it's really news? I expect for my news to have really happened.

Don't you know? The documents are fake but accurate.

Re:Um, it's Cory Doctorow

[argent]

The OP's point is that with just a little bit of critical thinking you can see that there isn't any factual information to link the BBC story to something some unnamed individual said on a mailing list.

The OP made several points. The one I'm objecting to is that the fact that this was on a humorously named website had anything to do with its credibility.

I expect for my news to have really happened.

That would be in some alternate universe, then? Or do you think the fact that we can see the sausage being made means that it's being made any differently than it was in the past?

Why not use "Links" instead of "Lynx"

[Jagasian]

eLinks is a far better text based browser compared to Lynx. eLinks actually tries to recreate a better layout of the web page, tables, forms, etc, while Lynx is basically just the same as telnetting into the web server port with all of the HTML tags ripped away. eLinks also supports SSL, colored text, and mouse input, so that you can actually use it to browse the web and even do a little shopping on Ebay or Amazon.

In fact, I don't think that anybody in their right mind actually still uses Lynx. Once Links hit the net, nobody ever looked back. Eventually Links gave way to improved version such as eLinks. I guess many people used Lynx many years ago, and then never used a text based browser again, so they don't know any better?

eLinks is lightweight, small, but a joy to use whether you are using a commandline only system or a graphical system. Give it a try, and you can bet that you will find it useful.

Re:Why not use "Links" instead of "Lynx"

[Jagasian]

Opps, I replied too early. Compare this in your favorite graphical browser to the text-only browser eLinks' rendition of Google News. Then take a look at Google news using Lynx. See the difference? I thought so.

Re:Why not use "Links" instead of "Lynx"

[cpghost]

Also tried w3m? It's quite good too, though it has shortcomings of its own.

Re:Why not use "Links" instead of "Lynx"

[Teancum]

Although it has been a while myself, I used to be a rather avid Lynx user. Also, if you absolutely want to make sure that your website is 100% following standard HTML coding, I love to run it through Lynx if for nother other than to do a quick verification that all of the images are properly tagged, and other aspects of viewing web pages aren't all that cumbersome. If the webpage passes the Lynx test, I feel pretty confident that most other non-standard browsers will also work (in addition to IE and Mozilla).

Also, keep in mind that there are some (admittedly older) computers that you can shell into via telnet that only have Lynx installed. Rather than trying to hassle getting something new installed, Lynx is there and handy. It was also spread around quite freely in the early days of the web.

Re:Why not use "Links" instead of "Lynx"

[Vo0k]

Links instead of Lynx?
And probably OpenBSD instead of Solaris?

They woudn't send the Police. They would nuke your house from the orbit.

i ain t kindding

[The MESMERIC]

the police arrvied
dont do it!! the povlice is here!! fukkkk

Cory Doctorow vs. JWZ

[argent]

In this corner: the author of "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom", a crusader for online freedom, and respected onine journalist.

In this corner, the man who invented <blink>.

Who are you gonna trust?

this is how they do it in the US

[airConditionedGypsy]

Have someone they trust fold different notes in different ways and load up the wallet or billfold.

Woz and the "$2 Bill Incindent"

[caveat]

Shameless Karma Whoring

You don't get arrested for using IE

[Felinoid]

Remember when it was "You don't get fired for chousing IBM"
Now we have "You don't get arrested for using IE"

I'll lazly look over the server logs and see diffrent clients and look em up. Some times it's a bot some times it's a spammer scooping e-mails but I've found some neat new web browsers this way.
I guess the first thing the BT admin do when THEY see a client they don't recognise is call the police.

Yes I've seen the comments that suggest the guy was actually hacking the website with lynx.
Sure sure he was hacking the website with lynx and I was speeding on a little kids tricycle and broke into fort knox with a paperclip.

On the flip side... yeah it could be a hoax. However I'm rather sceptical that BT could be so sure nothing evil happend before they cought a hacker.

Wait for the next virus/worm/browser hijack etc contain code that changes the browser to report it's "0\\/n3d" or something.

The real question

[KlomDark]

The real question is: How to blind people know when they are done wiping their ass? Smell?

Ignorance?

[lysium]

"Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things" (the name doesn't exactly instil confidence in the credibility of its stories)

Which wet rock do you live under, exactly? Your 'net lore obviously extends no further than your slashdot account. Speaking of which, what do you think "slashdot" sounds like to the tech-phobic businessman? Think about it -- you are now categorically defined.

Great way to get attention...

[PhYrE2k2]

So I'm a guy in my 20's and every once in a while I'll go somewhere that I want attention (like a furniture store for example) and of course no salesperson will attend to me.

Problem solved. Go up to a salesperson and say "Hi- do you accept cash?" They'll perk up very quickly and won't leave you alone for the rest of the visit (especially if they're comissioned). Who walks into a place with $700+ couches with a wad of cash? Or an AV store with audio/video equipment starting at $300-$500.

You'll never be left alone again- they'll abandon most other customers. If you're there with hundreds or thousands in cash, you're probably looking to mkae a purchase.

-M

Re:well

[lysium]

BoingBoing is a news aggregator, one of the oldest and best known on the 'net. You did a great job displaying your ignorance, though.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Perfect, thank you :)

[new500]

Nice one. Thank you. DONE!

I guess in Soviet Russia all your old browsers belong to us . . .

Sorry, that should read, Welcome to Lawless Dictatorial Britain.

. . .

It's early and it's friday so all I can say is...

[neckdeepinspecialsau]

Bah! hahahahahahahahahahaha!

No good deed goes unpunished.

Hahaha...Doh!...Fell off my chair.

This is a better story than the guy finding the nail in his head.

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.

Reason No. 326 to Use Mozilla Firefox

[Cruxus]

You won't be arrested for being an evil L'/nX h4x0r d00d.

BBC World Service Report

[sepluv]

It was reported on the BBC World Service in the main news headlines the other night that someone had "attempted to hack" into the DEC WWW site (which is actually on *.bt.com.) (in order to steal money) but had been caught thanks to the resourcefulness of "their ISP, BT".

As well as the IMO very dubious bit about BT ever being resourceful (which I didn't mention), I did contact the BBC World Service and ask them not to (mis)use `hack' in its journalistic sense.

On second thoughts maybe the word wasn't so inappropriate.

Re:BBC changed article I think

[amnesiaWind]

of course lynx handles forms! it would be utterly useless if it didn't (you couldn't even search google)... it also does encryption so you can post those forms securely...

I experienced this type of situation before

[dillee1]

Back in the days when I was staying in uni resi, I used gnome to browse the windows network there.

I got funny compliant letters from ITS saying I was trying to hack their windows machine. Seems like admin there think the same way as BT admins/police then.

Single largest personal donation - clause

[Pitawg]

I suppose this was due to an End-Donatee-Server-License spelled out in Bill's large personal donation to the cause....

Re:$2 bills widely circulated in strip clubs

[karnal]

Just give the bill a good whiff. I guarantee you will be able to tell whether you'll want it stinking up your wallet or not.

Exactly!

[alienmole]

CBS News: Documents have come to light proving that George Bush cheated on his National Guard service.

Bloggers: Nuh-uh!

CBS News: Bloggers are a bunch of losers sitting at home behind their computers wearing pajamas.

Rest of world: CBS News crashed and burned. Investigations underway, heads are rolling.

Smaller examples happen all the time. Look for retractions in newspapers and even on some nightly TV news shows (*cough*Keith Olberman*cough*).

that news is not true

[walkingshadow]

I don't believe that news. That's bullshit. Folks, don't believe everything you read

Blind People and Same size money.

[djdavetrouble]

When I was in high school I worked at a grocery store, and there was a blind man that came in regularly to shop. I would walk him around the store and tell him the things that I saw, the sizes, etc. When he bought canned goods, he would make notches in the paper label so he knew what it was.

When he had to pay, he had different denominations of bills folded differently in his wallet, presumably done at the bank or by a trusted helper.

There are lots of little systems like this that are a part a blind persons life, to deal with the things that sighted people take for granted.

What's Next?

[einhverfr]

Maybe the UK will pass new terror laws banning suspected terrorists indefinitely from the internet and cell phones without trial. Maybe even putting said suspects indefinitely under house arrest without trial.

Sound out there? It's not.

Article URL

[phorm]

How about the URL of this article? Or a link to the "links" webpage?

Thank God I use Links

[AmazingRuss]

I always knew in my heart that Lynx' inability to render tables was a mark of Satan. Someday I simply MUST put xwindows on this box...

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Lynx user arrested?

[MSisEvil]

Oh well, time to switch back to telnet for all my web browsing...

Should have been...

[runamok1]

Everyone arrested who used Microsoft's Internet Explorer on Microsoft's Windows operating system(s).

Strange world

[neo2k.dk]

Pretty strange world, lynx is great, besides i use firefox the most... text-typed browsers are very usable when getting the nvidia driver og testing my website in text-mode :) Lynx is great !!! Links is great !!! Why would someone ever think it was a hacking attempt :S

To be more precise

[billstewart]

The police arrested him because The Big Telephone Company thought he was hacking stuff, and they reported him to the police for hacking. It wasn't because he was using Lynx, because they didn't have a bloody clue that he was using Lynx...

In civilized countries, there's usually more court proceedings than appears to have happened in this case, and part of the surprise here is that the police didn't just politely knock on his door and ask him to "assist them in their enquiries" as the localism goes, they broke the door down violently, something they normally do only if you're engaged in violent crime or you're Irish. On the other hand, there are some vile scamemrs out there trying to rip people off with fake tsunami-relief appeals.

Sounds like a good libel case here, if BT doesn't pay him off first. Hope nothing was burgled out of his apartment (other than by the police) while he was locked up, and if anything was, BT's responsible for that too.

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

[justins]

Racists, sexists, and Rush Limbaugh won't even bother to tell you what a bizarre idiot you are for being a furry. So really, maybe he likes you MORE than they do.

Feel the love!

Re:Um, it's Cory Doctorow. Who?

[klausner]

Doctorow is mainly know to BoingBoing readers, which makes his "fame" completely self-referential.

At least with Slashdot, folks can post comments criticizing or calling the sources into question. The only comments BB posts come from some secret submission mechanism, and only appear if the article author likes them.

You don't have to break down the door

[PetoskeyGuy]

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.

For IE users you can just walk right in.

at a youth center for the blind near you....

[dopeghost]

ha, ha, ... shit whats that noise!

Now picked up by "mainstream" press...

[I confirm I'm not a]

...well, as mainstream as the business press gets in NZ! (disclaimer, yes, I am a Kiwi)

National Business Review - Tsunami 'hack' -- London cops Swat lynx

Re:Um, it's Cory Doctorow. Who?

[argent]

Doctorow is mainly know to BoingBoing readers

Or to anyone who pays any attention at all to computers-and-society issues. I've corresponded with the man for years, but I didn't even know about BoingBoing until this past Christmas.

Discounting this because it's on BoingBoing would be like discounting a comment about free software from RMS because it showed up on BoingBoing. The fact that it's on BoingBoing is completely irrelevant - consider the source, not the medium.

Redirect...

[mbrooks]

Any chance we can get the police to break down the doors of people using Netscape 4 and forcibly upgrade them? Heck, start a PayPal collection to hire mercenaries to do the work, and webmasters around the world would start kicking in to help out.

That's not funny

[DeadVulcan]

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

Who's moderating this funny?? That was totally informative!

Now this post, on the other hand... This post is funny.

Re: 2 dollar bills

[Mr_Perl]

The trouble is that banks have to order 1000 of them at a time, and few are willing to bother with it so they will probably stay fairly rare.

Re: Obligatory sci-fi reference: Envaluation

[RomulusNR]

I think it's in Running Man (the book) -- in the future, the U.S. introduces a new plastic coinage currency, but grandfathers the old metal currency by devaluating it to 1/3 of its face value. For a while, there are two U.S. "dollars", one that is 3x the value of the other.

This is probably the sort of thing you'd have to do to make low coinage useful again while not having awkwardly high base coins.

And besides, in the U.S., if we got rid of the penny, we'd get screwed on all those $xx.99 purchases. And those little dishes on the counters of convenience stores would be no more.

Lynx day

[Yankel]

Or you can still use a Windows version:

http://www.rahul.net/dkaufman/

and see how many of your favorite websites are usable with Lynx. I remember the good 'ol days when designing websites for text-based browsers was still the number one priority. After all, those Digital VT-200's could only do so much!

Are there no skeptics on slashdot?

[CA_Jim]

I tried to verify this story. The only site that knows anything about it is boingboing.com. They won't give details because the source is "leery".

I hate to say this but reputable news requires confirmation of sources. This seems more like a "friend of a friend told me something..." Could it be a hoax to see how many people bite?

It worries me how many people on slashdot accept boingboing without noting how scant the evidence is. Where is the skepticism, the desire for proof, confirmation of the story. Every other link I could find ultimately went back to the same vague story.

Ouch

MOD UP

[fiannaFailMan]

I'll second that. And the headline writers on here crack me up. Even if this story were true, he wasn't jailed 'for using lynx.' He would have been 'arrested' for supposedly breaching the Computer Misuse Act by unlawfully trying to access information that he has no business viewing.

Re:MOD UP

[Teancum]

he wasn't jailed 'for using lynx.' He would have been 'arrested' for supposedly breaching the Computer Misuse Act by unlawfully trying to access information that he has no business viewing.

Still, he was jailed for using Lynx. The headline is correct as that is the only action he really did, and the "unlawful access" was a public website where he was doing something not only legitimate, but encouraged by the government.

It kills me when people consider it "hacking" when you type a new URL into your browser (i.e. directly moving to another webpage (5.html to 6.html) or accessing the directory root. In this case, this individual wasn't even doing that... he was simply using a non-standard web browser that also didn't fully implement the HTTP protocol correctly, or at least do so in a manner consistant with the psuedo standards pushed by Microsoft.

Re:$2 bills widely circulated in strip clubs

[Brandybuck]

Husband returns home from completely innocent business trip, where he received a $2 bill as change at a restaurant:

Husband: "I'm home!"

Wife: [sniff, sniff] "You two timing bastard!"

Conversation

[Landshark17]

Imagine that conversation:

Inmate 1: So, what are you in for?

Inmate 2: Murder. You?

Inmate 1: Tsunami donation.

Re:Or...

[LuckyStarr]

a way for BT to do the maths:

1. Arrest User
2. ?
3. Profit!

Easy work around

[beetle496]

There is an easy fix that makes everybody happy and has worked for years. Text browsers and screen reader users get what they need and pop-up text is suppressed.

Use alt="something" and title=""

Re:Easy work around

[archen]

Internet explorer will still display the alt, unless they fixed that in modern versions. I'm pretty sure IE4 always shows the alt as a tool tip, although I'm pretty sure NS4 would should show neither the alt or the title.

That's one nice thing about Mozilla, and to a lesser extent IE6 - you can put title attributes on just about everything which is handy for web applications. I'm not sure where jwz got the title attribute implemented in HTML 1.2, although he'd know more than me. My impression was that wasn't a part of the spec until version 3 or later.

I sure hope SCO doesn't find out

[Anonym0us Cow Herd]

I sure hope that SCO does not discover that a mere claim of wrongdoing is "evidence".

I got one of those letters

[temojen]

One of my boxes was rooted in early 2001, and I discovered it, took it offline, and began investigating within about 15 minutes of it being rooted (I walked into the room and saw the cablemodem blinking when it shouldn't be).

It appeared to be the BIND-Lion worm. I was running RedHat with Cacheing DNS on that machine. Notice I said that I took the system offline within 15 minutes of the attack.

About 2 weeks later I got an email from shaw saying that I was hacking, and that I should cease immediately, or they would cut off my service and contact the RCMP.

I replied that I had already dealt with the problem two weeks ago, and that there message was useless because if I didn't already know what the problem was, I wouldn't have a clue what they were talking about.

I suggested that they change there message to more politely suggest that the recipient's computer was infected with a worm or virus and should be taken to a repair shop when the complaint fits the profile of a recent, well documented worm.

Re:I got one of those letters

[temojen]

I just read your letter... It looks like they took my advice. The one I recieved was more like:

Dear Shaw Internet Customer

Please note: we ask that you provide confirmation by reply email (keeping the subject line intact) that you have received this email and will be acting upon the information contained below. If no reply is received we will cancel your service and contact the RCMP.

We have recieved complaints that hacking attempts against other computers have originated from your connection.

This is not the origional message. I do not have a copy of it here. Notice the lack of details about who complained, what ports were used, etc.

Re:I got one of those letters

[Stephen Samuel]

If you'd been rooted, chances are that someone was using your box as a zombie-bot to crack into other systems. The email that I sent out complained about a worm. The email that they got about you probably complained about a hack attack, dos attempt, or something like that.

They pretty blindly accept whatever complaint they get and don't seem to do much, if any checking. My letter said Nimda Virus, so they forwarded their 'nimda virus' letter. If you read the email that they sent to me, you should notice a complete lack of any information that could identify the machine that was supposedly infected or even the time of the complained attack.

He better be compensated

[Rekkr]

I hope they compensate him for his bail and jail time. If something like that happened to me I'd sue the police and courts. He did nothing illegal yet he has to pay money for bail and he has to go through the process of the courts. On top of that who knows what else will happen to him.

Americans Don't Recognize their Own Money, Either

[SonOfFlubber]

For an amusing account of the trouble someone had when trying to pay for food at Taco Bell with a US$ 2.00 note, check this link:

http://www.digiserve.com/eescape/closet/silly/2-at -Taco-Bell.html

Log

[Ostie]

Lynx user : Log on the site Admin: OMG, something's wrong! Lynx user : I give you my money Admin: Omg, this guy is even mad! Something's wrong! Lynx user: disconnect. Admin: Let's call the police! FBI: OMG... unknown hacking,tsunami,money... let's outsource this one to the Army US Army: SET US UP THE LASER SATELITE US Army: Coordonate x,y,z ready US Army: Main screen turn on US Army: Make your time US Army: boom

Re:HAHA YES THAT IS VERY FUNNY

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly the same with me. I have been using straight IE (no shells, whatever) for many, many years, and have only recieved one virus -- and that was because I downloaded and installed an EXE I found on the net (hey, I was 8 years old, give me a break :P ). Since then, I have had NO viruses, NO spyware/adware (except the occasional 'tracking cookie' -- big deal), and NO giant memory/CPU leaks like I get with Firefox.

Yes. I've tried Firefox. I tried switching twice since 1.0 was released, and both installs would either suck up memory (ended up using over 200MB RAM after left open for a couple days) or suck up CPU (took 50% CPU to scroll on a few select pages, while IE performed perfectly).

I'll stick with IE, despite its pathetic CSS rendering.

Drop your keyboard

[Ostie]

Police : Freeze!!!! Police : Drop your keyboard! Police : I won't repeat it twice, drop your keyboard!!!!

You are mistaken.

[beetle496]

Internet explorer will still display the alt

Nope. IE displays prefers to display title content (as tool tip) if it can, which is why title="" suppresses tool tip even in the presence of alt="something". Please try it.

unless they fixed that in modern versions

I think it was with IE4 (or maybe one of the decimal revisions) that this behavior changed. I am not sure I would characterize even the current version of IE as "modern" but this little trick has worked for years, at least since HTML 4.0 (1998). What was HTML 1.2? I thought the first official version was 2.0? For the record, title was a valid attribute for A HREF but not for IMG in HTML 3.2.

Re:You are mistaken.

[archen]

Yeah, I'm pretty old school so I still think of 3.2 as more or less the standard, although I've gotten in the habbit of coding more xhtml these days (although they can take 'align=' from my cold dead hands). I tend to get IE versions mixed up since they all pretty much look the same from IE4 on. I've never tried to suppress the alt with the title, so maybe I'm thinking of IE (4?) displaying the alt when no title is present.

I thought the first official version was 2.0?

Yeah, I caught that too. Maybe the fact that jwz thinks there was an html 1.2 explains why Netscape 4 and below did everything wrong since Netscape use to make up the standard as they went along

Beaten with an organic carrot?

[ebyrob]

You somehow related to Camp Mivoden?

Seem to recall seeing that on the wall there... Those things are really TOUGH by the way!

Re:Beaten with an organic carrot?

[Stephen Samuel]

I ran into it on a poster at a store in Edmonton a long long time ago. I vaguely remember it being attached to a threat against people who insisted on smoking. In any case, I remembered it because it just seemed so .... cute.

As for organic food being tough, you must have run into a batch of really bad organic carrots -- one of the ones that'll beat non-organic food without wilting a leaf.

People Speed Read Emails....

[sasha328]

and smetimes miss the whole point of the email.

There's this email virus hoax about the file in windows that looks like a tedyy bear which is supposed to be a "virus". It's one of those "irish viruses", literally asking the user to delete their own files.
Anyay, I thought I'll do the ritght thing by the people I was supporting at the time, and drafted an email which basically copied the contents of the hoax email and advising people not to follow the instuctions because it is a hoax. The clincher is that the subject of the email was HOAX this is not true...
What happens, they read the contents, skipped my section about not following the instructions and they went about deleting the file!
To make things worse, the group that I sent the email to forwarded it to a whole heap of people who I didn't know. My phone number was in the signature, and I started getting calls from people saying they've followed my instructions and deleted the file...
It made our whole IT Department laugh at the silliness of people who don't read their emails properly!
Eventually, I started advising my recipients to not-please forward my emails without my approval.

Yes, strict xhtml is hard

[beetle496]

Yes, strict xhtml is. I am mostly doing okay with it, and have pretty much gotten past the lack of an align attribute, but I don't think I ever figured out how to center a table. CSS float attribute could use a center value me thinks.

Anyway, I re-read the jwz quote and there clearly is a typo, 1.2 should be 3.2. He is explicitly talking about title on A HREF (which actually doesn't apply to IMG tool tips) so that all makes sense now. It was about this time that IE started with tool tips for links, probably as a feature Navigator didn't have. I don't know what other browsers do in the presence of alt="something" title="" but I am confident this works for IE.

what's next

[torrents]

lynx + whitehouse.gov = gitmo scary times...

Let's really f*ck with them...

[http101]

I say we find a Mosaic 1.0 browser and donate. That should really freak them out.

Re:I use Lynx

[Vo0k]

I use Lynx notoriously. My "main" box playing a game, my firewall just next to it, with lynx fired at the game FAQ, walkthrough, tips or something like this.

Oops.

[Kymermosst]

That's what I get for not previewing. Everything starting with "Ah, well" and subsequent is my own text, not the parent poster's text.

Funny money

[Thuktun]

We are already at the point where making a large purchase with paper money is unusual.

Depending on your level of belief, there's also trouble passing certain small bills, too.