Slashdot Mirror
Teen Sentenced for Releasing Variant of Blaster Worm
ScentCone writes "Minnesota teen Jeffrey Lee Parsons got a year and half for releasing a Blaster variant. The lightweight sentence was due, said the judge, to the parents' neglect. Quoting the judge: 'It's not a healthy thing to lock yourself in a room and create your own reality.' Which means most slashdotters basically have a get out of jail free card."
Maybe Their Charity, the Lord Protector, will assign him to tranlate old MS-DOS textbooks.
18 months in a Minnesota prison may only seem like 2000 years. Maybe his cellmate will be like that guy from Fargo...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
'It's not a healthy thing to lock yourself in a room and create your own reality.' Which means most slashdotters basically have a get out of jail free card."
Don't you mean a "locked yourself into jail already" card?
When did Slashdot math change it so 18 months in jail is like getting no jail at all?
"He will still have to pay restitution to Microsoft and to people whose commuters were affected in an amount to be determined at a hearing set for Feb. 10."
"The judge imposed three years of supervised release following his prison term, during which Parson can only use computers for business and education - not video games or file-sharing or hacking."
Come on. He's not getting off easy. He didn't do anything irrepairable, why would more jail time change things?
You know, the thing that really pisses me off is the fact that whenever companies start using a technology, they make everything that the scientists and engineers who don't work for them illegal. In the meantime, they release products (like MS Windows) that are totally insecure. I don't advocate releasing viruses--especially script kiddies--but it seems like more an more things are going to be illegal to give businesses a tool to punish those who reveal the flaws in their shitty products. Soon Nmap will be considered a terrorist tool used to infiltrate networks. Maybe MS can succeed in making all of Linux illegal, since it was put together by a bunch of European commies anyway. That is the attitude of the Bush administration toward Europe anyways--just hope it doesn't whittle Linux down.
"Parson had been out of jail on a $25,000 pretrial bond pending sentencing. He was not allowed to leave his home in Minnesota except to go to work, or if supervised and preapproved by the court." So it's not healthy to lock yourself in a room and make your own reality, but it is ok to force you to stay at home. Amazing.
You really think this is worth wasting a productive life over?!?
I guess the reason that I got rejected for this story is that I thought the sentance was oppressive, and this submitter felt it was lightweight. Get out of jail free card?? How about felony speech?!
Surely, there was some ground that both got the point home to him well before prison. Were they worried about Anarchy breaking out all over?
I know, if no machine was ever vulnerable, it could never happen.
Which is a bit like saying that breaking and entering is the homeowner's fault for using windows. No windows means no part of the wall is easily breakable, so no one can get in.
I doubt his parents would realize he was making a virus even if they were looking.
He used a hex editor to change the name of the virus and put his "handle" in. That's it. He didn't write a variant of the blaster worm, he changed a couple strings in a binary.
Black and grey are both shades of white.
Like Kevin Mitnick?
Yes, his crimes were a bit more on the border and less damaging, but he was in jail longer, convicted older, and still seems to have gotten on with his life pretty well. I'd hardly call the guy useless.
I figure this kid has at least as good a chance of turning out a normal guy as Mitnick. (Though only time will tell if he has the moxie for it)
Sure, there is a lot of debate around the legal age of reason.
Sometimes the law draws an arbitrary line (voting age, army age, driving age) and sometime it prefers to judge in case by case (as in murders, trials as an adult).
If legal age for prison can fluctuate, then the legal age for voting, drinking, driving, and the army should also be decided on a case by case basis.
- On a more serious note, I'm not sure our judges should really be handing out extra-light sentences to people they believe are deranged. SAT classes? Scary stuff. This seems like a slap on the wrist for someone who caused such a tremendous amount of damage. It sets a bad example for other script kiddies.
Really now, we don't know all that much about the details of this person's life. The judge has a lot more information on this person's background and is better able to decide than those of us in the "peanut gallery". It was noted that he had "psychological troubles" due to parental neglect.Also, " Pechman said she was sentencing him at the low end of the range because although he was 18 at the time of the attack, his maturity level was much younger than that.
"I learned a lot about you," she added. "Many of the mental-health problems from the household you grew up in contributed to this problem."
The interesting thing is that he could have been a Slashdotter. His malicious attacks were against a Microsoft Windows update Web site as well as the Recording Industry Association of America Web site, two favorite "whipping boys" of Slashdotters.
Sig cancelled due to lack of interest
It's actually more complicated. American justice sensibly splits into trials of "guilty" or not, and sentencing. Your distinction makes some sense in the "guilty" part, though even an 11 year old knows stealing is wrong, but they won't be tried as an adult for shoplifting. But the real distinction makes the most sense in sentencing. That's where the court decides what to do about it. And deciding what to do about a kid's bad behavior can include education, while incarceration destroys most chances of socializing them. In this case, the court learned that the kid had been deprived of time that other kids spend socializing and learning consequences of destructive behavior. So he was all the more suited to education, rather than just incarceration, even if they reduced the time. The rest of the sentence, denying access to "fun" computing, seemed to recognize that. But justice must be applied consistently for it to work at all.
--
make install -not war
A key example of this from my old CF reserve unit: We had young men in there of 18 years of age who could go places and die for their country *but who could not have a beer in the mess!*. So, it was okay to give them a firearm and let them call in artillery, but Dear Lord don't let them touch a light beer. (Well, combining the two is a bad idea, but that's not really what I was getting at....)
Of course, this just led to the 'blind eye'. Many of us felt if you were old enough to wear the uniform, take the oath, and kill and die for your country, you could at least have a beer from time to time.
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
My 20-year-old former next door neighbor (a habitual criminal and the one person in the neighborhood I wouldn't gladly invite to brunch with my folks) was recently convicted on 4 counts of auto theft. The cars he stole were worth a total of about $25,000. He was sentenced to 5 years in prison (actually 4 5-year terms, but served concurrently). How does this compare to the kid who got a year and a half for releasing a worm that infected 50,000 computers? Let's do the math.
For purposes of this discussion, I'll assume that the car thief totally demolished the cars he stole, for a total damage of $25,000. That makes his sentence one year for every $5,000 in damages.
The LovSan worm infected about 50,000 computers. Let's assume that each computer cost $1,000. Let's also assume that the machines were out of service for 2 days as a result of the worm. Given an average PC lifespan of 4 years (1460 days), that's 1/730 of the computers' lifespans, or about $1.37 in damages per computer infected. Multiply by 50,000 computers, and you have $68,500 in direct damages.
That doesn't count the costs of removing the infection, lost productivity, etc. etc.
The kid got off light; a just sentence would have been 12 years or more, IMHO. Of course, that'd only be 4 years in jail before he got paroled.
Then again, I think my punk-ass neighbor got off light, too. If I'd caught him trying to steal my truck, he'd be serving his sentence in a hospital bed, eating and crapping through tubes.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, & Firearms" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
Wachowski brothers are a bad example. Firstly, they didn't really create their own reality so much as they assembled it from a couple Japanese cartoons and Tron. Secondly, a theatrical production involves a hell of a lot of interpersonal interactions; you have to constantly deal with actors, various production teams, and funders.
Douglas Adams died while going to the gym, so he wasn't exactly locking himself in a room. Stephen King may or may not actually be healthy, it's an iffy question. If he is, I'd imagine he's fairly capable of separating himself from his own stories. I don't know enough about Stan Lee to comment on that one, though, he may be a valid example.
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~