Slashdot Mirror
British Teen Cleared in "E-mail Bomb" Case
legaleagll writes "According to this article , a British Judge has ruled that a teen who sent approximately 5,000,000 e-mails to his former employer was not in violation of the U.K.'s Computer Misuse Act. It appears that the Computer Misuse Act is a bit outdated being that it was created 15 years ago when a number, perhaps most, of the current methods for misuse of computers were not contemplated."
How do we strike a balance between a piece of legislation that covers any crime that may not have been thought up yet, without prohibiting activities that are not necesserily criminal that will be invented in the future? This is something that no country has come up with yet and this is unlikely to happen any time soon due to various governments in power. (cough)
-Palal
Perhaps it is time for that business to invest in a more modern mail server. Indeed, even the lowliest of Dell servers running Linux or FreeBSD can easily handle 5 million email messages, even if sent in a very short period of time. A large amount of mail should never cause the server to completely crash, even if it does consume much bandwidth and cause other delays.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
That law has a hard time keeping up with technology. It takes a long time for laws to be made, changed, proven, and stand up in court. It doesn't take nearly as long in the technological world for attacks, defenses, and things in general to change. This is where a lot of the problems are coming from, since most of the time when you get things that are pushed out quickly there are all sorts of acts or laws such as the DMCA or Canadian Do-Not-Call list) which contain all sorts of problems in one way or another. It's just a shame it will take so long for things to really shape up.
Really quite a predicament when too fast means you get poorly written laws, and too slow means the bad guys can work "legally" for a while...
While he got off on the computer misuse charge, what about spamming? Couldn't it be argued he was sending unsolicited email to this bloke? Do the UK have such laws?
Sorry, but that's a pretty dumb comment. In fact, there isn't one line of it that I can't rip to shreds in seconds.
Do you have any idea of the size of the company involved?
For all you know, the company concerned might have no more than a handful of employees, so a mail server capable of handling 5 million emails in a short space of time would be totally inappropriate. Not all computer crime is committed against large organisations that have turnovers that are measured in millions or even billions.
Wasting police and court time? Well, if the police were involved then there's a good chance that the prosecution was brought by the Crown Prosecution Service (ie, the government), so someone in the appropriate position of authority thought it was a sensible case to persue.
And even if it was a civil case, well, then that's what courts are for: to listen to all the evidence, consider all the facts, and make a judgment one way or another when two parties are in dispute.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
More importantly, this is a story about an assclown who flooded an e-mail server and got away with his abusive behavior on a technicality in British law... one which will surely be corrected soon.
How the fuck does this have anything to do with "my rights online?"
Unless you think I have an inalienable right to be an assclown, in which case, HAND.
Yeah sure its only 5 million emails, and most systems should be able to handle that. Providing of course that they were only going to one person. What if it went to all staff and there was 30 employees then you have 150 million messages and its a little bit more of a problem. Assume you posted these all at 2 am at night, at 8 the next morning all 30 people get to work and check their emails all at about the same time. Ouch
Illegal is to use lynx and to type URL manually, as was covered by previous slashdot posts.
If this guy would be punished for annoying people by sending 3 millions E-Mails, it would set precedent to punish spammers.
It would seriously harm advertising industry, if spam would be banned. No responsible jugde would allow this to happen.
The Computer Misuse Act seems to have been designed to encode the electronic equivalent of breaking-and-entering (offences 1 & 2) and criminal damage (offence 3).
Denial of service is probably very difficult to encode in a similar fashion, since I do not see what *criminal* offence it would equate to.
In this particular care, there is no essential difference between sending a million emails and sending a million letters by post - both would swamp the service, but equally both are simply making use of the (e)mailing infrastructure as it was designed. (Yes I know letters cost more. That's irrelevant - they require more effort to deliver, and are priced accordingly).
Taking a different example, such as opening thousands of connections to a server with intent to deprive others' of access to it, I still can't see what equivalent physical world *criminal* offence has been committed. In this case an analogy requires many people, but what difference is it if a thousand people stand on the pavement outside a shop entrance effectively preventing other shoppers from entering, due to weight of numbers? Sure, the police can ask people to move on, which is the same as closing those open connections, no?
Since most electronic systems only enact operations which have equivalents in the physical world, I do not see how it would be right to create a law which makes the electronic equivalent illegal, when the physical original is not. This use of legislation creates the likes of the DMCA.
The Computer Misuse Act is a rare example of a really *good* law which is (1) broad enough to capture most offenders (2) easily tested for applicabilty i.e. not complicated with exceptions, extensions, etc and (3) not so vague that it is open to abuse.
What is illegal?
Getting on trains, if you're Brazilian.
We don't believe in radical loony monotheistic religions from the middle east -- we're Christians.
Just because this guy sent x amount of emails it doesn't take away the fact that he destroyed a computer network infrstructure, which can be applied as criminal damage. That can be recompensed by the criminal for replacing the equipment and lost revenue. On a similar note, some berk's managed to ping my website into submission so that it cannot be view for the rest of the month. If I ever find who did it then there will be serious hell to pay.
There have been many times when dealing with people that I wished I could kiss my own butt goodbye