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MySpace Predator Caught By Code
An anonymous reader writes, "Wired News editor and former hacker Kevin Poulsen wrote a
1,000-line Perl script that checked MySpace for registered sex offenders. Sifting through the results, he manually confirmed over 700 offenders, including a serial child molester in New York actively trying to hook up with underage boys on the site, and who has now been arrested as a result. MySpace told Congress last June that it didn't have this capability." Wired News says they will publish Poulsen's code under an open-source license later this week.
PWND.
[sarcasm]While most of us here know how trivial searching for string a in string b is, I for one believe that Tom couldn't do it. Aside from all the horror that it is conceptually, the (lack of) stability of their site actually makes that statement believable![/sarcasm]
This article isn't credible. It must be a hoax. I mean, c'mon, you really expect me to believe someone wrote a 1,000 line perl script. And that it did what it was supposed to?
Isn't this a breach of privacy and wouldn't this person or MySpace be vulnerable to lawsuits?
Anything you put on a public web site is--by definition--not private. It would be a breach of privacy if MySpace used private, personal information, but if the script just culled information from public pages, there's no breach of privacy.
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
Thus spake the article:
No amount of rummaging through any database is going to detect someone who registers under a false name, so no MySpace will NEVER really have the ability to find all the sex offenders, unless they can somehow verify that people are who they say they are when they sign up. Though they do now have the ability to catch the really stupid ones it seems.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
That seems like a complicated way to get the same results as:
SELECT * FROM userbase WHERE SexOffender="1";
And then there is Jacob, one of the kids this 39 year old had "friended":
So Jacob's parents can't be bothered to, you know, go see wtf this kid is doing on MySpace? The earlier comment snippet makes it seem like the parents of this kid are totally off the hook here, but guess what? Wether your kid is hanging out at the local corner or someplace online, you really need to know where they are and what they are doing. And then there is the whole issue about not talking to stangers in the first place; apparently his parents have completely missed the boat in that area. Scary.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
I'm quite glad for this guy; but law enforcement's malaise still cheeses my off a bit. Indeed, writing a Perl script to spider MySpace is not rocket science -- I whipped one up six months ago as part of a graduate school project. Immediately sensing the possibilities of catching people like this, I contacted several people in the CIA and FBI through my school. After several painfully blunt explanations, none of them could grasp how the script could be used in their agencies. Governments and major corporations wonder why China can get into "secure" sites and "kids" write viruses like "ILoveYou" or "Blaster". It's because they're so monolithically slow, stupid, and blind that they can neither see nor react to their environments. Maybe law enforcement will "wise up" and start offering prize money / sponsoring competitions, just like the recent Bio-Tech news here on Slashdot.
No. Most of the hard work in writing something like this is dealing with server errors, which Myspace serves up in lieu of content based on a sinusoidal pattern where you have between 10 and 100 percent probability of getting an error depending on the time of day on Mars.
If you are sifting through private information, then one of the following is true:
- If you are a Law Enforcement Official, anything you discover cannot be used to obtain a warrant, nor can this evidence be used against
someone without it being lawfully reacquired once a warrant has been issued
- If you are a private citizen, unless you violated some sort of Terms of Use or other agreement to obtain the information, it is not
illegal for you to use it
Yes. It is perfectly legal for a private citizen, acting on his or her own volition, to perform searches. The illegality occurs when laws are broken to obtain the information (breach of contract, breaking and entering, etc).OCO is Loco
Doing a bunch of HTTP fetches, parsing and extracting the data -- from sources that were probably never designed to be automatically parsed, and hence have lots of weird exceptions and corner cases -- and then performing string compares, easily adds up to 1000 lines, especially with comments and error messages. The task is trivial in theory but somewhat hairy in practice.
And speaking from unpleasant experience, doing something like this in a language without features dedicated to text parsing (like C++ without the Boost Perl regexp library) would take at least three times the lines.
So how many false positives and false negatives does this produce? i.e., how many non-offenders does it misidentify as being offenders and how many offenders does it misidentify as non-offenders? Furthermore, of the offenders properly identified, how many of them are actually committing, planning to commit, thinking about committing, wanting to commit, or some other way being involved with the committing of a sexual offender related crime on myspace?
While the tool may produce results, are the results good enough and non-damaging enough to be useful? (I'd consider any given non-offender being identified as an offender and subsequently harrassed as such rather extensively damaging.)
Now why is that, exactly?
We know that child molestation has occurred for untold eons. Humans are therefore resilient, resistant to such things, for the sake of survival. And at the risk of getting flamed, I want to point out the evidence that most victims of such mistreatment do in fact go on to lead normal lives. Natural selection sternly requires it.
So. Why is child molestation such an obviously hideous evil?
Is it just because we in the West are presently obsessed with sex?
I swear I am not trolling. I myself am actually a victim, from age 8, but I seem to be fine (although my level of slashdotting may be a sign of a deep malfunction). Ever since I realized that I survived unscathed, I have been wondering for a long time why this subject gets an automatic "OMG teh molestation!!!11!" response, when it is actually such a commonplacde in human history.
It almost -- ALMOST -- smells like we are protesting too much.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
Hey folks.
Picking and choosing when it is/is not OK to cooperate with authorities in a criminal investigation might be very convenient for Kevin Lee Poulsen, but it should give his sources -- past, present, and future -- significant pause.
Wired News -- and Kevin -- have shown that writing a splashy story means more to them right now than the danger of blurring the lines between reporter and cop. This isn't about protecting kids, or about what MySpace should or should not do. It's about eroding the role of the journalist as a fair and impartial witness, in a time when too many people are already barking up that tree.
A hacker should know better.
-- Adrian Lamo
Myspace IS a 1000 line pearl script.
Please sign petition to restore sanity to our banking system!!!
http://financialpetition.org/
It's because people want to outlet their aggressive tendencies someplace, and we've all collectively aggreed that "child molesters" (and now, to some degree "terrorists") are a target that no one will object to our over-reactive hatred for. Other acceptable groups include "cop killers". Let's get all righteous and bloodthirsty over these groups of people, now that it isn't socially acceptable to hate a group based on their skin color.
See how far we've come?
Oh, bullshit. It may be a PR nightmare for them, but the truth is that they likely don't have a true liability in the situation, any more than ICQ/AOL, MSN, Yahoo, etc. would have liability if their software was used by a pedophile to make contact with a child.
In fact, the question could be posed whether they would have liability if they went hunting for "sexual predators" and made a public spectacle of someone who could be guilty of nothing more than propositioning a police officer posing as a street walker - in other words, someone who could be required by their state to be registered as a sex offender but has shown no predilection towards the exploitation of children or forcing sexual contact on someone.
I sure hope he wore gloves and/or other protection for that part!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I posted it under another "funny".
I think there are folks who take the mod system way too seriously and have some sort of problem with the fact that "funny" doesn't garner "karma", so they feel obliged to give it "insightful" or some such. I don't care, If I post a "funny", I don't expect "karma".
My personal opinion is that "funny" is just that - for those who think it is funny. Maybe having zero karma for funny is "right", maybe it is "wrong".
I dunno.
Hey mods - don't zap me down too much. I didn't mod myself up. You are in a pissing match with other mods! (Not that I give a shit what my "karma" is, I am soo going to hell, maybe, depending on who you ask.)
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Make anything personal and you'll care a lot more. It doesn't change the statistics. If you've got fifty million idiots congregated at one place, many of whom are always-horny teenagers, you'd expect more than a handful of predators to try to take advantage of the system. Sure, it's still unfortunate, but considering the numbers we've seen in other situations, it seems remarkably low.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Actually, not exactly, natural selection just requires that the problem doesn't get so bad that it has a significant impact on the ability of the species as a whole to survive. It's perfectly compatible with natural selection if, say, 2% of the population, despite being totally innocent, meets some horrible unfair death, as long as the other 98% gets along fine. If that's enough to keep the species going, then it's all that natural selection requires.
I think there's a common misconception that evolution is a force which is so powerful that it eliminates all imperfection. That's not necessarily the case. It only eliminates perfections that threaten the ability of the species to do the minimum necessary to survive. All other imperfections are relatively unimportant, at least as far as evolution is concerned.
Having said that, I've heard it said that of the people who experience some form of severe trauma or abuse, there is a certain percentage who become pretty much permanently (or at least over the long term) messed up in the head and have trouble coping with life in a wide variety of ways. But then there is also a large percentage of people who come from a messed up background who grow up to be perfectly healthy adults. In fact, these people tend to take their messed up background and find some way to make it into something positive. They may even be more successful than the average person. Years ago, I knew someone who came from a background where he and his siblings had all been abused. He wasn't able to deal with it very well and his life was, I hate to say, a serious mess. (I hope he's managed to iron some things out by now.) His sister, on the other hand, had earned a graduate degree in social work (I think) and had written at least one book on the subject of child abuse. She had done well for herself and was making a real difference in the world, and I think she was emotionally healthy as well.
Basically, it seems like when something really terrible happens to someone, either they are never able to overcome it or they are able to overcome it, and they grow from it in ways that others never would even have the ability to grow. I'm thankful that a good percentage of the people are able to totally recover and be a stronger person as a result. But the reason child molestation and similar things are so bad is that a certain number of people will fall into the first category and never get past it. I don't know why some people are able to get past it and some aren't, but it seems to be the case, and that's why I think we should continue to treat it as a very serious issue.
Make that little girl that he targets your daughter and we'll see how your "perspective" changes.
You're absolutely right, that sort of thing is enough to change anybody's perspective and turn just about anybody into somebody who would suddenly support torture and summary execution.
That is, perhaps, the best reason of them all that it should be impartial parties who administer justice and decide the punishments for these sorts of things. Child sexual abuse is just one prime example. Replace it with "terrorism" and you have another one playing out each day before our very eyes.
Often times it is best to leave the emotion at the doorstep and debate things logically and dispassionately. Pretty much any issue with as much emotion behind it as this one is going to be one of those cases.
Another thing to consider with these "lock them up forever!" attitudes toward some crimes: You run the risk of making things worse. Somebody sexually abusing a child is bad. Somebody sexually abusing a child and then killing him/her because, in terms of their sentence, it is essentially free--that is worse. I'd rather get my child back and the offender get out of jail than have him/her killed and see the offender locked away forever. No contest.