Slashdot Mirror
Teacher Found Guilty of Endangering Kids Due to Spyware
nursegirl writes "Norwich, Conn seventh grade teacher, Julie Amero has been convicted of four counts of risk of injury to a minor after her classroom PC displayed pornographic pop-ups in class. While an expert for the defendant said he had discovered spyware on her PC that had been downloaded from a hairstyling site, the local police investigator claimed that the spyware had been downloaded from actively visiting porn sites. Amero testified that she had told four other teachers and the assistant principal about the popups, but received no assistance. The school's internet filtration software was not working because it's license had expired. Amero faces up to forty years in prison."
The other sad thing (That is, other than a jacked up jury, and the defendant not having a tech-savvy lawyer...) is that this could probably have been easily prevented.
When I service customers' computers, I like to install Spybot, configure it to auto-update, auto-scan, and set its scan priority to "Idle", so it doesn't interfere with the user's activities.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Amero testified that she had told four other teachers and the assistant principal about the popups, but received no assistance ... Amero faces up to forty years in prison.
If only we had some... amendment... a "bill of rights" if you will... that ruled out "cruel and unusal" punishments like this.
Nah, that's crazy talk.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
how that is teachers fault? Unless the teacher installed the spy-ware intentionaly, which is probably not the case.
Eclipse PDE and Me
There we go, slash the budget for Personal Health and Development classes. The kids have already gotten all their ill-advised Sex Ed from the friendly people at Backdoorsluts9.com.
Ninjas use italics.
I don't see this is the teacher fault, it is well known that spyware can install it self with viruses and other nasty things. It is also interesting to note that the software that is meant to keep this out was not working, becose it's license was expired. That can only be the schools fault. But I don't expect conviction greedy Prosecutor to understand that. Since, based on the news I am reading here. He is a total idiot, and rightly so. Who the hell sues over spyware, even if these kids did see some porn on the computer screen, I would think that the Tv is twice as worse then that.
I guess few people in the US needs to be connected back to reality.
Nice fantasy you have there. School teachers are public enemy #1, they are seen as more of a threat to America than terrorists. Plus there's the thousands of cases that prosecutors take up every year in which they don't have good cases. And then there's the politicians and police wanting to look "tough on pornography" for the votes and funding.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Amero faces up to forty years in prison.
With laws like that... why don't you let the terrorists win?
Here in scandinavia you would not even get such a hard punishment even if she had murdered the entire schoolclass.
I know she will not get that much, but even to consider it is laughable.
40 years prison for not installing Firefox... duh!
It is trivial to write a piece of software that, when installed on a person's computer, will visit web sites of the attacker's choosing. The software could be programmed to do this covertly and with the specific intent of incriminating the victim, e.g., by only visiting illegal/immoral sites at such times when the person was using the computer to browse the Internet. The offending sites would be in the victim's browser history, having been visited at times when he/she was using the computer. The software could be programmed to destroy itself after a duration, with the attacker then providing information to authorities with regard to the victim's illicit surfing habit. Getting the software onto the victim's computer is also trivial, given the number of exploits available, open wireless networks, etc.
I'm expecting this to happen soon, if it has not already. Perhaps even as targetted attacks rather than simply random misanthropy.
What has *science* done?!? -- Dr. Weird (ATHF)
Its license. Its.
Seriously...
except it's NOTHING LIKE THAT, it's not her pictures, they were from software installed in secret without her knowledge, and when she discovered what had happened she attempted to get them removed and recieved no assitance. you can not remove the technology from the argument simply because your too dense to understand it, it's intergral to what happened.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I get so fed up with the duality of American society where, on the one hand you are so exceptionally uptight when it comes to nudity, tolerance of other peoples sexuality etc - and on the other hand you are the worlds largest producer & market for pornography.
This leads to sad, sad examples like this where Prosecutors need to find a guilty party or person at any cost to pin the blame on for having some kids unintentionally see some porn pop-ups. I feel really, really sorry for the poor teacher for getting caught in this mess.
Its tragicomic for us living outside your country watching this - I sincerely hope you are able to fix these issues in a fundamental way.
--
It's high time conservative Americans got over their problem with sex. It's clear these hypocrites have sex, otherwise they wouldn't be breeding the children that need to be "protected" from these images. No-one can be harmed by viewing pornographic images, certainly not grade seven students.
There is nothing wrong with sex. There is nothing wrong with nudity. There is certainly nothing wrong with naked female breasts - those of us in the rest of the world were left laughing our heads of at the utter ridiculousness of the outcry over the Janet Jackson "wardrobe misfunction". In fact, women should be free to walk around topless, as men can, if they so desire. The double-standard is simply mind-boggling.
I wouldn't mind betting that the same children that saw the images on this poor woman's computer also saw a number of acts of mindless violence on television that same evening, and not a soul complained. How's that for stupidity?
-- Even if a god did exist, why the fsck should I worship it?
She's a substitute, which means she was only in that class a day or so. For her to have installed spyware and be duped into clicking on it multiple times may be feasible, but is it likely? Besides when you read TFA, the investigator also points out that the jury viewed a list of sites accessed, many of which could not be reached without actively clicking on the ads:
Hitting one or two could be a mistake, but several? It really sounds more like she was surfing for pr0n in the classroom, and using "teh spyware" as an excuse. And of course, Slashdot fell for it. Again.
that prosecutors are allowed to get away with this sort of abuse in the first place. If for every case that is overturned the prosecutor is required to pay a hefty fine to the defendant for wasting their time and messing with their reputation, we might not have to deal with these kinds of cases in the first place. The D.A. in the Duke rape case needs to be strung up by the balls and give those boys everything he owns in restitution.
We all agree that the prosecution has wronged the teacher in this case, so the question is--what do slashdotters think should be done about it?
Well if she was actively looking at porn that changes everything, why a 40 year sentence is too lenient I say!
An important difference between the case and your analogy is that it were not her private pictures.
In my opinion a better offline analogy would be if she was responsible for collecting the school's mail. On the way to the classroom she emptied the school's mailbox and during her lesson some sex advertisement slipped out from that stack of letters.
Suing a teacher for something like that is unbelievable. It ruins your education system in the long term for sure if you have to work in such a climate.
She "faces forty years"? I'm sure that is purely theoretical. I can't see her getting any serious jail time. America is crazy but not that crazy.
However, I do imagine that she will be punished, and if the punishment is something more serious than a scolding for being a computer-retard, it will be excessive.
... who do not live in the US, what is "seventh grade"? Not everywhere uses the same terminology. How old are we talking about here?
ror allowing Windows computers in the classroom in the first place.
t .html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print
Botnets are huge and well known to anyone who ever glances into their spam box.
Some collection of security experts claim that they are tracking 400,000 infected machines
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/07/technology/07ne
These machines are sending out spam, and a fair amount of it is porn spam. The obvious conclusion
is that most every Windows-using school in America has porn on the disks of its classroom computers.
Actually the percentage of infected machines in schools is probably higher than the general percentage,
because schools typically don't have much budget for IT staff, and they often have older computers.
so i could go buy a car, and get put away for 'risk of injury to a minor' or to anybody for that factor, who knows who is going to step out on to the road, or even if something is going to go wrong.
i definitely blame the support engineer (damn techies, giving techies like me a bad name)
just like if i was lied to when my car had apparently past it's mot, but hadn't, and malfunctioned.
that computer should not have been allowed on the network, the suort should have been there, as should the protection.
just for the record, i don't drive (can't) perhaps it was a bad choice of analogy.
for anybody who's seem monkey dust, driving a car = murder
however i do like norwich, i think there might suddenly be a job opening or two.. woo!
And, this isn't the only case where this has happened before (2003)
If it's already there, the last thing you want to do is to publically say that it's already there.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Well, I believe they should weigh her, and if she weighs the same as a duck, she's guilty...
We all make the supposition that pornography is "bad for kids." But where are the studies showing it's harmful? Physically, we don't need to go far to demonstrate that fire and razor blades are potentially harmful to children. But when it comes to emotional or mental damage, I think we're going to need some proof because all the variations involved there. A good defense lawyer would be able to bring those ideas out in demanding that proof of damage be presented.
I'm sure counter claims could be presented such as pulling in case examples, etc, but I get the feeling that there's invariably a lot more going on with the "troubled" kids and that generally healthy kids, while being embarassed at seeing such material, aren't going to launch any rape or 'Columbine' campaigns as a result of pornographic pop-ups.
Now that said, the schools should be suing the HELL out of the companies profiting from this form of advertising and in many respects there are plenty of grounds for other legal action against parties outside of the school. I say they should direct their anger and outrage against the REAL parties responsible.
I don't think much needs to be said about "prevention" though. But I will say this: teaching in school is a presentation. And as such, presentations should be fully prepared in such a way that "unpredictables" are kept to a minimum. Live internet in a classroom at a grade school level is just a bad idea.
No this could not easily have been prevented. There is no anti-spyware or anti-virus software that will stop all possible infections on a Windows box. As to the morons in court convinced that the teacher "had to physically click" on the porn links to make them show up in some way in Windows... give me a break please. That is so not right. It sounds like this teacher may be railroaded to the jail house over computer issues that the persons running the court are clueless about. Just one more reason to toss Windows and learn to use a real OS.
Lets replace the woman in this story with you, would it be ok to push the same line then? It's easy to respond with 'sure', but deep down, would you mean it with real conviction?
I see this as fairly huge. If I was a schoolteacher, as soon as I heard about this, I would immediately stop teaching anything to do with computers or the internet in my classroom. Setting aside the question of whether or not the images in this case resulted from the teacher's actions or from spyware, the case sets a precedent that if students are exposed to pornographic images in your class, you become responsibly, criminally. And, just for gravy, you get to be a sex offender. The cost of this is way too high to make it worth the risk of an accident (say, if a malicious student installed something nasty to set me up), so I would just treat my class as if computers and the internet didn't exist. And so my students wouldn't gain the benefits of these tools, nor any education in their use.
One would think the possibility that the images were the result of spyware would create reasonable doubt, but since it doesn't...
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
She is most likely not allowed to use work computers for private purpose (although everybody does), and using it for porn is worse as the risk of malware is higher. This is something that would in a sane society be a cause of a "serious talk" at the boss office. So how did this get this far?
1) Someone, either the school principal or a parent, must have decided that watching porn pop-ups constitute injury to the pupils.
2) The prosecutor must have agreed.
3) The jury has agreed.
This point to a society whose norms are seriously sick, not just a few twisted individuals.
*** Topic in #doghouse is 'Our hearts are extended to the 17 victims of the recent internet fraud'
* Anubis has joined #doghouse
<Anubis> what fraud?
<Kadmium> You haven't heard about it?
<Anubis> no?
<Kadmium> You can read the full story at http://www.tubgirl.com/
<Anubis> omg wtf!
*** Kadmium changes topic to 'Our hearts are extended to the 18 victims of the recent internet fraud'
from bash.
If noone rtfa, then what's the slashdot effect?
It looks like this person is being scapegoated. Lets concentrate on the fact that it was the school that was negligent in having the license expire on there content filtering software. Even if she was viewing porn and got spyware installed on her computer it looks like she already asked for help in getting it removed and was denied. The school was negligent in letting its content filtering expire and in preventing popups on a teachers workstation causing students to see the dirty. Why is the school not on trial? Answer: Because she is. Why not be as harsh as possible and burn her at the stake along with all the rest of our teachers and all the books in the library?
Even if she intentionally showed porn to children, a more appropriate response would be to fire her. A felony charge for multiple counts of endangerment of children is very far over the top. Forty years in prison, for accidentally exposing some children to dirty pictures is just insane. That's a roughly equivalent to a murder conviction. It this, even if it were intentional, really as bad as murder?
The gouverning elite has a very high incentive to keep the status quo, or even widen the separation between the 'classes'. If the poor underclass is big, that means more options for the upper class to exploit that. The method to produce more poor is to make prevent less children from middleclass families to establish themselves as such, and to keep the children from poor families from rising the social ladder. (Talking about groups and averages here, not induviduals). Good teachers that teach to these classes of kids actually stand in the way of these objectives, as their aim is to have their pupils to achieve the best they can and get the best follow-up education, essentially raising their social status. So what needs to be done is to frustrate those teachers so much that they give up.
Cynical? yes.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
Short answer: State Constitutions vary. Each state decides how many peers a "jury of your peers" needs to have in it to be fair. Twelve is traditionally the number, and most states observe this, but some use six, and some eight.
IANAL, but I'm pretty sure all the states still require a unanimous verdict (all jurors in agreement) to convict.
Who did what now?
So let's assume two reasonable worst case scenarios about this case.
...and laughter/ridiculing of the teacher ensues, the story is told behind the teacher's back for a few weeks and then everyone forgets about it.
1. The teacher was viewing porn on her computer, but she intended it for her own eyes only, messed up and the kids has seen that she viewed porn. She lied to the kids covering up the situation...
reasonable reaction:
2. The teacher was viewing porn on her computer and was showing it to kids because of pedophile intent or as an inappropriate sex-ed.
reasonable reaction: teacher fired, putting her on a list that she can't work with kids anymore. I find the sexual offenders list an overkill though. Disclosing the location of people like this teacher, not letting her go near schools or some such restrictions are an overkill, she is just not fit to be a teacher. She's 40 years old, must have been teaching for a long while now, so you just have to dig in her past to check whether something associated with paedophilia turns up. If yeah, hell sentence her criminally, but if not then there isn't a cause for stronger measures than firing her and not allowing her to work as a teacher anymore.
Criminal prosecution should only come if there is actual harm to children, and viewing a couple of porn pictures is not harm, it's just bad conduct on the part of the teacher, so it should mean loss of job.
Personally I think that criminal prosecution in this case is a joke, even more so the 40 year sentence. What's next, execution for giving "the finger"? When I was 12 I was looking for serial keys on astalavista if my memory serves me correct when a porn popup popped up and it displayed a monster cock. The IT teacher walked up behind me and just told me to turn that off and walked away again. Other kids were directly looking at porn when the teacher wasn't looking and noone made a big deal about it. If the teacher's screen would have flooded with porn popups we would have been laughing at it. I'm not from the USA so I don't get the whole obsession with trying to hide sex. I also received proper sexual education from the school, so I can't complain.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The only way this would have merit IMHO, would be if her home PC was full of pornography and had several bookmakrs for porn. Her best defense would be if the spywareand related porn in question WASN"T on her home PC.
How was it determined she was visiting porn sites?? Just because it was in her history? The advertisements come off of THE porn site, so of course the "computer" visited the porn sites. And what, they went to the index? Sure, popup comes up right as you are about to click, and you just accidentally visited a porn site. The school should be held accountable for not having a good solution for keeping that stuff off, and for not keeping it's software up to date. If I was a parent there, I'd be extremely pissed at the school (and selling them some hardware to make sure it doesn't happen again).
Kernel Krunch - Part of a Complete OS
By 2012, children in the US will be fully protected from sex. At birth, their genitals will be removed and stored on ice. The genitals will be reattached once the children have grown up and married. This will ensure that they learn about sex when they really need to. Any parents refusing to allow this process shall be brought before the elders who shall smite them sorely with stones until they be dead.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
is that people are thrown into jail for 40 years just for accidentally displaying "pornography" to
kids. I suppose it isn't really a "proper" thing to do but what I wonder would she get for
flashing her tits to the class?
10 years of solitary confinement on death row, breast amputation and then being flogged with rubber hoses to a
bleeding pulp and hung from a construction crane??
Why the fuck are they going after the teacher when they SHOULD be going after the Spyware writer/vendor??? Even if the teacher did get the spyware on the computer by visiting a porn site, that doesn't ruduce the culpability of the spyware company/individual in exposing the kids to porn. I'm assuming the teacher didn't visit porn sites WITH the kids (or in front of the kids) of course.
So, fire the teacher for visiting porn in her off hours, and put the spyware guy in jail.
MadCow
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
I don't think it's so much a problem of the legal system being behind the times technologically as it is a 'problem' with our legal system's greatest strength also being its greatest weakness. Trial by a jury of your peers means that you will often have lay people deciding highly technical cases. This is a situation where a better voir dire would have resulted in a better informed jury. The problem is that you have to explain highly technical language to people that may have no clue. I'm not sure how this case will turn, but you also have to remember that the judge (who supposedly is a highly educated person) is the final arbiter in the case. The judge may decide to toss out the verdict in the end. Also, there is the possibility of appeal in this case. Unfortunately good expert testimony (the kind that is more likely to convince a jury) is often expensive - and it is this caveat that often leads to these sorts of verdicts.
Police get rewarded for arresting people and prosecutors get rewarded for convictions. Because of that, they'll tailor thier processes to that end. The fact that computers and the interenet are not secure, and unfathomable to most people is irrelevant. They can't arrest the interent or convict your computer. But they can arrest and convict some poor sap who has no idea what a root-kit is or how his computer can be made into a zombie. So they will.
Police and prosecutors don't care what really happened because their job is to arrest and convict - that's what we reward them for. We'd be silly to expect anything different.
The most important distinction, however, is that it's not some hairbrained idiot at the school that decided to levy these charges. Anybody can sue anyone at any time for any reason. No, this charge was levied by the people. By people representing you and me. The real responsibility for this miscarriage of justice rests on the prosecutor that was elected by the people, and who decided to prosecute this case. He or she needs to be held accountable for ruining the life of another human being.
Don't talk about this like it's something that could really suck for this woman. It already does suck. She's already been convicted. Sure, she can appeal, and based on what I know from this case, she stands a chance of winning, but that black mark is on her record forever. Appeals are not based on the merit of the original conviction, but rather on the fact that she had a fair trial. Until you are convicted, you are innocent until proven guilty. Once you are convicted, you are guilty until proven innocent. It's a whole different ballgame.
As someone who regularly uses a computer in front of children as an educational tool, and as an IT professional, this story scares the hell out of me. Although I know how to keep my computer free of spyware, there isn't one person on
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
I don't see how she had poor judgment since she did seek help to remove it.
Another thing would be the school policies to consider. She might have gotten in trouble by cleaning the hard drive herself. And as to which sites actually installed scripts to allow porn pop-ups, the sites could be very innocent on the surface but could intentionally have those scripts in the background or they could be sites that they themselves have been infected.
If she isn't a techie type person, she might have been scared to try to do anything to remove the problem without help for fear of damaging the computer.
This idea that she could have been found guilty of porn pop-ups is crazy since it really not her fault, especially since she did seek help to get it removed and was ignored by peers and higher ups.
I do hope this is appealed and a good lawyer (ACLU or another techie savvy group) steps in so a bad precedence isn't put into place and used to convect other innocent people.
Injury? I bet the kids started to laugh their asses out when the first tit appeared on screen. I can see what happened here.
*DINNER TIME*
LOL LOL MOM IT WAS SO FUNNAY AT SCHOOL THE TEACH0R'S COMPUTER SHOWED P0RNS
OH DEAR GOD NO MY CHILD!!!!!!! SOMEONE HAS TO PAY!!! (I need a new car too)
Repeat in three more houses and you're done.
Bah, kids nowadays know what porn is from seven years old onwards, not like they are going to get a life-lasting trauma or become terrible perverts for that.
The years where kids used to play ninjas vs cowboys vs pirates are over. (pirates won, obviously, specially if piratebay gets its own country yarrr)
There's your problem. The person going to jail for 40 years should be the one who decided to let Windows into a classroom. Won't somebody think of the children!
The road to hell is paved with Cat 5 cable.
This gives me an idea for a new Mac vs PC ad...
... Mac smiles smugly 'I'll visit you in jail'"
"PC gets cuffed, led away protesting innocence
-- "It's not stalking if you're married!" My Wife.
This is yet another example of the Police powers being abused a user at the school the I work at was accused of a very similar crime the authorities assured the Administration that the could PROVE who had or had not been accessing the purported material. Th specialist in internet crimes went to the local machine and pulled a hard drive and scanned it for information using very good software. However this agent was completely clueless. and the search was ridicules because. 1. Our network uses profiles all user data was on the server not on the local machine 2. Even so he did not pull the correct drive there were three hard drives on this particular machine since it was used to do system backups. 3. Just 1 week prior we had discovered that students had gotten hold of staff passwords and were signing on as staff although this had been corrected any data that might have been discovered could not have been proven only a very careful screening of access times and pc's could have shown a probability not a certainty of association. We live in a new age of the Salem Witch Trials. An accusation is enough to establish guilt.
Counter-point to that.. I'm a part of the OKC2600 crew, and we have monthly meetings that are open to the public. At one such meeting, there was a really creepy guy who kept asking questions about how people could push files onto a computer and such. Being wary of this guy, I did some research. Turns out, he was facing charges for having kiddie porn on a university computer. He was a professor at a community college. He MAY have been able to build up a good BS defense.. were it not for the fact that he had backed up large stacks of disks full of kiddie porn.
Underage kid walks in on parents having sex. kid turns of age and sues parents.
Parents claim they were making a little brother or sister for the youngster.
Court upholds Kids side, claiming parents should lie to underage kids about how
little brothers and sisters are made.
So if you want to get a teacher busted and sent to jail, you now know how to do it.
And only a fool would think kids today don't know about computers.
Remember, santa and the easter bunny exist until you are old enough to be told the
truth. What better way to prepair the next generation for believing the political,
war monging and religious BS.
Personally, I have been to hairstyling sites that have tried to DL spyware. I beleive this is truie from the teacher. I also believe that the spyware went to the porn sites -not the teacher herself per se. I feel the school is at fault for letting the filtering software expire. It also states the teacher had told others about it, but received no assistance. All teachers are not tech savvy.. thats why they rely on the schools filtering system to help out with blocking. I feel the injustice starts with the school letting the filtering system expire. Filtering systems can also be acquired free for schools.. I do not see any excuse by the school to have let this have happened. Also, the school computers schould have been cleaned regulary to check for new programs - spyware - installed on them. Many workplaces have software that will check all computers on the network to see if new programs have been added.
This is one reason why 'malware did it' defenses should be taken seriously by the courts. Most pedophiles are collector types. For example, the FBI profiling guidelines for law enforcement officers who have discovered child porn, whether on or off a PC, just assume the perp is sn obsessive collector, likely to have dozens of CD photo collections burned, whole cabinets of VHS tapes, or similar sized caches in whatever forms they collect. Pedophiles almost invariably want tens of thousands of photos and hundreds of films, perhaps to validate their orientation ("See, lots of people do it, so I'm not a lone weirdo!"), or perhaps from a fear that the supply will dry up and whatever they have managed to collect will be all they see for the rest of their lives. That really creepy guy you mentioned is very typical.
If all the material is on the PC, and good searches of the suspect's home or workplace don't find back ups and additional material, it's time to look at the alternatives before rushing to convict. Conversely, local law enforcement ought to be trained that finding a back up cache or other off device child porn is one of the best ways to ensure solid convictions.
Who is John Cabal?
I read this story earlier on el reg, and since then I really feel sick for this teacher. Facing 40 years in jail for what appears to the most casual internet user as bad luck is so way out of reality touch it's totaly unbelievable.
Her case desserves the world's attention and help ; I'm wondering wether it couldn't be brought to some NGO attention such as Amnesty international, for it looks like a violation of her human rights. This could help her finding a competent lawyer.
I'm really upset a person's life can be shred to pieces that way, just to fulfill some obvious political ambitions.
My father's advice (possibly misremembered) was to opt for a trial by judge if you were innocent and a trial by jury if you were guilty. Now, he actually was a lawyer, but he was definitely not a trial lawyer, so take that with a very large grain of salt.
I mean comeon im sure at least SOME of you have heard of a scripting language program called "AutoIt" and any one that has worked in a school district (on the Tech Admin side) knows that half the teachers/subs dont know how to properly use the computer and a far too many of them should not be allowed access to a computer on the grounds that they are too stupid to use one.
to continue my rant....
on the point of IE vs. FF / M$ vs. Linux vs. MAC. it dosent matter. I can recall 2 instances of having 30+ FF windows opened because of popup loops that were DESIGNED for FF. The districts generally dont have a choice when it comes to the desktop OS. Sure they could move to linux but the tech would be used only 10% of what it was because (as mentioned above) The teaching staff is incompentent when it comes to anything technical. (again im refering to overall averages)
The school's tech department is the only one to blame here for allowing the content filter to expire. if there is no tech dept the pull the school board to the hellfires for not allocating the funds nessary to fix a very weak and broken system.
oh and a side note, just for the record. there are those who dont know that you can turn off a computer by holding the power button. and WONT unplug it because they are petrified they will break a $1000+ machine. Ill say it again most users should not have access to a machine because they are to stubborn to learn how to use it correctly.
there is a shortage of people willing to be teachers in many parts of the US!
Here's the checklist of benefits of becoming a teacher:
-Relatively low wages
-Dealing with spoiled kids
-Dealing with the parents of spoiled kids
-Facing 40 years in prison because your school has an IT department consisting mostly of monkeys
Where do I sign up?!
...///...
What you're seeing on this article is common sense. Even if she got to work at 4am and browsed hardcore bestiality porn for 4 hours before work there's no reason to put her through this. It's ridiculous, it's Kafka-esque. If she browsed porn at work and it can be proven, simply fire her. See how easy that was?
Prosecutors, police and lawmakers all seem to be making the assumption that computer owners should be responsible for everything that is sent to and from the Internet. Yet, we have average people with little knowledge of computer security who are using hard to secure Windows computers. A large percentage of all Windows computer have been infected by spyware or browser hijackers or have had back doors placed in them my hackers or the malware itself. A recent New York Times article was titled the Attack of the Zombie Computers Is Growing Threat. It says that "botnet programs are present on about 11 percent of the more than 650 million computers attached to the Internet". Most of those zombie computers are probably spewing out spam for porn, pump-and-dump stock schemes, or illegal activities such as phishing schemes that steal peoples charge card numbers or passwords. Should those 70 million Windows computer owners around the world also be arrested and sentenced to years or decades in prison?
Last night on ABC, on TV, I saw a 20/20 segment about "Prison Time For Viewing Porn". In that case a teenage boy was facing the possibility of 90 years in prison because several child porn files that were found on the family computer. Police pounded on the door of their Phoenix home at 6:00 a.m. and seized the family computer. The sixteen-year-old boy offered to take a lie detector test and passed the test, but prosecutors continued to press charges. A computer expert later looked at the hard drive and found more than 200 infected files and back doors that allowed hackers to access the family computer from remote locations. Most likely someone else used the insecure Bandy family computer as a place to store the files which they did not dare store it on their own computer.
I have heard that many computer repair people spend much of their time removing spyware from computers belonging to people who complain that computers are running slowly. Prosecutors and police should take into account that these people were not using a more secure operating system such as MAC OS X, Linux or BSD. However, security problems or other misleading circumstances can occur when using Mac, Linux, or BSD. For instance, I use Linux and when I find an interesting website with various interesting Linux, ham radio, solar energy or nutrition related files, I occasionally use the wget command to download most of what is on that web page. I latter frequently am surprised to discover that the wget command also downloaded hundreds of pictures of New England covered bridges or family photos too. I most would most likely not notice if child porn photos had also automatically been downloaded into an obscure subdirectory.
How can law makers, police, prosecutors and child protection supporters seriously suggest holding people accountable for what is found computers without outlawing the use of Windows first? Furthermore, where I live the local cable companies provide their customers with broadband routers which are wide open to being used by nighbors by default. The telephone company where I live provides wireless routers which by default use insecure WEP encryption method. About half of all wireless networks do not have any security enabled and many of the others just use WEP or are still using the defalt SSID and password. Many people also do not use antivirus software, spyware removal software, properly secured firewalls or the latest security updates. Even with Windows security patches installed there are frequently unpatched zero-day exploits out there such as the one for Word documents that Microsoft failed to patch earlier this week on "patch Tuesday." How can police and lawmakers seriously suggest holding people accountable for what is on people computers in these circumstances.
When I worked at Microsoft's technical support division, on at least one occasion I answered a call from someone whose computer had been compromised and was being used as a distribution point for child porn. At the time, I told her it was better that she go to the FBI and seek their assistance, but sometimes I wonder if that was really the best advice.
I don't know what ever became of it.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I have on several occasions tried to give several security tips to average computer users about using WiFi host spots. In two instances, I barely got started before they complained that I was talking way over their head and had used unfamiliar jargon such as browsers, IE, cookies, packet sniffing, encryption and phishing. It was clear that they did not not even want to try to understand what to understand what I was trying to warn them about. They just wanted to access their email and do their on-line banking. It would be scary having some people like that in a jury in a case like that. They could easily understand the idea of someone illegally downloading child porn but not the alternative explanations of how the files got there.
That reminds me of some scenes in the movie "Idiocracy". In that movie, for the last 500 years, the dumb people in the world have been having more children than the smart people. The smart people would postpone marriage and children until they complete college and establish their careers and can afford children. By then in many cases they are less fertile. By contrast the dumb people supposedly don't worry about when they can afford to have children and frequently forget to use birth control methods so they out breeded the smarter people. After 500 years, the average IQ has fallen to an amazingly low level.
In a forgotten suspended animation experiment conducted by they Army, a soldier and a civilian hooker were test subjects who accidentally end up in suspended animation for about 500 years. After waking up, he went to a hospital but was not able to pay the hospital bill because he did not have a bar code on his forearm. He was arrested and put on trail for being un-scannable and for not paying his hospital bill. In court, he said that he was not guilty and tried to explain the Army suspended animation experiment that that he had been part of. They did not even understand much of anything that he was talking about. The prosecutor used a more effective simplistic emotionally charged strategy with little consistent logic. The jury found him guilty but he soon managed to escape from the poorly run jail.
After being recaptured and booked in jail again they discovered that he was the smartest guy in the world, so he was released and sent to the White House to become secretary of the Interior and was asked to figure out why the crops weren't growing. With the help of the hooker, they came up with the outlandish idea of watering the plants. One week after trying that, the plants had not yet grown noticeably. For reasons that I won't bother explaining, watering plants with water resulted in millions of employees of the Brondo sports drink corporation being laid off. Mobs of angry unemployed people soon appeared and he was placed on trial. He used his best logic to try to explain everything in the televised court trial. He was sentenced to death by being crushed by monster trucks on live TV, but fortunately the plants finally started to grow just in time. He soon learned to to talk dumb and properly connect with average voters and was elected president of the United States. Rita the hooker became first lady.
It was a good movie with many that in many ways reminds me of how advertising, politicians and perhaps even the courts sometimes act in real life.
It has nothing to do with prosecutors being tech-ignorant.
It has to do with prosecutors seeking to make a name for themselves by jumping on the "child porn" bandwagon - a guaranteed way to get re-election.
It's a career move, nothing more.
It's what you get when "law creates crime".
Look at the "Drug War" sometime. It's a way for the Feds to get money and power while suppressing minorities - nothing more. The Feds regularly arrest people for things that shouldn't be crimes in the first place, threaten them with massive jail time in exchange for ratting out all their relatives and friends with lies, then arresting everybody else and repeating the procedure ad nauseum. This is how they get their 98% conviction rate - and their budget money and career path in the DoJ.
This is why the US has the most incarcerated population in the world.
The entire system has utterly NOTHING to do with the vague abstract term "justice".
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
How can we be sure the defense attorney is so utterly incompetent? The quotation from the article,
seems to indicate adequate competence, at least on the technical side. On the other hand, I think
indicates the prosecution is dishonestly making up "facts" and playing on their credibility as "voice of the authority", and a stupid jury or judge believes the accusation because "the authorities say so".
In court each side has a limited number of opportunities to speak. If the prosecution made this claim in a response to the defense witness, the defense probably (I don't know the actual protocol in this court) had limited opportunity to start a new debate, and find expert witnesses, etc. to counter this statement.
There is no substitute for common sense. Especially, no body of rules will do.
I'm a highly technical and certified computer network geek. My own server was compromised twice last year. My laptop was compromised. My eBay account was compromised. My main home PC was infected twice and I had AVG on it. Now if I as a highly technical security nut can have that many problems in a single year imagine how many problem the average Internet user has. Besides that person having way more problem than I because of their inherent insecure practices, I actually noticed when I had a problem. I have to wonder how many problems I missed.
Wake up, most IT is outsourced now and has been for a long time. Most hospitals have million dollar medical equipment connected to outdated and abused PC's that you wouldn't use to operate a toaster much less an MRI imaging program.
If you want to see penny pinching at it's best, go work in a hospital for awhile.
As I pointed out at the end of my original post, I do work for a hospital, and I do support PACS systems, so I do know what I'm talking about. And for the record, I have never seen a million dollar piece of equipment connected to an outdated and abused PC. The worst that I ever saw was an old MRI machine that was purchased third-hand from a hospital (supposedly in China, though more likely Taiwan), who had purchased it second hand from someone in the United States. The control station for it was based around an old SGI Octane workstation, but it was well maintained under contract and we never had a problem with it. And of course the entire thing cost considerably less than a million dollars.
And I don't know where it is that you have been working, but I have yet to work at a business (much less a hospital) that outsourced their entire IT department. Some businesses outsource their call centers, true. In very rare circumstances I have seen a company that outsources their desktop break/fix group, but never the entire IT department (or anywhere close to it).