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Fighting Porn Vs. Ruining Innocent Lives
After news of the conviction of a substitute teacher for endangering minors — because porn popups, possibly initiated by adware, had appeared on her computer during class — comes the even sadder story of 16-year-old Matt Bandy. His family's life was turned upside-down when he was charged in Arizona with possession of child pornography, even though the family computer was riddled with spyware and Trojans. After the intervention of ABC's 20/20, Matt finally was allowed to plead to a lesser charge (namely, sharing a Playboy magazine with friends) and just barely escaped being labeled a sex offender for the rest of his life.
Not very good that when the prosecutors couldn't convict him for the porn they still wanted to stick some conviction on him! What's the idea that someone handing copies of playboy to their friends be convicted of a crime? There's nothing illegal in that magazine. The US have some weird attitudes to tits and nudity (playboy ain't really porn).
As for computers, things like this show why we need better education. Make sure people know to keep things updated. Tell them about Firefox, suggest that they get a Mac next time. They're not going to be 100% safe this way, but at least when you add it together with common sense safety measures then they're going to be significantly safer. Like it or not, the fact is all these people who get computers have been given the impression that it's so easy but they get the least secure system out of the box. People need educating about the dangers plus knowledge of the alternative choices.
lesser charge (namely, sharing a Playboy magazine with friends)
Wow. You USAians really live in a fucked up country if you can be charged with showing your mates a playboy.
this wouldn't be an issue. There are ways to determine (using system logs, install logs, and the vast information available in the system registry) when content arrived and by what method. When it was determined that the system was being remote-controlled, the boy was spared a lifetime of embarrassment.
It' sad to think that the prosecutor was more interested in the conviction than the truth.
As a forensic computer examiner, I'm not always given the opportunity to come to the correct conclusions based on evidence because that's not what I'm asked to do (and if I go beyond what I was asked to do, the client just won't pay for the extra work.) The legal system in this country rewards those who win, who are not always those who tell the truth.
"Lame" - Galaxar
Funny, but noboby gets labeled a "murderer" for life. Murderers are released from prison every day. In fact, hundreds of them. They serve their sentence and move on. No reporting themselves to their neighbors. No exclusion zones. No "registered murderer" lists.
I'd actually rather live next door to sex offenders rather than next to convicted drunk drivers. Why am I not notified when a convicted drunk driver moves in next door? Probably a lot more dangerous to me and my kids. Right?
The really weird thing is that neither side of the political spectrum dare oppose the whole "sex offender" legal agenda thing. Its a bit like global warming. Groupthink.
"Think of the children!!" Wait, I didn't mean it THAT way.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
This is not isolated to porn (duh). When a prosecutor has it out for you, there isn't much that can be done. Often there is a willingness to make an example for others, or to appear tough on a specific kind of crime for political benefit.
Chris Soghoian knows what I mean. It has nothing to do with evidence - all that matters is the nature of the charges. The Duke lacrosse team knows too.
FairTax baby!
But is it plausible to convict a 16y old for child pornography?
Next they'll be prosecuting young mothers breastfeeding their kids on sexual molestation charges...
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Your friend was extremly lucky
they blame everything but the vulnerable system that propagate this kludge...
You think that's a good idea? What happens when people start suing Linux developers for bugs and holes in that software? No software is perfect. Unless MS is doing this deliberately, it's not negligent. It's the nature of software.
And you know what... MS didn't do this to these people's machines. The virus/worm/spyware writers did. They're the real criminals, but no law enforcement agencies are smart enough to be able to track these people down.
I'll just let my signature speak for me.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Of course! But Windows only comes with a screen door, and very few people realize they need a better door, let alone know how to install one. And even if they did manage to get a better door installed, they wouldn't be able to figure out how to operate the lock!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
At the risk of the infamous lousy analogy, consider this:
- You have a Masterlock brand deadbolt on your front door.
- You head out for Las Vegas Friday night at 9:00 pm, lock your door.
- Unbeknowst to you, at noon on Saturday a guy with a lockpick breaks in -- turns out your lock is easily cracked in 30 secs by anyone with a pick and 3 minutes to spend on google.
- From the moment he breaks in up till 10:00 pm Sunday night, the guy sells crack to anyone who walks in the front door.
- At 10:00 pm, he cleans up and clears out -- you'd never he had been there.
- You arrive home on Monday at 7:00 am and lounge about resting before heading back to work the next day.
- Tuesday afternoon, you come home from work and are arrested -- it seems some kid got pulled over for speeding and during the course of the traffic stop, the cops found the crack. Kid "cracks" in fear and fingers your address as the place where he bought the drugs.
The question is, should you be convicted based merely on the fact that your house was used without your knowledge and permission to perform illegal activities? Sure you locked the door but any luser idiot would know that a Masterlock isn't true security. Why should it matter that you didn't actually sell crack -- it's plainly your fault for keeping such an insecure home.What we're talking about in the real case, is someone whose property was used to commit a crime and faced life in prison (9 consecutive 10 year sentences) merely because their property was used without their permission or knowledge. That's flat fricken wrong.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Most people have very little reason to be connected to the internet all the time, or have their computer on all the time. Save the environment: turn off that computer!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
"Oohh, I guess that rules out this per-- oh wait, they were convicted in Arizona, where "child molester" doesn't actually mean anything. Ok, you're hired."
Until TV news anchors show up at your door demanding to know why you're hiring a convicted sex offender, and both of you get fired because protesters are making your company lose money over your decision. Watch TV some day, fucking up everyone's lives is quality prime time material!
Arizona just undermined itself. Be ridiculous with labels, and you end up only labeling yourself.
Pfft. The label has been ridiculous from the start. Public indecency in many states is a sex offense, and you're added to the registry on the second time, whether a minor sees you or not. Alabama will register you for "obscene bumper stickers" (what about those popular truck mudflaps sporting a woman's silhouette, are they "obscene"? Miller test time! Who wants to ruin their life to see whether shitty beer is shitty or not?) Googlized version of pdfd version of an excel spreadsheet (yay!) listing registrable offenses by state.
Add to that the fact that as far as "being a sex offender" goes, raping 3 year olds is apparently just as heinous as having sex with your 17 year old girlfriend, or taking home a 24 year old who didn't seem drunk until she woke up and had no clue where she was or who you were, and the whole thing turns out to be a horrid mess, but somebody has to think of the children! No matter how ridiculous it gets, no politician will touch it, because anyone who does would be opening the floodgates for monsters to rape your little girls.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
The reason child porn is illegal is not because being attracted to minors is a crime, not matter what your age. The reason it is a crime is because you are feeding an industry that is preying on children. Children under 18 are not considered old enough to make the decision to appear in porn. So sure, at 16, it's perfectly reasonable to be attracted to girls his age. But supporting those girls as they start a pornography career (under the influence of others) is what's wrong!
More percisely, how can you tell if she's turning 18 tommower or turned 18 yesterday? One of those makes you a sex offender for life, the other is perfectly legal. Both are equally moral in the eyes of the majority, but try to get the laws changed in any way other than more harsh and people think you're some kind of kid rapist.
And if you wanted a real answer, look for 18 USC 2257 compliance. It at least gives you some kind of plausible denial (not that that will get you far in court). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_Protection_and
On a related note, if you google for "18 usc 2257" like I just did to find the wikipedia link, you find plenty of sites like met-art and all the other legal-but-looks-like-jailbait sites. Funny how those are legal, but a 17.999 year old who looks 25 is illegal because "pedophiles get enticed by it" or some such drivel.
I should post this anonymously, but meh, more people need to speak out.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
"OMG little Johnny saw a boobie! Armageddon is upon us!"
/.ers like myself), and it's just stupid to be so repressed about the whole deal.
We crazy-ass Americans have such bizarre hangups about sex... Jesus, folks, get over it. We all think about it, most of us do it fairly often (/.ers excepted, especially those of us old married
The liquor laws piss me off enough (whaddaya mean it's a dry county?), but all the puritanical sexually-repressive moral crap that's in law has just got to go.
I am thinking that they are setup as IRC fserves, black ftp sites and such.
You are all a bunch of idots.
No need to lower it. I'd be willing to bet that nearly all of us break a half dozen laws or more each day. Just thinking about it, I can come up with about 10 infractions for me today, and those are of laws I know about. Most are of crap no sane law enforcement officer would ever do anything about, but the point is they're still on the books and they could, at any moment, decide to enforce them.
That's one of the problems with the US today (and I'd bet many other nations) - we pass *fuckloads* of laws that are then never revisited, never repealed, but sitting out there awaiting enforcement if they can't pin anything else on you. There's no way that the citizenry could possibly know all of the laws and be sure they're abiding by them all, thus we need to streamline and simplify.
I'd suggest starting with all laws having a 10 year sunset clause and a constitutional provision against omnibus renewals. That'd be a good start. If it's not important enough that it can be revisited every 10 years, then we should really question if it needs to be a law.
If you were dealing with illegal pictures, would you store them on your own computer? The video linked to in the article mentions child pornographers storing their data on other computers than their own, so maybe they use some kind of p2p network where "zombie" machines store the pictures/videos. That way, if police find out where the pictures come from, the child pornographers would not be at risk themselves.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: the worst thing for a legal system to do is to convict innocents.
Let's think about the purpose of the legal system for a while. Why do we want laws at all? Why, we want to make sure people can just live their lives, without being robbed, killed, raped, and whatnot. So we make robbery, rape, murder, etc. illegal. Now we have two categories of people: innocents and criminals. The innocents are the people we want to protect, the criminals are who we want to protect the innocents from. So we must arrest and convict the criminals. A legal system that does not result in criminals getting caught is useless. But a system that results in innocents getting punished is worse than useless, because it does exactly what it was intended to prevent: harm innocent people.
From what I've heard, the whole crackdown on child pornography is mostly punishing (severely!) a lot of people who are not harming anyone, while the people who do harm others (the criminals _and_ the law enforcers) mostly run free. That can't be good.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
You're looking too far into this. The goal and effect of irrational sexual legislation is to promote hysteria, and instill a sense of guilt into young people. The religious nuts can't burn us anymore (legally), so they use the legal system to promote their sick, twisted views of humanity. It is the same reason they abhor sexual education in schools - they would rather teenagers die of STDs than fuck outside of marriage.
I wish I was joking.A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
That's something I really don't get. It contradicts itself.
Q: Why do we protect children from sexual predators?
A: Because children are deemed unable to make a conscious and consenting sexual decision.
Q: If anything sexual a child decides to do or not to do is unconscious or nonconsenting, how can it ever commit a sexual crime?
A: Because we say if it does it anyway, it must be a criminal.
(We have currently a case in Germany where an at the time probably 11 year old girl took sexual photographs of itself and sent them to someone per email. In the U.S. probably the girl now would face charges for producing and distributing child porn).
Here's the problem with your assertion: The product itself did not cause any harm. Rather, a third party -- not the product creator/vendor -- caused the harm through their direct action by exploiting weaknesses in the product.
Now, I'm not defending the well-known security holes in Microsoft's operating systems. And I have no problem with the creator of a shoddy product being held liable for direct harm caused by their product. I do, however, have a problem with Entity A being held responsible for the actions of Entity B, under any circumstances, no matter who those respective entities may be -- individuals, corporations, whatever. Should Microsoft be held liable for the known security holes in their operating systems? Absolutely. Should they be held liable for how others with malicious intent exploit those holes? No.
Addressing products that are less than 100% secure does not address the underlying problem: Human behavior. Obviously, if everyone were honest, there would be no need for physical locks, computer firewalls, and so on. However, because of the malicious actions of many people, we do need those security measures. And those measures can never, ever be perfect. No padlock, no steel door, no software firewall, no router -- anything that is designed to let "some" stuff through and block the rest -- can ever be 100% secure.
If, as you state, "a software company can be shown to be grossly negligent about the security of their operating system software", then they should certainly be held liable for their own negligence, but not for the actions of others. Ever.