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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.
Oh here's my personal favorite quote from TFA:
Admittedly the prosecution's behavior in this case is excessive, especially the part about pleading to an obscenity charge for a Playboy magazine, but it doesn't have to be another excuse to spread FUD about the evil "here there be dragons" internets.
Making you think you're crazy is a billion dollar industry.
Now let's figure ruining your life into into that total cost of ownership.
Got Code?
"If you have an Internet connection, high speed, through, let's say, your cable company, or through the phone company, that computer is always on, and basically you have an open doorway to the outside," said Tammi Loehrs."So the home user has no idea who's coming into their computer."
Call me crazy, but can't this last issue be fixed by locking your door? If you keep your doors locked, then it's really not too hard to figure out who's coming into your computer. Although, I've got to say that coming into one's computer gives new meaning to Intarweb porn. Maybe she should teach her son that there are safer places to come.
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.
Seems common sense is abscent.
If you are an average non-techy person, especially one prone to getting spyware and so on, you simply cannot afford to use Windows. Hell, if it's still too much money, and 2 years of your life, the rumours, the 'no smoke without fire' retardo simpleminded shit, the stress and the upset is still too much to bear then at least do yourself a favour and install Firefox ... if you are going to visit the type of website that gets you overloaded with this type of spyware then you need to give yourself some sort of protection!
Conversely, if you are a fan of kiddy fiddling pictures, you surely must use a Windows machine without any anti-spyware applications. And IE6.
It appears, as in most cases like this, the prosecutor was trying to make an example of this boy. The judge actually suggested that the boy's family appeal the decision, as the judge could not believe why the prosecutor wanted to keep the "Sex offender" charge even though he had dropped the child pornography offense. This boy finally cleared his name, but not without horrendous legal wrangling. Sad, very sad.
has become nothing more than part of the Prison-industrial complex. The concept of justice is no longer in the picture and just gets in the way of the profits.
What?
WHen a Windows machine gets really infested with spyware, it's tough to sort out the chickens from the eggs.
Did a user to to a porn site that downloaded spyware that brought down kiddie porn, or did somebody intentionally go to a kiddie porn site?
I've never found pictures of kids on a customer's PC (thank God), but I have done some investigations on "porned" and infested PCs: it's hard enough for an IT pro to figure out which came first. When the cops are doing the investigating, I expect they'll come to whatever conclusion makes the suspect look guilty.
popups, spyware, viruses, trojans & worms are all part of the microsoft windows experience...
Jail Gates! Jail Gates! Jail Gates!
Table-ized A.I.
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
At my old University, they required everyone to buy a computer through them. So, every numb-nuts had a computer hooked up to the network. There was no default AV or firewall installed, or even Auto-updates, as this was early WinXP days (and Win2k and 98 the years before that).
Well, he of course got infected with ungodly amounts of crap. I ran Adaware on it once, and it came up with 500-600 pieces of garbage, with approximately 50 - 60 of those being actual installed software. As the school had on-campus service, I just told him to bring it to them, and they'd reinstall all the school software for him.
So, he brought it in, and they found "child pornography" on it. Now, this was absolute news to him, and everyone else. As this was at my old Fraternity house (owned by the school, network owned by the school, was run similarly to other school-owned residencies), they threatened everyone at the house, and God knows what else. Eventually they looked around the house, and to their surprise, did not find a projector and child porn laying around. Apparantly this is what they thought they were housing a child porn theater of some sort. Amazingly, they dropped the case right there, and were very nice about it all, considering what was involved.
As for the original poster, was it this student's fault anyway? He was forced to use this computer, was given inadequate software with no training, and was only using the services given to him. I realize he got away cleanly, with no lawyers involved, but can we really expect this to not be a problem? Many in law enforcement do not understand what's involved in these cases, nor do many in the field of law (though this is getting better as the younger generations are entering these fields.)
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
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.
"when he was charged in Arizona with possession of child pornography, even though the family computer was riddled with spy-ware and Trojans."
I am currently taking a Data Forensics Course at Sheridan Institute, and the teacher of the course is a Peel Region Data Forensics officer. He told us in the last 5 years of him being there he has not once come across a machine where child porn was put on the machine by a popup, or spyware. He Said this does not happen, as it would be easily traced back to the company that advertised it. This is not a valid deference in child pornography cases
-EL
Would it still be that wrong? Why would a sixteen-year-old find a forty-year-old-woman attractive? At that age, you still develop an attraction to other 16 and 15 year old girls. But anyone featured in pornography under the age of 18 is considered child porn.
These things should be looked at with relativity. And some lawyers and politicians need to remember that they were kids once. Rediculous, "possession of a playboy." I can understand cigarettes or alcohol, but it's illegal to be curious now?
Just think of what terrorists could do with this sort of reaction?
Key people could be coerced or exploited simply out of fear of what the American judicial system would do should they be reported about stuff they don't even know about. I will readily admit in the gigabytes and gigabytes of data on my hard drives(s) there are some directories I have never been in - and I am a friggin programmer.
Huge swaths of people could be put through the grinder by so many "save the children" politician prosecutors that finally it would reach a point where people either ignore child porn or become disillusioned with the judicial system distressing innocents. Either way it is hard to support and trust such a government.
The idea of "don't help the man, all he will do is fuck you over for some shit you didn't do" and "so much for good intentions" will build up year over year throughout the population. Already there is an incredible distrust in government regarding taxes and intelligence gathering. What happens to our society when we begin to distrust law enforcement and the judicial system - become like east L.A.?
This kind of nonsense with unfriendly people in other countries could in quite a quiet manner - damage the society and fabric of the United States.
... priceless
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Nudity and sex are Evil, but blowing someone up because they live near someone we think is bad is Good.
All research on the subject says quite clearly that seeing sex and nudity isn't harmful to kids. Until very very recently, most children were conceived while their siblings were in the same room. The vast majority of children in the world see their first female breast within about 5 minutes of birth. Kids don't make a big deal about it, it's adults for whom its a big deal. Laws against showing porn to minors are really to protect adults from the idea that their kids might understand sex, not to protect kids.
The problem is that lots of people who understand these things, but no one has the balls to stand up and say in a political campaign that they're fine with children seeing adults and other children naked.
I am officially gone from
Oh, for crying out loud, it's Amish, not Omish! If you were trying to make a joke about impedence (which I hope you would resist) that would be spelled "Ohmish".
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not entirely sure about the universe - Einstein
Here http://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=2791529&page=1 is an interview with the DA of this case.
...that he did it.
Very interesting read.
Quote:
"JIM AVILA: So there was a huge amount of evidence that in fact, this kid was not involved in a sex crime. And yet, your office and
you yourself continue to believe and put him through two years of hell, because you continue to believe despite lie detector
tests, court psychiatrist reports, a report from the computer expert who said it could have come from anywhere...you
continue to say..."
NDREW THOMAS: (Overlap) Well...
JIM AVILA:
ANDREW THOMAS: Well, I...again, I...I'm not sure that that's totally right. But you gotta...
JIM AVILA: (Overlap) Halfway right?
"
Round and round we go.
We Canadians take "American" to mean a citizen of the USA; not of Canada, Mexico, Brazil or Argentina.
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.
Remember, the US is still a very young nation. It's history as a country only goes back 350 years or so. Even then, present American culture only really took off after World War II. So it hasn't even been 70 years since what we consider "American society" took root. Compared to the history of even just European society, for instance, that's virtually nothing.
So it's no wonder that they still have an aversion to boobies. It's something they'll grow out of, likely once the first generation of people exposed to the Internet for virtually their entire lives start to become politicians and hold office. They'll realize that a bouncy pair of titties are a wonderous sight, and some vulva now and then is good for the health.
And we sadists in our wisdom unleash Windows XP as the tool to use. In fact it's a shite solution for that 90%.
I'm no MSFT fan, but are you kidding me. You have people basically downloading anything they think looks good to them. They are so greedy and so clueless bad people around the internet don't have to try very hard to own them.
Basically right now it's a wash. People get a lot of stuff for free, software, pictures, songs, movies, but some of them lose their bank accounts or even their identity. But hey, don't worry, click here to download.
Sort of like a reverse lottery.
rd
"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.
The solution to this problem, and to virtually all of the problems that are associated with computer ownership, is simple and inevitable. Do away with the personal computer.
For most people it is completely unnecessary. For most people all they need is a graphical display terminal with a rich user interface environment that is attached to the Internet and software which is streamed at them, whether in a browser or, as in the case of X, served up to their graphical display terminal.
No hard drive to worry about, nothing police can find in your possession to investigate, charge, prosecute and punish you for, no viruses, no spyware, no adware, no trojan software.
Nobody every got in trouble for watching the most raw, stimulating, raunchy porn on TV and nobody will ever get in trouble for watching what is streamed to their graphics display terminal. After its viewed it just goes right off into the great void. Any software that the average person needs in the future will be streamed directly to their graphics display terminal which is connected directly to the Internet without the need for a local operating system, storage, massive bank of RAM or local copies of application programs.
Users can go anywhere in the world, walk up to any graphics display terminal and have the same software experience regardless of who they are, where they are. No need to download songs or movies, just stream them right to you, just like Television. You don't need a PC to have a TV, you don't need a PC to have a phone, you don't need a PC to receive streaming software. You just need a graphical display terminal. No mess, no fuss. The PC, for the average person, is an unnecessary, expendible component of the software experience in the era of ubiquitous access to the Internet and versatile graphical display terminals.
This kind of thing makes me want to vomit. Leave aside all the technical stuff for once. Personally I would really like to know what the hell is going on with the judges in these court rooms? I'll admit to far too much ignorance on the powers of a judge but surely they have some? Don't they have SOME sort of book to throw at these low life prosecutors?
We've already gone down the "slippery slope" of making analogies between Real Life and Digital Life, and trying to make them legal precedent. I think we all know that, although there are parallels, the analogy is not usually that direct.
Example 1: in the case where you've locked your door, someone breaks into your house and injures themselves when leaving by slipping on your icy walk, and then sues you because they injured themselves on your property. Jury finds that you should have shoveled your walk. Yes, some juries have actually awarded money to burglars in personal injury suits.
Example 2: Same scenario, but you left your door unlocked. Jury finds that you should have locked your door.
Example 3: Kids from next door walk into your yard when you're not home, fall into your swimming pool and drown. Jury finds that you should have put up a fence.
Example 4: Neighbor climbs your fence, ignores your no tresspassing sign, and goes ice-skating on your pond, then falls through the ice and dies. The parents sue you. They lose. Jury decides that your fence and sign were enough to tell a reasonable person that they shouldn't have been there.
An analogy in the Digital World that many people have been drawing lately is Open Wi-Fi. (Which I agree with, BTW.) This says that Wi-Fi piggy-backing should be legal because if you don't want people using it, you can secure it, put up a digital "No Tresspassing" sign, etc.
Is there an analogy here? If your computer isn't secured, according to the standards of a "reasonable" person? I think it depends on who these "reasonable" people are. Does the average person know how to secure their computer at a bare minimum? Probably not. But are average people reasonable?
I don't know how to fix my car. But I, and I would presume other reasonable people, as well, know that your car should be checked regularly to make sure that it is in safe driving condition. I also know that I'm supposed to get regular checkups to make sure that I'm healthy.
If I got sick from something at work, didn't go to the doctor for 6 years, found out 6 years later that I was sick and tried to sue my job, the court, at least in my state, I wouldn't get anything. Why? Because the statute of limitations says that I have 2 years from the date that I got sick OR 2 years from the time that a "reasonable person" in the same situation should have known that they were sick. Because reasonable people are supposed to go to the doctor on a regular, I would be unreasonable for waiting 6 years.
Should reasonable people have their computers checked for malware? Yes they should.
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." - Mohandas Gandhi
-b.
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.
as someone that has gone through this system on this.
Many moons ago I went out to meet this gal I met online, I knew she was under 18 but I was early 20s and stupid so I went out to meet her and I got busted as I walked in the door, tossed in jail and got a lawyer and got out on probation.
5 years, 2 lie detector tests, 2 years of mandatory therapy, tens of thousands of dollars spent out of mine and my families pocket, 1 career, 1 fiancee all lost along the way because I never really did anything but I thought with my love whistle insetad of the head on my shoulders.
So now I'm labeled a pure hardcore sex offender. I'm on the website here in my state, my glorious picture is up there, they put posters all around my white color suburbanite neighborhood, my neighbors who knew me couldn't believe it, the ones who didn't' saw me and pulled their kids aside like I was going to eat them alive when it was the farthest thing from the truth. I've had people spit upon my father who has a lawn business, mom who gets harrassed at her school from other teachers cause of it, my friends got hassled and dropped me like the plague. I got to see who my true friends and people were. People who were still there, still loyal, looked past my stupid mistake and realized "Hey, he did something really dumb, but he didn't rape some kid or kidnap a school bus full of girl scouts."
So here I sit here after I got all my ducks in a row, got a consulting job because companies hire business' not people so no background check, going to school out of state because they don't require registration or signup stating that some kiddy raper is attending their school, I live in a place that's in a decent area but the county is trying to squeeze people like me out because the community thinks we are all 'horrible representations of society' or some nonsense. I had to grow up alot along the way and I learned alot about the legal and criminal system and know there are thousands upon thousands of guys like me that are out there that really won't be able to be 'themselves' for 20yrs or so until it's all cleared up in the system and maybe a pardon for the governator.
I'm sorry for what I did to my family, to my friends, and to that lil child whom when I saw her in court I would've never done a thing to as she looked like my lil 12 yr old sister.
Do I feel my debt to society has been repaid? You be the judge on that. I'll let you know in 10 more years.
Eventually it was discovered
That God
Did not want us to be
All the same
This was
BAD NEWS
For the Governments of The World
As it seemed contrary
To the doctrine of
Portion Controlled Servings
Mankind must be made more uniformly
If THE FUTURE
Was going to work
Various ways were sought
To bind us all together
But, alas SAMENESS was unenforceable
It was about this time
That someone
Came up with the idea of TOTAL CRIMINALIZATION
Based on the principle that
If we were ALL crooks
We could at last be uniform
To some degree
In the eyes of THE LAW
Shrewdly our legislators calculated
That most people were
Too lazy to perform a
REAL CRIME
So new laws were manufactured
Making it possible for anyone
To violate them any time of the day or night,
And
Once we had all broken some kind of law
We'd all be in the same big happy club
Right up there with the President,
The most exalted industrialists,
And the clerical big shots
Of all your favorite religions
TOTAL CRIMINALIZATION
Was the greatest idea of its time
And was vastly popular
Except with those people
Who didn't want to be crooks or outlaws,
So, of course, they had to be TRICKED INTO IT...
Which is one of the reasons why
Music
Was eventually made
Illegal
http://www.lyricsdomain.com/6/frank_zappa/scrutin
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
The first of my friends to try installing linux didn't realize the particular distribution came with FTP installed with an anonymous account. After spending a few hours trying to figure out why the internet was so slow, he discovered someone was using his machine to distribute porn, some of which was of questionable legality.
This was back in probably 95 or 96, so i'm sure in the intervening decade distributors have got much better at it. Using a network of hijacked computers to sell your "product" would probably make reasonable sense - you certainly dont want to host it on your colo account.
This unfortunately leads us to one of two conclusions
1) spyware is a legitimate out for child porn charges
2) people should be responsible for anything that shows up on their computers
I'm sure people here will argue 2 all the way, but when it comes down to it we all make configuration mistakes. I had a disk error once result in our sendmail.cf file being truncated at 1024 bytes, which was just enough to leave it working but turn it into an open relay. I've never had random files appear on my boxes, but i'm sure part of that is luck since i'm not really obsessive about monitoring logs etc... yet i'm probably 10x better than your average computer user.
In the end we need our investigators and prosecutors to have a high degree of technical knowledge, so they can seperate out the victims from the perpatrators. Is that too much to ask?
...by mentioning his full name in the article, /. made sure that any searches for + "sex offender" will turn up hits for decades to come. Nice work.
If you can read this sig, you're too close.
A two year old article is all you can do?
And, straight from the article, "The mi2g study concentrated on 'overt digital attacks' and didn't include more general forms of attack such as viruses and worms." So even the (pitiful) evidence you've provided doesn't include the most common forms of attack. The mi2g study was on manual forms of attack. Pop quiz... which is more likely to happen: a hacker sitting down at your computer, or a remote attack through your internet connection?
I swear. Microsoft apologists are getting weaker every day.
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.
Heh, when I was 16, I bought my own computer (333MHz yada yada). I caught my dad using mine for porn.
When I caught him, I told him to save it to (my documents)/homework/images/ .
Guess what... My mom found out and threw a FUCKING fit.
I'm surprised no one else is interested in knowing how the authorities discovered this child porn.
Property is theft.
It seems to me that the problem with over-zealous prosecutors could be that they are elected in many places. They need to get a certain number of convictions for certain crimes to show that they're "tough on kiddie porn/drugs/terrorism/jay-walking".
This means, of course, that there will almost inevitably be abuses of the prosecution process, with people like this 15 year-old the victims.
The long-term solution could be to stop electing the prosecutors.
That's fine - at least they serve as somewhat of a check on the power of a prosecutor. Better than a prosecutor basically being able to press any charges he wants and have people in jail or having their reputations tainted until a trial happens to occur.
For those who don't like grand juries, I propose an alternative. Allow private prosecutions of prosecutorial and police misconduct under civil rights legislation (18 USC 241,242,etc). By private prosecution, I mean allowing a private attorney (hired by the aggreived party) to press charges against a state official in the name of the state. This is possible under common law, but infrequently used or impossible today. Why private prosecution? Government officials seem a bit too unwilling to prosecute one another, so someone from outside sometimes needs to be brought in.
-b.
- Drug dealer (convicted felon) says you have guns and tips DEA (possibly to lessen a charge against themselves..so they can later make money).
- Criminal (Ibid) puts malware out on the internet (possibly just to make money).
- Homeowner leaves for work
- Computer owner leaves for work with computer on
- District Attorney has no clue but proceeds with warrant
- Ibid
- See the article (RTFA)
- Agents surveil the house, wait till you leave, serve a "no-knock" and pull the front door off the house. Dog/cats are taken to the pound, house is ransacked and left in shambles, and your perfectly legal and $4,000 gunsafe is destroyed in the process of getting inside.
-Countless legal battles to
A: Figure out what the hell just happened
B: Clear yourself of the charges
- Ibid
The first one is the article I just read, the second happened to a neighbor two blocks away.
I've had a computer since 1983, using a TRS computer and a Hayes Smartmodem (300 baud, course) and I've got Sun certified in running hundreds of Solaris systems. I went most of those 23 years without a virus-scanner (just being very careful and patching), but still got bit. YouTube bit me. 23 years experience and a protected/patched system was still defeated. Never downloaded a wallpaper or any attachment for that matter. I played with the malware a little before fixing the system, and it was interesting watching the malware disable and render the AV software inept. In one case, it sat there by itself, just feeding, until I wacked it. A few moments later it re-spawned and this time protected itself from whacking. The other mal-ware blocked the port for updating the AV software...seems ironic the virus is smarter (remapped URLs to localhost) than the AV.
Oh well....after reading this it's just one more reason to switch over to the Mac when I have the $$$ (yeah, it's still vulnerable....but a lot less attractive to malware).
So what's my point? Even with all the knowledge and training, you will still get infected. You can scoff at YouTube, or MySpace, but you will eventually get bit. The upside: You'll figure it out quick and patch (hopefully).
I'll likely get modded as flamebait but to be blunt: You're just as naive as those you scorn if you think the average person is capable of stopping it and "got it from downloading screensavers." I don't think there's a single computer I've seen in the last 5 years that wasn't a Windows OS-installed screensaver. Wallpapers? Yeah, I see those on occasion...
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.
And this is my big argument against surveillance.
Often the question is asked: if you've done nothing wrong, what do you have to hide?
This ignores an entire category of people. What if you have done something wrong?
I smoke drugs with friends (occasionally), I have had sex with people (my age) when it was illegal for us to, I have consumed alcohol while under the legal drinking age, and I have cracked DVDs that I've bought to watch them. I've idled my car for longer than 5 minutes (to charge my battery), I've watched a torrent download, and I've played music at a party after 11pm.
As a potential criminal, I appreciate the fact that I can run from my crimes, and not get caught. There are far too many moralists and politicians to create a legal system that is just - or at least just enough that surveillance is safe and right to deploy.
My $0.02.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
Well,... it kind of reminds me of the 'olden' days where horse porn was used as a form of 'WTF' factor.
Not in Georgia I hear.
_ channel_id=32&url_article_id=22700&url_subchannel_ id=&change_well_id=2&weak
http://www.gwinnettdailypost.com/index.php?s=&url
He 17, she 15.
What they did: _consensual_ oral sex.
What Georgia Supreme Court confirmed it was: aggravated child molestation.
What he gets: 10 years, plus probably being classed as a sex offender for the rest of his life.
Don't make it into a pissing contest.
Any country where you can get prosecuted for showing an issue of Playboy to your friends have serious problems, be it North Korea, Saudi-Arabia or USA.
As a US citizen living abroad I sympathise with other residents of the Americas taking umbrage with our appropriation of an entire continent's name. However, there isn't really any sensible replacement. USAian looks and sounds stupid, so you will never get 300+ million people adopting it, no matter how sympathetic they are to your point. Every other identifier for folks from the US, from "yank" to "gringo" has derogatory connotations, so you won't see us stampeding to change our label to that either.
The fact is that we've been called Americans for over two hundred years, and the etymology of the word stems quite clearly from the name of the country "United States of America." Since Unitidians and Statsians are too generic, American is the term that evolved.
I suppose we could start calling ourselves "Americans of US citizenship" or some other stupid, ungainly term, but anyone doing so would be trivially identified as a politically correct dogmatist of gargantuan proportions, and probably laughed at almost as much as those who use USian, or other inane terms like "Sie" as a singular gender neutral pronoun ("their" may be grammatically wrong, but at least it doesn't sound utterly contrived--but I digress.).
So, if someone can come up with a sensible replacement for "American" that doesn't sound like PC newspeak or involve multiple words, and isn't derogatory, I will entertain the notion of adopting it. But until that happens, I will consider calling myself American, with due apologies to the other residents of America who also happen to be able to call themselves Belizian/Brazilian/Mexican/etc., and don't have 300+ million Americans demanding they should change their centuries-old national identifier.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Indeed, it appears to be the modern day McCarthyism! The whole concept to stopping whatever your country decides are children from experimenting with each other is ludicrous! Obviously, there's a problem with predatory adults (and sad to say usually males!), but to apply those same rules to 16 year olds is crazy!
Age of Consent by country (some examples from the page) :-
UK - 16
USA - up to 18 (differs by state!)
Spain - 13
Madagascar - 21
Spain seems low to me, but I guess I am just used to the UK's 16. 18 seems high, and who'd want to grow up in Madagascar!
Maybe the issue is just when there's a large age range between the (otherwise) consenting parties? There was a case recently in the UK of a substitute teacher who the school governers discovered had a previous sex offence with a 15 year old when he was 30-something. A big to-do in the papers (Daily Mail!) about it. He lost his job - probably never worked again as a teacher, which is all well and good you might say - serves him right! Turns out, they married a year or so later and are still married now! Perhaps he really did love her?
Rules are (usually) good, but the blanket application of rules will pretty much ALWAYS come across cases where the rules should be flexible or there will be injustices.
If these childporn hackers are looking for PCs why don't the authorities setup some honey-trap PCs without firewalls etc, and catch the people who use them - spammers, pornographers, whatever! Surely that would be the sensible thing. The pornographers are seeding (potentially!) innocent people's PCs with illegal pictures to try and grey the concept of guilt, why not fight back with honey-trap PCs so the hackers have a grey area to ponder on about whether this really is a safe PC for them to take over!
Eclectic beats from Leeds, UK
handmadehands.co.uk
It IS a country built by Puritans, people so uptight that the British kicked them out.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
Old news in US...
e /2004-03-29-child-self-porn_x.htm :
From URL http://www.usatoday.com/tech/webguide/internetlif
> PITTSBURGH (AP) -- A 15-year-old girl has been arrested for taking nude photographs of her self
> and posting them on the Internet, police said.
(Found via the English Wikipedia article on Child Pornography, found via Google.)
There have been a bunch of comments already and no one has mentioned WebeWeb? I find that strange. I'm at work and filtered, so I can't google for links, but look for "Pierson" (the photographer) and "WebeWeb" (the umbrella site). It seems that the U.S. govt now believes that photographs of clothed children *not* engaged in sexual acts are now child porn. All I can do is shake my head, wonder, and start looking for some sensible place to migrate to when I retire in a few years.
I've dealt with this particular family for a few years and the mother always let her teenage son download all sorts of porn, even though he's under 18, and laughed about it. She called me last week to fix her laptop and I found a ton of child porn on it. I brought it to the local PD and awaiting the outcome.
I've been doing house calls and such for about 5 years and have never had this happen. I've seen some bizarre shit on people's machines, but nothing illegal before this. I have a baby daughter and I asked myself "Knowing what I know now about this kid, would I ever want him near my daughter? No. If he's searching for this shit, I don't want to let this go and then read 5 years down the road he molested somebody and I didn't do anything about it."
I'm just glad I didn't spend much time working on the computer, because I'm pretty sure they aren't paying me now!
we can all expect the inquisition to assume guilt and punish quickly, damn the facts, damn the humans
it's the price of using Microsoft. meet the new tax
This is normally a bullshit argument since we could use it to make literally any claim, but this is a unique situation since some of the malware out there is quite sophisticated (e.g., using private digital certificates on control channels) and the idea of a combination VPN/P2P network to host illegal material is fairly obvious to anyone with a technical background. Sufficiently motivated people (e.g., people facing decades in prison) will make the effort to contact the malware producers who can provide secure channels.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken