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FTC Threatens Spyware Distributors With Prison
Federal regulator Mark Pryor, in a Senate Commerce Committee hearing, has stated that spyware distributors should face harsher penalties than fees. His solution: imprisonment. "Federal Trade Commissioner William Kovacic said most wrongdoers in the spyware arena 'can only be described as vicious organized criminals. Many of most serious wrongdoers we observed in this area, I believe, are only going to be deterred if their freedom is withdrawn,' so it's important for the FTC to collaborate on its cases with criminal law enforcement authorities, Kovacic said."
So what about the developers that put spyware in Windows XP and I'm assuming Vista also contains spyware. Will they go to prison? Will Microsoft be forced to strip the spyware out of it's operating system?
Free software, free thought, free society.
"kick someones ass on the first day and you'll be ok"
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
So how do you throw a corporation in prison again?
All I can say is that it is about damn time. I worked for a summer as a tech support agent and spyware caused us more headaches than anything else; and it results in stress, time lost and possibly even monetary loss for individuals with infected computers. The fact that spyware and malware writers can usually avoid punishment (particularly considering that many spyware and malware applications are used to steal people's identities) is simply ridiculous. Good on the senator, and I hope that spyware and malware writers get what is coming to them.
This is a really good idea. Spyware makers are the worst in terms of computer crime.
I remember, not too long ago, when pricks around the world wrote dialers for people with dial-up connections. Dialers, once installed, would route someone's call to their ISP through some insanely far-away place (usually pimples in the pacific) with insanely high long-distance costs. The people who wrote the software would then split the profits made from the long-distance call with the corrupt operator of the far-away places' phone company. The effect was to leave people out-of-pocket by a huge amount (hundreds or thousands of dollars). If the target got the long-distance charge removed by the local phone company, the local phone company would have to eat the charges.
The point of the above is to underline the character of crimes committed: it's pure theft. Modern spyware either seals people's browsing habits or personal information, so it's a little less direct, but it's still a theft.
I think spyware writers are more foul than virus writers: while virus writers do what they do for the technical thrill and bother a lot of people in the process, spyware writers do it just to get money.
Their motives are base, their methods are underhanded, and they should go to jail.
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
So right, I hate spyware, adware, and the likes. But sending people to jail may be a little on the heavy side. Reason being, who'll decide quantitatively about the severity of the malicious code? And will there be a difference of punishment between individuals and corporations who make spyware? If a corp makes it, they'll be dragged to court resulting in a lengthy legal battle ultimately only resulting in financial loss of the corp, not necessarily prison. There cannot be a very fair system of deciding this since its a very grey area with no clear black and white lines. What some people think of as invasion of privacy could be regarded as a useful convenience by another. The best protection you could have is your common sense.
"Never try to tell everything you know. It may take too short a time."
How is that spyware? It sends anonymous statistics on what packages you have installed throught apt, and you have to choose to enable it.
It does exactly what it claims it does, and you really have to go out of your way to enable it (add/remove software>preferences>statistics>enable popularity contest )
Right under the checkbox there's a clear explanation of what it does:
Compare that to Windows update, which 'inspects your system' every time you update, and you have no way to know what exactly it's inspecting, and what it's sending back to MS.
You're probably trolling, and I'm probably wasting my time, but someone modded you up, so I guess at least one person believed you.
That doesn't make it spyware. I assume most distros (desktop-oriented ones, anyway) also install things like Firefox by default, which - suprise! - sends information on my system to websites when I visit them. But that doesn't make Firefox spyware, simply because it only does so when I tell it to; the situation would be quite different, however, if it did so on its own in the background.
Without knowing anything about popcon really, I think it's safe to say that as long as it has to be EXPLICITELY enabled and/or started by the user, it's not spyware.
butter the donkey
Does it do things without the users consent? If it doesn't (and it obviously doesn't since it is disabled) then it is not spyware. The Last.fm music tracking is similar to spyware in function, but users install it willingly and it is therefore not spyware.
By definition, spyware is one that sends 'personally identifiable information' to a target server without the user's explicit consent. It is reliably established that Windows Genuine Advantage and so-called Critical Updates from Microsoft can be classified thus...
Also data from 'crashed programs' etc.
So why is the parent modded troll?
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
/cough Sony /cough
By your logic, you are spyware. Since you know about popularity-contest, you obviously use Debian or Ubuntu. IMFORMATION LEAK! YOU ARE SPYING ON YOURSELF.
Wait. Does that argument make me sound like a complete and utter idiot? Now you know how you sound.
My other car is first.
Because, contrary to normal citizens, corporations still have rights.
.. in order for this to work, they need a clear, concise definition of what Spyware is. As somebody else already said, it gets kind of murky when they have end user agreements which trick the user into agreeing to accept the spyware as a stipulation for using the program. Realistically, 3/4 of people don't sit there and read all the fine print in the end user agreement. If I wanted to legally get spyware onto somebody's computer, all I would have to do is make the end user agreement longer than a War and Peace novel, and then put the 'spyware clause' somewhere in the middle. One final note: I don't agree with the prison time part - this seems too kind to me. Why can't we bring back cruel and unusual punishments? If you were to threaten to flog the people responsible for spyware, that would be an even bigger deterrent.
We need better fact checking here. Mark Pryor is the junior senator from Arkansas. The FTC official is William Kovacic.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
"Why only threathen?"
Because this is Slashdot, where lately no one bothers paying attention to the article, or even the blurb (which is incorrect as usual anyway), and just tries to get their opinion in as quickly as possible for moderation.
This William Kovacic dude is a bureaucrat for the FTC. He has no authority whatsoever to make laws or throw people in jail. All he can do is threaten, much like the drunk guy on the corner (except that he's more likely to get a Congressman to listen).
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
warning: The above content tests positive for sarcasm and/or is a failed attempt at humor and should be taken with a pound of salt.
My Dell computer calls home regularly. I didn't ask for this and I don't want it. Until my warranty expired I didn't dare remove it.
I have to keep a copy of IE available because Firefox chokes on the tracking cookies MSNBC shoves at me. And still Zonealarm reports spyware being blocked from time to time.
With this level of white collar participation, business will tell its entertainment branch, government, that this is all perfectly legal. The FTC people are great, and more power to them, but nobody is going to go to jail over it.
On the other hand, I get spyware blocking reports from Zonealarm when I use a couple of well known bittorrent sites. Now THEY should be afraid. They don't own any congresscritters.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
It will be a long time before it comes to that. The FTC can't even assess a decent fine for clear violations of existing spyware laws. Think about it, these guys got off with a measly $1.5m fine total after pocketing $6m to $10m for each of the four partners (see Ben Edelman's site for the details). They're laughing all the way to the bank. So forget about the risks of prison. Quite the contrary, start a spyware company and rake in millions.
Oh, there's some pulling out involved... although as I understand it, you don't have to actually be an active participant.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
And let's start with Howard Stringer as a thank-you for the Sony Rootkit.
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