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Man Fired When Laptop Malware Downloaded Porn
Geoffrey.landis writes "The Massachusetts Department of Industrial Accidents fired worker Michael Fiola and initiated procedures to prosecute him for child pornography when they determined that internet temporary files on his laptop computer contained child porn. According to Fiola, 'My boss called me into his office at 9 a.m. The director of the Department of Industrial Accidents, my immediate supervisor, and the personnel director were there. They handed me a letter and said, "You are being fired for a violation of the computer usage policy. You have pornography on your computer. You're fired. Clean out your desk. Let's go."' Fiola said, 'They wouldn't talk to me. They said, "We've been advised by our attorney not to talk to you."' However, prosecutors dropped the case when a state investigation of his computer determined there was insufficient evidence to prove he had downloaded the files. Computer forensic analyst Tami Loehrs, who spent a month dissecting the computer for the defense, explained in a 30-page report that the laptop was running corrupted virus-protection software, and Fiola was hit by spammers and crackers bombarding its memory with images of incest and pre-teen porn not visible to the naked eye. The virus protection and software update functions on the laptop had been disabled, and apparently the laptop was 'crippled' by malware. According to Loehrs, 'When they gave him this laptop, it had belonged to another user, and they changed the user name for him, but forgot to change the SMS user name, so SMS was trying to connect to a user that no longer existed ... It was set up to do all of its security updates via the server, and none of that was happening because he was out in the field.' A malware script on the machine surfed foreign sites at a rate of up to 40 per minute whenever the machine was within range of a wireless site."
It just seems immensly more likely that he got infected by malware from surfing porn sites, than getting infected by porn from having malware.
Good to know they researched heavily before firing him. At my company when re-deploying hardware like a laptop it is standard to wipe it completely and load a ghosted image. Who WOULDN'T do at least as much?
case where you can't help but think "this can't be right".. making certain types of information illegal to possess just doesn't make practical sense in the context of the Internet, no matter how morally objectionable we find it.
This guy should get one. And, meanwhile, insure no one touchs that laptop.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Why don't you try writing your submissions intelligently and professionally?
If people hadn't jumped to conclusions and had done a more thorough investigation, this man would not have lost his job and reputation.
That's a nice HUGE FREAKIN' BLOCK OF TEXT you've got there, buddy. Maybe you'd like some PARAGRAPH STRUCTURE to wash it down.
I've heard of people getting screwed by their bosses before but this is ridiculous.
If he hadn't had the resources to hire his own expert, he would be in prison and branded a sex offender for life, all because his boss didn't practice safe hex.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
This is a tough lesson learned for Mr. Fiola, but the lesson is, always request a clean build when receiving new equipment in the workplace. That would have eliminated the malware and given him a clean system to work on.
--I like turtles...
Not that Linux (or OSX, or any of 'em for that matter) are 100% crack-proof, but putting one's career at the mercy of common malware and the only safety net is a sharp eye at the IT department?
OTOH, I suspect this guy (if he plays his cards right and has a sharp lawyer on retainer) may never have to work another day in his life.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Julie Amero and the Porn Pop-Ups all over again?
The real crime here is that the charges were dropped thru "insufficient evidence".... Why is this loophole allowed to prosecutors? How about. "We are sorry we should never have arrested you, fired you and will will formally erradicate all your arrest process so it never happened and give you backed dated pay and legal expenses".
I am a lawyer, but this is not legal advice. If you need legal advice, the attorney in this story might be a good choice . . . (but I cannot endorse him).
This, in a nutshell, is why lawyer's represent guilty scum.
Sometimes, it turns out, they are neither . . .
Personally, I'm skeptical about the idea of malware that secretly downloads and hides kiddie porn--why would the malware developer do that? I really can't fault the emploeyr for not considering such an idea and investigating it.
The defense attorney, though, is to advocate for his client, even if the client claims seem far-fetched.
hawk, esq.
So expecting them to ask for a clean build is asking to much. Their IT department should have known better and done this automatically.
"As soon as you mention child pornography, everybody's senses go out the window, she [the computer forensics expert] said."
Sounds too familiar. What's really fucked up is that his former employers "stand by their decision", namely to fire the guy. The bare minimum would be a public excuse, an offer to let him work there again, and probably a hefty compensation if he refused. But that's not likely to happen since by definition, the government knows best.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
In Canada that would be unlawful termination.
Actually even if he was guilty, they would have had to tell him before he went outside why he was fired, or he would have grounds for compensation.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
DIA spokeswoman Linnea Walsh confirmed Fiola "was terminated," but declined to say if any internal discipline has been meted out as a result of his name being cleared in court.
"We stand by our decision," she said. So now the DIA is trying cover it's own ass for giving him "a ticking time bomb" and then firing him for it and ruining any social life he had.
The worst part is that the assholes at DIA responsible for the horrible "roll-out" of a replacement laptop, and the PHB's responsible for firing him w/o doing proper research into the issue will not be punished in any way. THEIR lives won't be ruined. Even if he wins a lawsuit. It'll be money from the DIA, but no real punishment to the people involved.
Somebody find all their names and contact info (I'm too lazy) and post it. Let's send the info to Russia with requests for Viagra and child porn.
Seriously though, The Office is funny on TV, but tragic in real life. These people should be arrested for harassment and criminal negligence at the least.
What kind of laws can we enforce (and/or pass) to truly punish the individuals responsible for shit like this? Lawsuit money from the organization isn't even close to justice.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
I was even fooled by it once. I found pr0n bookmarks under a cute girl's login and I was thinking "Daaamn this girl is a freaky.." for a few seconds until I realized what it was. I could easily see how people would jump the gun and over react when they find actual material on a computer and not just bookmarks however they should at least ASK the person if they're guilty and send it for investigation first.
Liberty.
* to disrupt society
* to provide a plausible alibi for any of his perverted friends
* to drive up the cost of prosecuting this type of crime so prosecutors will have less money to prosecute his brother-in-law who runs an organized crime family
* kicks/jollies/juvenile reasons
* someone paid him to do it
* Why ask why
* He wanted his work to get on CowboyNealBoard, er, I mean Slashdot
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Because the sites the malware connects through pay via click through.
What that bit of malware probably did was go around to a bunch of sites that the author gets fees from and makes it look like someone is browsing them.
Get a botnet of 1,000 computers going and it looks like hacker X convinced 1,000 people to view the site over and over.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
I would say that the scripts surf a list of shady sites to get hits on banner ads. I imagine that, even though they don't stay up as long, kiddie porn sites may have ads too...
The fact the he was charged with child porn. I've been following this case in the news because it is such an odd case. As TFA says, they eventually figured out it was viruses and malware doing the downloading of images (over the web, BTW). Ok, fair enough.
...or did they find real kiddie porn on there?
However, another article (can't find the link, sorry) was interviewing one of the detectives involved with the case. What he said was something along the lines of "there was a LOT of porn on the computer. 99% of it was just gross stuff, not illegal. But we did find a few pics of young girls.". Which makes me wonder --- how, exactly, do they define child porn?
Are they just arresting people because pictures look young?
It just seems odd that all of a sudden there is all this kiddie porn out on the publicly available internet and it does not draw attention. I would presume, with Tor, Freenet, etc all of that activity would be driven underground (ie: encrypted). Is there really "spam" and popup based kiddie porn still going on in the WWW?
I ask because I have...err...my friend has not seen it since the early early days of the internet. Back then, you truly could stumble across it accidentally. It hasn't been that way for a long long time though, in my experience.
Many companies only have limited IT capability and many will just hand over a computer from an ex employee to a new employee with very minor changes. Saves a bunch of work reinstalling stuff.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
It's called Farm Sluts. Hilarious! Well not for the guy in real life.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Personally, I'm skeptical about the idea of malware that secretly downloads and hides kiddie porn--why would the malware developer do that?
I've actually seen this sort of thing a couple times... not for kiddie porn luckily. Just movies (hollywood) and warez back before p2p.
As you can imagine finding servers to host and distribute this sort of stuff can be difficult. So why not compromise some random persons laptop, setup an ftp server, irc, dynamic dns, and whatever else... and then use it as a free and 'anonymous' remote host and storage.
It wouldn't surprise me in the least that this could be in use for kiddie porn distribution.
I really can't fault the emploeyr for not considering such an idea and investigating it.
When dealing with any case of child abuse including kiddie porn, one should ALWAYS be extremely cautious. Because whether he is innocent or not, people will never look at him the same way again.
From my (admittedly cursory) read of the article, I gather they claim the malware was trying to pop up the images to a broken account. I.e., the malware downloaded the images (hence their being in the temp directory) and tried to display, but then failed. Thus, the user never saw that the laptop was doing this, or else he could've gone, 'uhm, something is very wrong with this machine.'
If this is true, though, the real question then becomes how they didn't notice the virus on the machine when reconfiguring things (poorly) for the new user. At that point, if the defense argument is accurate, the malware should have still been able to display this stuff, and you'd think the IT guys would have noticed...
--Rachel
* To create mirrored websites to ensure availability of the material.
It happens with malware spreading sites, why not illegal porn?
If the malware can run a distributed dynamic dns based site, it will achieve a highly distributed network that would be hard to shut down easily.
No sig
Get child porn on your enemy's computer as long as he runs Windows (or whatever else), total deniability because there's so much malware out there. This scares the bejeezus out of me.
Probably, the malware itself is a temporary webserver to help distribute the load of an illegal kiddie porn pay site. Look up Fast Flux (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_flux) spammers use it all the time and it is very simple to set up.
Your skepticism is mis-placed.
There is more than one kind of malware.
One kind sends Phishing Spam / Viagra spam / etc.
Another performs DDoS attacks.
A third acts as a distributed FTP/Fileshare server so that the guilty have a place to hide & share their wares and not have a single point of being shut down by the authorities. Whether this be lists of CC numbers or kiddie porn is immaterial.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Personally, I'm skeptical about the idea of malware that secretly downloads and hides kiddie porn--why would the malware developer do that? The malware wasn't downloading and hiding kiddie porn From the article: "Loehrs found a script file that was set to go out and run its own searches on foreign Web sites, she said. "And once you get into some of these foreign sites, you'll get all kinds of stuff you don't want to see. "Actually, the child pornography was just a very small portion of it. The majority was just bizarre porn. He was being hit with everything," she added." The malware author was probably running a pay per click scam by using his malware to visit a bunch of sites and making it seem a bunch of visitors were browsing the site.
From a purely technical point of view, a clean install is good advice in this situation (and many others!) But it's not something an ordinary user can do. This guy certainly doesn't have the expertise, not if he was using such a thoroughly compromised system. So he has to turn it over to the IT department, which then charges his department $100 or more for the service. That's approaching the total value of the laptop if its been around for any length of time.
zero tolerance laws produce an extreme disincentive to properly and discretely investigate such things before slinging around an accusation which will ruin somebody's life.
"Megan's law"s punish people after the official debt to society has been paid. If you are so sure pedophilia is an incurable, life-long disease, than imprison them for life or develop a house arrest program, but you can't simply toss these sex offenders out, put a big neon "child molester" sign over their head, and pretend they have the same rights, or are not in danger of vigilantism.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
I'm involved in investigating things like this in my line of work. The argument I've worked on the most was that X worker was on eBay at 6am, and then there is a record of X on at 12pm, so we fired X for waisting time spending 6 hours of their day on eBay. Everyone of the cases I've helped investigate the employee was a few months from reaching a big pay increase or increase in retirement benefits.
Their team also loves to hand us data that their forensic person has pulled from Windows without giving us access to the original drive. When questioned on how he obtained the data it was clear that their certified forensic expert didn't make a locked copy of the drive but logged in and poked around. The certification their contractor has is from IACIS http://www.cops.org/certifications
None of them so far has gone to a judge AFAIK but I know my PHB has testified for an arbitrator and the arbitrator ruled there was insufficient evidence for a dismissal.
Considering the series of screwups that led to this, I figure his next course of action is a lawsuit against the state - I'd sure as hell do it.
Giving him a laptop without re-initializing it? They got them some dimtwitty IT folks there in Taxachussetts.
--- Asking inconvenient questions for over 30 years...
Whenever I end up with a new (always used to me) computer or laptop, the first thing I do is install Google Desktop, and more recently Picasa, and I scour the hard drive for jpg and other image files, and then I delete them. I am absolutely freaking paranoid about something like this happening to me.
Whenever I have the opportunity, I like to wipe the hard drive completely and do a clean reinstall of all the software, but sometimes, you just can't do this, especially if you don't have the install disks. The reason I like to do this especially is because then I know what the machine acts and feels like under ideal conditions, and if the computer later slows down or acts sluggish, I can tell almost immediately if I've done some dumb cluck thing like downloaded some adware or freeware that turned out to be crapware.
As a direct result of reading Slashdot and TechDirt, I also have locked down my wi-fi with a highly encrypted password. It's too bad actually, as I like the idea of open wi-fi, but I can't take the risk that some joker might use my connection to download porn or music, tied back to me and my IP address. Knock knock from the FBI - no thanks.
Indeed. they should extend the indictment requirement required by the constitution for capital offenses to these sorts of crimes. Being falsely accused of molestation is much worse than being falsely accused of murder in terms of social repurcusions. (assuming one was eventually declared innocent of both).
http://notanumber.net/
Amendment 8 - Cruel and Unusual Punishment. Ratified 12/15/1791.
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
Frankly, zero-tolerance doesn't seem like what the Founders had in mind, nor does torturing people you don't like for the rest of their natural (and now probably shortened) lives. Granted, I suppose this depends upon your interpretation of "cruel and unusual", but if this can be applied to sex offenders it can be applied to any group of people if you can manage to vilify them sufficiently.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Unless it's sealed or marked "actually innocent," he'll have a hard time getting any job in any position of trust.
Heck, he may even be barred from volunteering at his child's school as long as this information is public.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
That would really be insanely stupid considering the hysteria kiddie porn provokes. If he wanted to just store it, encrypt it and it's 100% safe. Stash it in a folder on a innocent DVDR; etc, etc. Anyone capable of creating malware certainly knows how to do this, and not risk having a FBI team break down his door next week.
I think the guys who do trade kiddie porn would be extremely paranoid and cautious.The dumb ones would have been caught by now. The idea that these guys are snickering while sending illegal porn to innocent people is as silly as those characterisations of terrorists as "they hate us because we're free". I believe the guy in this case was likely innocent, I think he was just collateral damage from some pay-per-click scam. The porn in his cache was just a side effect of sending his browser around in the background to earn a few cents.
Yes, Megan's law is obviously intended to incite mob 'justice'. Executions are expensive and socially messy. It is much simpler to 'think of the children', publish the addresses of sex offenders, and hope that some other sicko takes care of the problem for you.
Firing people based on things that happened on an infected PC is the modern equivalent of shouting burn the witch!
The truth is that this can happen. The truth is that so many corporate desktop and laptop systems are p0wn3d by th3m that it isn't even funny.
The truth is that event logging on these networks and systems are insufficiently detailed as to demonstrate conclusively which actually happened. Any logging that does take place on a system probably can't show you wether the user was responsible, or if an automated program pretending to be the user was responsible. Any corporation that gives a users a typical Windows system and then holds that user responsible when something untoward happens on that system ought to be opening themselves up to a lawsuit.
The truth is that even the the lawyers who advised not to talk about the reasons for dismissal don't recognize this. They prohibit discussion of the details regarding the dismissal of the employee for reasons entirely unrelated to the issue of being entirely unable to conclusively substantiate any accusations which would be made. (It's standard dismissal policy at all of the Fortune 500 to not give any reason). In general, employees, managers, lawyers and judges are completely unprepared to assess the details which would expose the fact that nobody can actually prove that this unfortunate person was probably the victim of some botmaster's prank. People should be surprised that this doesn't happen more often.
That said, there are things one can look at to determine what was *likely* to have happened on that box, and one can assess to some degree what things were relatively more likely than others. If the box was running malware, though, the most likely outcome is that one cannot demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that the user was guilty. However, one can, in some cases, demonstrate innocence, by showing, for example, that a given download occurred when the user was away from the keyboard.
It's important to note that the converse is not true. The malware can easily mimic user behavior by performing user style tasks only when the user is logged in. Malware may, for example, have incentive to operate only when a real user is logged in, because certain operations in certain environments are unlikely to succeed if the user is not logged in (being stopped, and identified as likely malware behavior by a 3rd party heuristic detection system, for example.) Malware often does change its behavior based on instructions from the outside, based on the day or the time, based on all sorts of things, and may not behave the same in an isolated test lab as it does "in the wild" so it can be difficult or impossible to demonstrate the full capability of a given strain, even if you have a copy of it.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
As long hes a decent guy...
By bringing it to his attention
1) You save the company a competent employee
2) Discourage him from doing it again
3) You demonstrate your personal loyalty to an up and coming executive.
The question you have to answer, is did the employees actions harm the company
in a non-trivial manner? I assume the answer is no. There are many things users
do that waste time, most of which are trivial and do not actively cost the company money.
If the cost of stopping these trivial things exceeds the benefits then you tolerate it and move on.
I would be more concerned about the use of a "firewall/lan bypass device" than the content itself.
We had an earlier article about a guy who was listed as a sex offender for raping a 30-40 year old woman, and when he moved a crazy neighbor killed him in a week "because I want my daughter to be safe." Preemptive removal of potential child rapist.
Note his daughter was 11. He saw him on the sex offender list and thought "kiddy fucker" immediately, not "rape" or "mild sexual harassment" (which can get you there too, with a little work).
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Lawyers represent the guilty because A) you may be guilty but we need to make sure your sentence is reasonable (a lot of people would like to hang a man for showing a kid his penis); and B) You might actually not be guilty.
In old country, court used to mean you had no representation (lawyer), the prosecution made whatever wild claims it likes, and then they lock you up. End of story. Guilty or not, you get a fighting chance BECAUSE the alternative is we send men in black to your house and throw you in jail after a cute little show just because we don't like you.
Think Salem Witch Trials, nobody had any real defense, all accusations were absolute indications of guilt. This is what happens when you take away the right of the (presumed) guilty to defend themselves.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Sue, sue sue. Sue. this was malfeasance on the part of the IT folks who were supposed to have sanitized the laptop (most shops reimage them) and a kangaroo court in all respects.
Sue the state for full re-employable reinstatement, back this and that, damage to reputation internationally, pain and suffering, cracks in the sidewalk, and anything else.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Personally, I'm skeptical about the idea of malware that secretly downloads and hides kiddie porn--why would the malware developer do that?
;-).
Why would it matter whether you believe someone might have a motive? I don't understand why people might commit all sorts of crimes, because I'd never do that. But some people commit those crimes anyway. Lots of people have motives to frame others for crimes.
In any case, on to methods. I have a demo on my web site of how to do "preloading" in javascript. Is javascript enabled in your browser? If so, my demo shows how I can create a web page that quietly downloads images from arbitrary URLs, without showing them to you. This may be used to load those images into your browser's cache. It has valid uses, such as to speed up subsequent downloading of other pages from my site which use those images. But I can just as easily fill your browser's cache with porn. Unless you know how to scan your browser's cache (or have the sense to purge it frequently), you'll never know what I've done to you. My code (actually my web server) also tells me your IP address, which I can use to send the authorities in to examine your browser's cache.
I'd be willing to testify in court how easy this is. And give the court a copy of my code (though they could easily download it from my web site
And yes, I usually do browse with scripting disabled. This was typed into a Firefox 3.0 window, which has the NoScripts extension installed. My demo code won't work against me.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
His employers can never be certain that it wasn't him, despite professional computer security experts testifying to the fact.
This is what happens when you assume your system is protected.
It certainly wasn't his job to ensure the machine had functioning anti-virus software. It was some other person's job, and they didn't do it.
They're using their grammar skills there.
I say castrate the pedophiles
Just to clarify, do you mean the dictionary definition of pedophile, ie, an adult that likes to molest children, or the legal definition of pedophile, ie, someone who is 18 or greater and is unfortunate enough that their sexual partner is only 18 minus iota and/or someone who likes their 30 year old wife to wear pigtails and short skirts.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Why write malware, they could sell that!
The 'partimage' program is. You could also check out 'g4l' which is the same idea.
In any case where you have 80+ GB partitions that are mostly empty, which is most of the time, dd results in wait times (and space requirements on the destination) that are simply unacceptable and a huge waste IMO. The drives will also tend to become rather warm and stay that way for too long.
At this point, having child pornography on your computer is like being infected with a virus, only this virus is child porn. The only way to get it off is to basically reformat your drive. If you were smart your drive was encrypted and that reformat will be the end of it, and if you aren't so smart then there could be traces of child porn (invisible to the naked eye) which could still be on your machine.
The point is, this guy probably deleted whatever child porn the malware sent to him. Thus it was invisible to the naked eye. Yet that doesn't change the fact that his computer still legally contained the 1s and 0s in a form which is still illegal.
So while I do think there are pedophiles, I don't think this guy is one of them. And this is the sorta situation that our ridiculous child porn laws create.
Maybe it was not visible to the naked eye because he deleted it. I don't know, but I can easily see a situation where some script kiddie creates a bot which trolls chatrooms and which sends random users child porn and then sends the feds after them.
It probably would not take a lot of time to write such a bot, or to trick the typical horny middle aged male to accept a picture of what they think is an adult woman, only to find out later it's child porn. But whats he supposed to do? his computer has been infected.
So now he has to reformat his entire computer. I can see this being the new WinNuke.
There's no such thing as a legal "slam dunk". The only person who will certainly make money from suing them is the lawyer himself (unless he takes the case on a percentage-of-settlement basis, of course).
This whole case would seem to hinge on one forensic expert's testimony, so if I were a lawyer, I'd be a bit leery about considering this an open-and-shut case.
Still, I wish the guy a lot of luck in setting a precedent that you can't be held accountable in all situations for what your computer does.
I'm not sure if the guy wasn't lucky that the employer went immediately to start criminal proceedings --- that's the only reason he has a valid forensic analysis of the computer to show. In an ordinary instance of firing, the computer would almost certainly have been reimaged before he could sue to have it analyzed.
It seems there's room for a law that in cases like this, the employer has to get a forensic snapshot of the computer involved before reimaging it (or be responsible for destroying evidence in any subsequent discovery proceedings).
Would you?
I think your sarcasm detector is off a little. The reason that 'Think of the children' is in quotes is because we all know that what it really means is pander for more votes.
Look, we are here on slashdot discussing this as if we don't have the technical skill to use CP as a weapon to get people fired. It's really simple write a bot, and then upload your enemy list in encrypted form to that bot server in whatever location and have that bot send a bunch of child porn to all the people you dislike.
9 times out of 10, most men will accept any photograph of what they think is a hot chick, not knowing what it is before they open it, it could be child porn, it could be a virus, they don't know. The problem is once the child porn is on their computer then they get reported and their computer gets checked for child porn.
They then undelete everything and find that one photo was on the computer for a split second.
This alone is enough to get a person fired. Personally, in my opinion, unless a person has LOTS of child porn, I don't think it's right to report them over one image found somewhere on their drive.
If we go by those standards then only the most paranoid of internet users will be able to avoid being infected with child porn. The situation is messed up but I wont label pedophile so easily.
In my opinion you did the right thing. It's becoming way too easy to label someone a pedophile, at this point any hacker can get just about all of their enemies labeled a pedophile by simply hacking into their enemies computers, uploading the child porn, storing it in some secret hidden directory they can't see, and then alerting the proper authorities.
It's fucked up, but just like there were people writing viruses which would destroy computers, there will be people who spend all their time trying to destroy peoples lives using child porn as a weapon to get people mislabeled into a pedophile.
If all it takes to get labeled a pedophile is to be caught with child porn on your computer, how hard will it be to make you look like a pedophile?
You probably wont have to look for child porn or search for it or anything, I doubt the authorities check search records in these cases to see if the person was searching for child porn, they probably just see the pictures on the computer and scream pedophile.
You're too lazy, just like they were, you want (yourself?) and others to act on someone elses information that you can't be bothered to confirm, and then have them harassed.
Thats the kind of behaviour that gets (got) the wrong person and ruins their life.
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
"We've been advised by our attorney not to talk to you."
When lawyers seems a safer medium for understanding between people than regular speech, there has to be a problem somewhere.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
I'm quite sure there are plenty of those old Sony Music CD's with those infamous rootkits floating around. What happens when one of these Music CD's are inserted in a computer? Can it still infect the computer and allow backdoor worms/viri get in and do to your computer essentially what happened to this guy? That's really frightening if true....
That will probably be too flimsy to sue, but you'll get a nice receipt for your deposition which you can trot out if ever any prospective employer ask why you were fired.
Turnaround is fair-play.
I'm seeing a fascinating parallel with the old-time witch trials. People who didn't know much about anything, but were filled with fear and confusion, were always happy to find a scapegoat. Nothing cheers you up as much as kicking the shit out of Bad People. If you can hang them, or burn them alive, that's a bonus.
So these regular folks would notice that somebody (often a lonely old woman) acted a bit oddly. Instead of using a bit of imagination and charity to understand why, they leaped to the conclusion that she was consorting with the Devil. Just as some Native American tribes got their fun from torturing prisoners to death - life was DULL in those days - torturing and killing a witch just made their year. (Another possible parallel is that those who informed on "witches" often did a deal with the state whereby they split the victim's - often considerable - possessions between them).
Nowadays it's not quite respectable to torture people or burn them alive (unless they're foreign Bad People). But these here pedophiles... we should string 'em all up.
There seems to be a type of mentality that doesn't even want to understand how nasty pictures can wind up on someone's laptop, without the owner's knowledge or consent. It's just a great chance to get someone down and kick him, kick him, kick him...
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Maybe your dad is better at social engineering. He may not need to hack your computer to hack your head.
The point here is that an innocent man has been through hell because IT screwed up and didn't set up SMS correctly so his computer had numerous security holes. The summary doesn't convey this, of course, resulting in the stupid (and, actually, offensive) comments from those who assume that he was guilty based on the summary. Folks, this is a real story about a real person, not something from xkcd. You should not be so quick to judge, especially when you didn't RTFA.
The guy might be rotting the the slammer somewhere if it weren't for his wife who rounded up the competent resources to find out what really happened.
I am infuriated because of the occasional poor summary posting that Slashdot seems to be proud of. If I see another story about an air-powered car again, I am going to puke and stop reading.
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
"I hope to recover my reputation, but our friends all ran."
Real friends wouldn't assume someone is guilty and shun someone - especially on evidence so flimsy.
Real friends would try to assume someone was innocent.
Real friends don't run like than. (If he was convicted in a fair trial that would be different).
Bet if (when) he wins a multi-million dollar judgment his former "friends" will be back!!!
"Oh, we hate perverts, we were just being careful, didn't want our kids hurt, or our reputation harmed, etc, I'm sure you understand, but since a court has ruled in your favor we know this must be the very rare exception where someone isn't guilty...
Oh, and by the way, I need $80K for a downpayment, and you got $80M...."
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!