Slashdot Mirror
Malware Can Download Child Porn To Your Computer
2muchcoffeeman writes "The Associated Press tells the story of Michael Fiola, a former Massachusetts government employee who was arrested in 2007 after child porn was found on his state-issued laptop computer. He was eventually cleared of all charges after some digging by the defense found that the laptop was infected with malware that was 'programmed to visit as many as 40 child porn sites per minute — an inhuman feat. While Fiola and his wife were out to dinner one night, someone logged on to the computer and porn flowed in for an hour and a half. Prosecutors performed another test and confirmed the defense findings. The charge was dropped — 11 months after it was filed.' The article also discusses the technical aspects of how it could happen and about similar cases in the United Kingdom in 2003."
Wherever she goes, the police will be aware that she was once accused of something related to pedofilia.
Accused of course implies she was linked to it.
ok, i meant to make this longer and darker, but i'm just not really feeling that paranoid tonight =)
Blah blah sig blah blah blah irony blah blah
Lucky for this guy there was evidence to prove he didn't do it. A hacker could might have installed a remote access program, downloaded the files manually, and then uninstalled the remote access program. There wouldn't be much evidence to suggest that this guy didn't download the kiddie porn himself.
Too bad his life is already ruined beyond repair.
Frameware ? :-)
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
Its crazy that you can be sent to jail for many years and be alienated from society for the rest of your days for having a certain amount of bits stored on hard drives/flash memory/toggle switches arranged in a certain way.
Criminalising mere possession only drives the stuff up in value, if there was more of it freely available no pervert would feel the need to hand their credit card details over to some lads in Thailand so they can pick more 5-year-olds off the street.
If everyone downloads kiddie porn, then that makes it really hard to pick out and prosecute the people who do it deliberately.
This case was kinda stupid in that it went faster than humanly possible. I expect that newer versions will be a bit more subtle.
Personally I think trojans like this are a good idea precisely because they make it difficult to prosecute someone for having a copy of the stuff -- possession of kiddie porn is just another thought crime and prosecuting it is complete hypocrisy. The politicians like it because it is 1000x easier to prosecute someone for having a copy of kiddie porn than it is to catch and prosecute the people manufacturing it. The politicians get their public back-slapping for a job well done, meanwhile the children who are really being hurt by the creation of the stuff aren't any better off than they were before.
Its a case of the politicians deliberately not thinking of the children at all, only their careers, but proclaiming that they are protecting children -- 100% hypocrisy.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Downloads all the latest movie and software releases, and stores them on my computer! It's madness, I say, madness.
Guess that lets my cat of the hook...
It's new because the prosecutors are actually being reasonable about it. Remember this story from last year?
CP is disgusting but we shouldn't lose our freedom over it..
Think Fred might beat you to that promotion? Think your wife was a bit too friendly toward Bob at the party? Think Doctor Franzhaufer gave you an unfair grade? Don't like your new uppity neighbor?
Download child pornography to their computers. Sure, they'll whine about their "rights" and their "innocence", but who's going to believe a creepy pervert? Even if the faggy liberal court lets him off on some technicality, his career will be ruined, his friends will leave him, and he'll probably end up shooting himself.
You win, right? You showed him who's boss.
--
This country is losing all its marbles at once Among our other problems, we're engaging in a good old-fashioned witch hunt against child pornographers. No accusation is too specious, nor any policy too draconian. Never mind if due process rights are bulldozed, and people who've served out their sentences are branded for life and forced to live under overpasses. Never mind that the beachheld of practically all Internet censorship schemes has been combating child pornography. Never mind the culture of fear that can justify anything.
At least we're getting those evil-doers, right?
It is not resources. It is a matter of will. If a US government agency can kidnap a person off an Italian street and ship them off to another country to be tortured, then the US government can shut down child porn site _no matter where_ it is located.
Because there is, to my understanding two kinds of "child porn".
1) The "core" material that is clearly children, clearly porn and prosecuted as such pretty much everywhere.
2) The "fringe" material that is teen but maybe not 18, suggestive poses, artistic or not so artistic nudes, CG art, stories, roleplay or whatever else that the US may consider child porn but at least parts of the world do not. They're an endless source of easy convictions that make it appear that they're tough on all the nasty bogeymen.
For example, here in Norway there was a "child porn" conviction that I read about in the paper, where the defendant disputed that any children was involved, and it quoted part of the main actress' bio. I found this very strange so I googled for it and it was "Tiny Tove", who was a Danish porn star that starred in a lot of dubious movies in the 1970s but was 18+ in all of them. None the less, he still got convicted because she was playing a much younger role in the movies and that is illegal in Norway. In other words, it's not "child porn" in 95%+ of the world and you can download it from any adult site or p2p network. If you turn off safe search on google you don't even have to do that. But if I did that, I'd be watching child porn under Norwegian law. It's just so fucked up you wouldn't believe it.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
In other news, slashdotters lined up in droves asking "where can I get the adult | lesbian | furries version of this script?"
Seriously, you gotta be a real ass to do something like this to someone.
It's this sort of thing that will give governments an excuse to try and control the net even more and give companies a reason to close up their hardware and in the end most people end up with less freedom.
The net was nice before every tard was on it waiting to be exploited.
Whenever I hear about something like this, I'm always a little bit skeptical. What would a malware writer stand to gain by writing some malware that "accessed 40 child porn sites per minute" and installing it on some guy's computer? It's pretty absurd when you think about it.
Does anybody really believe that there's some spergy criminal mastermind out there who spends his nights optimizing his malware's CPSPM rate? One would assume that anybody with enough knowledge to even write the software is probably already connected to the people who produce that stuff, or else he wouldn't know where to get it in the first place (and so how could he write malware to do it for him?)
---- I'll take you in a Hunt deathmatch any day.
While it's sad whenever someone is falsely accused and I have sympathy for him and his wife, I can't help but feel - it's wonderful that this has happened to a politician. Because this could happen to absolutely anybody and politicians will not relent in their fear mongering and ridiculous laws in this area until they become victims themselves.
While I strongly suspect if they weren't a) wealthy and b) in positions of power the governor would now be rotting in a cell, the fact of the case being overturned will help sanity prevail everywhere.
So now the guy's sold his car, taken out a second mortgage, lost his job, 11 months of his life and most of his friends. He's a pariah with a mountain of debt.
Meanwhile, the prosecutor's off looking for the next big case without so much as an uncomfortable public statement or even an "I'm sorry". Business as usual.
It's a touch kinder and gentler than the days of the (Un)Holy Inquisition where if you drowned you were innocent and if you didn't they'd burn you, but it's no different in principle. The process of being tried does very nearly as much damage as being found guilty would. The accusation destroys your life one way or the other. Those who cause all the damage face no consequences whatsoever.
...so of course he's innocent.
What if he intentionally contracted this 'malware'? It seems to do a good job of diverting the blame.
I'd like to think that you spent all of your fifteen mod points over the course of the last thirty minutes, and then accidentally undid them all with this ridiculous post.
MACs encode the brand of wifi card (and usually of your laptop if it came with) so it can be reasonably easy to visually scan the room for the offender if there aren't 9001 MacBook Pros in it.
Like this? http://www.abluestar.com/utilities/rndimages/img/acer.jpg
I don't even know why this is illegal. First-off, nude images are not a crime, even if you're a 15-year-old taking pictures of yourself in the mirror and sending them to your boyfriend. Second, a photo of sex is not a crime, since it's considered free speech (hence the existence of Penthouse and other porn websites).
The only person who's committed a crime is the adult raping an underage child, and also the photographer (an accessory). They are the ones who should be arrested.
It's also a bit nuts when some Australian court can say, "Cartoons of children having sex is illegal." No victims; no crime.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
As threats to society, people like you are far worse than pedophiles. People like you are why families get their lives derailed from something as innocent as a picture of their child in the bath. People like you are why a couple of teenagers sending nude pictures to each other gets them both charged with production and possession of child porn. People like you are why even after pedophiles have 'served their debt to society', their life is turned into a living hell by moralistic jerks, without a care for the fact that such abuse just increases recidivism rates. People like you are why even after being unambiguously acquitted of child porn charges, people continue to have the stigma of 'child-raping monster' on them. People like you are why a grown man has to seriously consider whether or not he should help a crying child, for fear of it being seen as him trying to abduct them. People like you are why parents are endlessly paranoid about some freak snatching their child off the street and raping and murdering them, oblivious to the fact that the vast majority of child abuse is perpetrated by friends and family. People like you are why the Internet continues to be censored in many places under the guise of 'protecting the children'. People like you are responsible for gladly handing over the rights of yourself and others to maintain the security theater that is the war on pedophilia.
You may not feel shame over your complete inability to rationally consider the situation, your lack of care for the harm you cause to society as a whole, your lack of care for the harm you cause to even the children you claim to be defending, and the fact that you're driven by nothing but hate and a desire to have a group to persecute and torture for your twisted amusement, but you sure as fuck should.
Except, of course, that it is difficult to even define who is or is not a predator, pedophile, or criminal. Here is a perfect example for you: in my home state, New York, the law states that it is illegal to have sex with someone who is under the age of 17, and if you do, it is a misdemeanor if they are older than 15 if you are older than 18 but younger than 21, a felony if they are 15 or younger and you are 18 or older, a misdemeanor if they are 13 or older and you are younger than 18, and a felony if they are younger than 11 regardless of your age.
Man, that is complicated. If someone was convicted of felony statutory rape in New York, I would want to know which of the above was the actual crime before I even considered any punishment, let alone the death penalty. I do not even know what happens if the victim was 12 and the perpetrator was under 18; that is defined in a different section of the law. There is also the fantastic reality that if you have a 17 year old lover in New York, that is legal, but you cannot legally produce any erotic photographs or videos of your lover -- that would be a felony, again under a completely separate section of the law (and before you say, "well, people should not have 17 year old lovers," bear in mind that what I said applies to an 18 year old -- or do you think that is a death-penalty deserving crime as well?).
Before you jump to conclusions about sex offenders, perhaps you should first ask, "who is being classified as a sex offender?" In many cases, it is and absurd classification to carry, and worse yet, it is a classification that never gets removed from their record.
Palm trees and 8
I'm glad to see finally someone in power having some common sense. As a PC repairman for way too many years i don't know how many times i have had customers reluctant to come in because they got a "nasty" bug, and after assuring them that I keep everything confidential have them bring it in with something like a bug I call a "topsite hitter".
If you haven't seen one of these it is a really nasty piece of work that'll spew connections to just about every sleazy topsite on the net, my guess it is is for some kind of click fraud. But the sites that'll come up have horse and dog, rape, scat, and yes CP images. Now these folks weren't looking for that, hell nobody would want a bug like that as it slows a network to a crawl spewing connections. It is always either some guy or some teenager who got on his families PC that was looking for plain porn like "lesbian Cheerleaders" and didn't know one should NEVER use IE, much less unpatched IE, and got driveby downloaded.
So I can vouch from years of cleaning bugged PCs that crap like this happens all the time. I have seen bugs that opened backdoors, dumped who knows what into the system files in encrypted folders, spewed connections to every sleazehole on the net, you name it I've probably seen a bug that has done it. I'm glad to see that prosecutors may actually be developing a brain, too bad it took them nearly a year to let this guy off. Surely one look at the log could have told you it was an automated connection. And from talking to a buddy in the state crime lab he says the real CP guys are pretty easy to spot, as they keep tons of the crap lying around on DVDs, flash drives, etc, so a basic search warrant could have shown whether he was a CP perv or not.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
But then I've long thought Puritan americans have a mental aberration where they can see violence on television without concern (think 24), but fear nudity (like Janet Jackson's naked breast). That can't be normal.
I have never understood this weird and insupportable belief on slashdot that this is somehow restricted to Americans. In terms of acceptance of violence vs. acceptance of sex in media, America falls somewhere in the middle--less permissive of sex than England, but more than say India, or several Asian countries, or just about the entire Middle East. Dismissing it as uniquely American is pure eurocentrism.
Boy, sometimes it's easy to tell that the majority of people here are men. I don't know American age-of-consent laws and I don't really care, but how hard is it really? Don't worry about all those scenarios - they don't all apply to you. You'll be ok if you (a) don't have sex with children or look at pictures of them and (b) find out how old a girl is before sex - if she's younger that 16 - she's too young for you if you're out of high school yourself and - if she's younger that 18 - don't put the pictures up on the net.
``People have a special contempt for pedophiles because their victims are children and the motivation for the crime is mere sexual desire - the sort of urge most of us supress every day. It's an adult versus a child.''
That's fair and well, but that isn't the whole story. I don't think you'll find many people arguing that actual sexual abuse of children isn't a horrible crime that should be punished. The problem is that, under the guise of protecting the children (which we all agree is a Good Thing), many people are labeled as child molesters even though they don't actually sexually abuse children. This is a problem, because it ruins the lives of innocent people - the exact thing the system should prevent.
The debate, now, is about whether the collateral damage (innocent people getting their lives ruined thanks to "protect the children" laws) is a fair price to pay for the protection it affords to our children. Some people seem to take the position that any price is a fair price to pay to protect the children. This is an irrational position, but people find it hard to argue against, for fear of being seen as soft on child abuse. The truth is that there are some measures that are worth it, and some measures where the cure is worse than the disease.
Personally, I feel that only actual abuse (suitably defined) of actual children (suitably defined) should be a crime. Anything beyond that just makes it far too likely that people will be prosecuted even though they mean no harm to children.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I see several people talking about how "gross" that guy is and maybe he "intentionally put the bot on his computer" and I thought that maybe I should put my 2 cents into this discussion since the same thing happened to me several years ago. I was charged with Possession of Child Pornography and I didn't do it. I didn't even know stuff like that existed, much less that it was on my computer.
I was a guy that always had fun hanging out with my friends and since I was one of the first ones to finish college and get a 'real' job, I was also the first one out of all of my friends to afford nice toys. Like a Flat-screen TV, every video game system, workout equipment, and a nice, fast computer. Friends came and went all the time. People may say I'm too trustworthy and I guess I wasn't thinking, but most of my friends had keys to my apartment along with my roommates. I'm sure you can figure out where this is going.
One day I get back from what was a 5 day party/drinking-binge with one of my friends who was going to college in another city a few hours away, and I notice that my apartment is messier than usual. I didn't think much about it at first but then I notice that my PC is gone. So I call my roommate and asked him if he borrowed it for a LAN party or something? (yea, that's how ridiculously lax I was with my friends) and he said no. Then on my PC desk, I noticed a detective's business card and a search warrant describing what they came to search for (they came sometime that morning and guess what they were looking for?) and what they took (PC stuff like HD's etc) and that they wanted to talk to me. I kind of did that whole out-of-body experience thing that people talk about where you don't really think this is happening to you and you get all numb and it almost feels like you're "watching yourself".
I can microscopically explain every detail of the whole ordeal, because even though I try, I will never forget it. But to make a long story short - I was eventually arrested and charged. My name was on the news in my local community and on the radio as well. The law enforcement went to my work and questioned my boss about how much "access to children" I had. (I never worked with kids so therefore I had "no access to children") but nonetheless I lost my job. There were even some people (old ladies who didn't personally know me) who wrote to the local paper asking the editor "why do they even give people charged with crimes like that out on bail?". I remember thinking "This can't be happening" and that someone's gonna come out and say it was all a joke like in the movie 'The Game' with Michael Douglas. I just couldn't believe it. I mean... I WAS INNOCENT and people were already condemning me for something I didn't even know existed.
At first I thought that the prosecutor would realize it was a mistake and apologize or something, but my lawyer sort of brought me to "reality" when he basically told me that I was DEFINITELY going to go to prison and that I was DEFINITELY going to have to register as a sex offender at least for several years after prison and possibly for the rest of my life. He was just trying to reduce the prison sentence and see what else he could do. He told me that since I was being charged with this crime there was no way in the world that I would "get off" despite not having any criminal record.
When the realization set in that my life was pretty much over... it got really bad. I felt as though my entire life up to this point was done and everything I ever worked for was over. I basically boarded myself up in the spare room at my parents home. It really felt as though the villagers were outside my Mom's house with pitchforks and torches just waiting to lynch me. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't eat. I lost 30% of my body weight in a matter of a couple weeks. I thought about suicide constantly... and every time I did I would begin crying. I would begin crying not because I was scared, but because I knew I wasn't thinking about suicide in a "passing thought
Because those laws might not be impacting me directly, but that's not a reason not to fight injustice. Segregation, apartheid and anti-semitism does not affect me, it is still wrong and must be fought and argued against.
The problem is that as soon as anything of a sexual nature is involved it is treated in such an emotional way. The main reasons for the laws are the way they are are because of emotional knee jerk reactions not because of a reasoned strategy to curb actual harm. Our feelings should never be a reason to enact laws. I personally can't stand pop music. I find that whole cult around britney spears and the rest disgusting. Should we have a law that would put people(and children) in jail for many years and permanently label them as perverts, because they had possessed pop music or a poster with a pop star on it?
If you lock a child in a room and emotionally scar it for life, so it will have trouble functioning in society, holding a job, creating a family etc. Then you are a child abuser and should be thrown in jail. So we should also throw the judges, the lawmakers, the police, and the voters in jail, who decided or aided and abetted that the appropriate response to a child sending some nude photos of her/him-self to their significant other is to put them in jail and brand them as sex offenders.
My point was that it is very easy to be convicted of a "sexual offense" without actually doing something wrong, and that in some states that even includes "sex with a minor." The GP said he would be proud to murder sex offenders, and that he is not ashamed to call for their executions. My point was that the "sex offender" label is frequently misapplied, and that even if you look up the crime someone committed, the statutes have become so complex that it could be difficult to determine what the actual circumstances are.
It has nothing to do with being a man or a woman. It has to do with being a citizen in a society where "sex offender" means a mark for life, where people violently hate "sex offenders," and where teenagers who did nothing wrong can be convicted of "sex offenses." No, the laws do not apply to me, but I still have to live in a society where people are convicted under those laws.
Palm trees and 8