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Botnet Spammer Gets Just 18 Months For Being Odd
itwbennett writes "Thirty-three-year old Scottsman Matthew Anderson was sentenced this week to 18 months in prison for orchestrating a malicious Trojan campaign in 2006. The reason for his relatively light sentence? He apparently wasn't seeking to maximize profit like any normal, red-blooded hacker. Also, his timing was good. His arrest in June 2006 predated by a matter of months the Police and Justice Act, which would likely have resulted in a harsher sentence. By comparison, David Kernell, who snooped in Sarah Palin's email, got a year in prison."
There's nary a court in the world that can outsmart a greased Scotsman!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
How long does a year last in your world?
Take a look at his crimes without the veil of judgment. He did some pretty neato stuff.
He found a way to run his code on a huge number of computers without the owners knowing at all.
He learned how to control the PC cameras of those computers and had "eyes" everywhere.
He ran this all from his mom's tiny little living room.
He's a modern-day phracker. He's doing stuff that is way out there, taking over peoples' PCs, controlling their systems, and he did it all for the love of technology. If he was alive 30 years ago, he'd have been whistling into the handset receivers of payphones to get free long distance from Ma Bell.
Yes, we need to condemn him because he crossed the line. Genius should be tempered with good sense, and it looks like he got carried away with what he *could* do and didn't contemplate hard enough on what he *shouldn't* do. However, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. His heart is in the right place. What he needs is better guidance.
Who took down numerous big name websites, was sentenced to eight months of "open custody," one year of probation, restricted use of the Internet, and a small fine.
Lets face it, you can't properly gauge the sentence with the crime - too many other factors come into play that the judges are supposed to try and account for. Intent, remorse, etc etc - all play factors.
Thirty-three-year old Scottsman Matthew Anderson was sentenced this week to 18 months in prison for orchestrating a malicious Trojan campaign in 2006.... By comparison, David Kernell, who snooped in Sarah Palin's email, got a year in prison.
Matthew Anderson and David Kernell live, committed their offences and were tried in different countries to one another. Why on earth would you expect their sentences to be comparable?
Next.. libel laws in England harsher than in the US! Owners of internet gambling sites that are lawful in other countries face imprisonment in US! Producing the same drug can get you anywhere from a governement contract to a stern warning to imprisonment to execution depending on which country you pick. Hello, welcome to the world.
... perhaps they need to get laid more often.
There is spam for that!
It's spelled 'Scotsman', not 'Scottsman'.
A little proof-reading wouldn't go amiss.
"As this case shows, criminals can't hide online and are being held to account for their actions. A complex investigation like this demonstrates what international cooperation can achieve," said Detective Constable Bob Burls of the UK Police Central e-Crime Unit (PCeU), neatly ignoring the fact that few online criminals are ever caught and it has taken over four years to sentence Anderson.
What you've described is a normal Scotsman. An odd Scotsman wouldn't wear anything below the waist at all-not even trousers, be on the receiving end of a tossed telephone pole for no particular reason, deliver Glaswegian kisses to cows and trees while sober, and not only would refuse to eat anything that didn't already have sheep, potatoes, turnips, or sod in it, he'd also refrain from alcohol in all its forms. Nor would he know how to play golf.
In retrospect, it's probably the total abstainment from alcohol that would mark a Scotsman as being 'odd'. Everything else would probably get overlooked or forgiven.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
As a practical, personal matter, I'm not particularly bothered by spam either. But try to estimate the total amount of resources that go into creating, transmitting, filtering and storing all the spam that has ever been sent. I have no idea what the answer is, but surely those resources would have been put to better use solving other problems?
Does it bother you when a stoplight is red for 30 seconds longer than it should be? It only costs you a few seconds of time, and a few drops of gas, each commute... I think it's equally reasonable to be bothered by both of these things.
If criminals without a profit motive are a harder nut to crack, maybe they need to be punished more severely, not less, one would think.
I don't see why premeditated murder should be treated differently from a crime of passion. Murder is murder.
A crime of passion is in fact planned. A person knows exactly under what circumstances he would kill, and does so when circumstances arise which fit that pattern. Merely, such a killer perhaps does not think /specifically/ about a given situation. Thinking like ``I would kill a person in such and such relation to me if they did such and such'' is no less evil than ``I will kill because of ...''. It's the same. One is merely an instantiation of the other by the substitution of concretes.
The whole rhetoric about premeditation is nonsense. I believe that every crime of passion is deeply rooted in the personality of the killer, moulded since birth.
Punishing apparently planned killings more severely clearly sends the message that a "thought crime" occurs when one is planning a killing which does not occur when a killing is done with a blank mind, on an apparent emotional whim.
The difference in punishment precisely corresponds to what the thought-crime is worth by itself.
They have this view that, when it comes to computers, if they CAN do something, as in it is technically possible for them to do it, that makes it ok to do and means it ought to be legal. Breaking in to a system that has a weak password or lacks a security fix is fine in their view because that person is "stupid" and "deserves it". Of course none of them would be ok with someone breaking in to their house, even though like basically everyone they live in houses with known security vulnerabilities.
Hence why they are ok with a guy like this. They are ok with someone who breaks in to others' systems and abuses them because their ego says that only stupid people can be victims and the victims deserve it.
It is a sadly common view on this site.