Typo In IP Address Led To an Innocent Father's Arrest For Paedophilia (buzzfeed.com)

An anonymous reader has shared a shocking story about the arrest of Nigel Lang by the British police for a crime he didn't commit. It all happened because of a typo, according to a report. From the report: On a Saturday morning in July 2011, Nigel Lang, then aged 44, was at home in Sheffield with his partner and their 2-year-old son when there was a knock at the door. He opened it to find a man and two women standing there, one of whom asked if he lived at the address. When he said he did, the three strangers pushed past him and one of the women, who identified herself as a police officer, told Lang and his partner he was going to be arrested on suspicion of possessing indecent images of children. [...] He was told that when police requested details about an IP address connected to the sharing of indecent images of children, one extra keystroke was made by mistake, sending police to entirely the wrong physical location. But it would take years, and drawn-out legal processes, to get answers about why this had happened to him, to force police to admit their mistake, and even longer to begin to get his and his family's lives back on track. Police paid Lang 60,000 British Pound ($73,500) in compensation last autumn after settling out of court, two years after they finally said sorry and removed the wrongful arrest from his record.

Comments

Racism and sexism

[operagost]

With no real inkling about what had led police to his door, he lodged a complaint that the force was institutionally racist and sexist, because the home internet account was registered in the name of his partner, who is white, but she was never asked about the images. Her smartphone â" Lang did not have a smartphone at the time â" was also not seized.

This is insane. Everyone knows that racism and sexism only exist in the USA.

Re:familyâ(TM)s

[tlhIngan]

Slashdot does have a naÃfve implementation of text. While there is a whole smÃfrgÃfÂ¥sbord of options UTF-8 is a pretty well established standard. It's embarrassing for a site whose raison d'Ãftre is technology. Maybe a bounty of say ã100 would encourage someone to fix it.

Seriously though, what does prevent Slashdot from handling it properly? Surely the text gets entered and stored in the DB as UTF-8. A fix can't be too difficult to implement.

Slashdot is fully unicode compatible. (It was the work of slashdot.jp a long, long, long time ago that did it).

I can't tell you if they use UTF-8 internally or what, but it doesn't matter.

The reason it appears to not work is because of unicode abuse by commenters. And if you go into many forums that naively implement Unicode support, you will see trolls that create posts that are miles long by simply abusing Unicode adornments. Or ones that reverse the text layout (RTL/LTR override), which was very popular on Slashdot in the early days.

So what happened? They implemented both an input and output filter - every character is scanned against an input white list, and when displaying, every character is scanned against an output whitelist (those LTR/RTL overrides are still in the comments in the database, so they now get stripped before display).

Google "site:slashdot.org erocS" if you want to see some examples of Unicode abuse. The strange word is "Score", if you didn't figure it out, and putting "Score:5" with RTL override was a popular way of "upvoting" your posts.

Unicode is complex, and you cannot blindly support it without restricting usage, especially in today's day and age.