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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.
Brazil, come to life.
Fuck how long has Slashdot been around and they still can't fix this shit? familyâ(TM)s familyâ(TM)sfamilyâ(TM)s This is seriously the only time in my many years on the internet I have not seen a website unable to render text correctly.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Maybe this is the lawsuit happy American in me talking, but $73,500 sounds like chump change for a mistake that could quite literally ruin your life even after a retraction.
seriously, if you can't fix it (protip: you probably won't), at least remove them from summaries.
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Say what you will about lawsuits in America but they sure do work great for cases like this. This poor guy has years of his life completely ruined and will possibly have people hate him for the rest of his life because of the implication. Also this kind of stuff still shows up on background checks even if it's removed from your record. I would bet good money that he will have a harder time finding work in the future.
Does 1 year's salary make up for that? It sure wouldn't for me.
It's quite scary how sure people are of what an IP address will tell them. There are any number of reasons why it doesn't provide much, if any evidence. You need a lot more than that, especially in a criminal case.
Noble? It doesn't take much imagination to see how zero tolerance does more harm than good. A half-baked measure based more on emotion and fear than reasoning? Sure, but punishing the innocent 'just in case' is in no way noble.
Your Google-Fu is pathetic - http://www.hertfordshiremercur...
Where you miss type and end up in a pop up loop.
http://gizmodo.com/5099383/pop...
Well that's bloody typical. They've gone back to metric without telling us.
Have gnu, will travel.
Sex crimes are horrible - but not worse than murder.
Western culture has demonized it by spreading lies and falsehoods. The truth is:
1) People convicted of sex crimes are LESS likely to commit more crimes than other criminals (this includes pedophiles).
2) Most people convicted of 'sex crimes' are normal, healthy people, not strange perverts.
3) Sex crimes are incredibly subjectively prosecuted. Homosexuals are likely to be arrested, tried and convicted for the exact same behavior that straight men or women would be ignored at (for example, asking someone out for a date => soliciting prostitution) Teenagers routinely create 'child pornography' and usually (but not if the prosecutor dislikes you), have it swept under the rug.
4) Sex, being something people are ashamed of, is often used by the police to legally extort people into confessing to crimes they did not do in order to avoid sex crime charges.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
"Brazil" starts with a typo. Buttle is being (violently) arrested, processed and in the end executed. Instead of Tuttle.
The number of member/AC posts per story on slashdot has been dropping rapidly, while posting systems with decent post editing, modern character representation, and 90's-era amenities like decent code blocks, lists, images and democratic up-modding proliferate around us.
The only question is, will the slashdot owners address this before the site becomes a completely forgotten backwater?
Okay, there is one more question: Do they even have anyone who could fix it?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Guess who can't do research?
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/arti...
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
The intersection of the set of people who call for zero tolerance and the set of people who understand real analysis and binary classifiers is empty.
Ezekiel 23:20
For those who haven't seen the movie 'Brazil,' this event is so close to the premise of that movie that it's eerie.
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
Even the loopback address can get you into trouble. When I was a grad student we had a technician who got into severe trouble because of it. It turns out that he was using the university computers to look at ordinary porn sites but, unbeknowst to him, the university had tried to block access by fixing the local DNS records of some sites to point to the loopback address. This was in the days of FTP rather than the web and so while hunting for files on his "porn site" he found the local /etc/passwd file with all our encrypted passwords in it (/etc/shadow was not around then either!). Thinking he had found evidence that our machines had been hacked he reported this without thinking about what his FTP command history plus the DNS name he used for the site would give away. Of course it was not helped by a group of us grad students who'd been initially trying to figure it what was going on while he fetched the sysadmin bursting out laughing when we figured it out while the sysadmin stormed off angrily to tell the group's leader!
Well, yes, that's how all totalitarian states start. After all the Nazis started with noble ideals: economic equality and fairness, free public education, universal healthcare, government retirement benefits, an end to unearned income (capital gains etc.), and nationalization of important industries. It inevitably led to corruption, theft, violence, war, and eventually genocide.
You forgot their desire to be strong, to avenge their defeats, to crush the threats to their safety, to purify their identity, and other motivations that were actually what lead towards corruption, theft, violence, war, and most importantly, genocide.
If the Nazi's had stuck with their other ideas, the world would have been better off, but you see, it was their pride, their anger, their resentment, that drove them, not their more positive ideals.
It's ok though, I understand you have to justify your own weaknesses and faults, after all, if people inevitably turn to the negative in life, you can't be blamed for your choices to enrich yourself and disadvantage others, it's entirely natural.
The ultimate sabotage tactic. Hack someone's computer and download child porn. Then turn them in.
:T:R:A:N:S:
Started in the late 80s with Pedogeddon spread by religious nutjobs because they couldn't ban sex before marriage.
Now porn is being blamed and universally blocked by default on most internet connections by these awful prudes like Claire Perry and her kind.
Sexual demonization has brought up a country of socially inept retards.
Not just here, but in many Christian nations.
No wonder the "white race is dying" is a thing, it literally is. They've been brought up in to hating their own bodies by absolute nutjobs of the highest order.
Even in Britain which is becoming less religious with time, it is still a huge taboo.
Teen sex is now so demonized that parents have disowned their children over it. It's fucking ridiculous.
I knew plenty of people in my teens that had had sex around 12-15 age range, none of them grew up in to complete fuck-ups or psychos, or murders and rapists.
Very little of them had children in their teens either, most waited till mid or late 20s.
In the case of child porn, it is such a double taboo that even accidentally coming across it can get you arrested if someone hates you.
Even being a moderator can get you arrested, a person that actively seeks to remove dodgy content!
Look at that Internet Watch Foundation bullshit years back where they blocked the Virgin Killer stuff from Wikipedia, all because some nutjob reported it to them. But the MAIN reason it got blocked? IWF never verified SHIT. They legally weren't allowed to, they could get arrested for it. THAT'S how fucking retarded the UK laws are right now.
Then just recently there, Facebook reporting BBC to police because FB had CP on their site and refused to remove it for a significant period of time. They sent the links to them and they tried to claim that was distributing child porn. Fucking. Retarded.
"Zero tolerance" is the authoritarian idea that every deviation from what they find acceptable has to be crushed with extreme force. Of course, in the case at hand, the accusation was extreme, but the same shit does happen for things that are nowhere near as bad. And you would think that before destroying a person's life they would double-check they have the right person. But not so, because the authoritarians behind this believe everybody to be guilty and giving people a chance to prove they are innocent is optional.
No, there is nothing at all "noble" with zero tolerance. It is a purely fascist idea. (And yes, I do know the actual definition for "fascism". It fits.)
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
But they all know how to vote! Now who wants a slice of pizza?
Without bothering RTFA, this sounds like horrendously bad police work and he should get a much bigger settlement. Hitting that IP address warrants surveillance, not arrest. After some nominal period of time looking at his traffic, they would have realized it was an anomaly and nobody outside the precinct would have known about it.
In real cases of pedo that get a conviction, there are usually whole hard-drives full of disgusting stuff that gives agents PTSD. You can't get that with a typo.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
You are correct, but the difference is that it DOES depend where your typo is, whereas with IPv4 it almost doesn't depend where your typo is as it's still pretty much guaranteed to point the finger at someone.
Additionally, if your typo is near the end of the IP in IPv6, the odds are good that you'll be pointing at the same customer, something not true in IPv4
There never was a peaceful society without a big government. There are only legends invented by people never living in societies with a weak or non-existant government about some utopia they just pulled out of their ass.