Posts by Paul

@DR

Well almost. You're right in principle that there's no reason a child couldn't make child porn, but "intent to arouse" is putting it a little broadly. Normally a picture has to cross some line in terms of conduct to be considered porn as well. A picture of a woman sporting a bikini and a come-hither look wouldn't be called pornography (outside of Afghanistan). Many people wouldn't even call magazines like Playboy (which show nudity but no sex) pornography.

I'd say it's very doubtful that anything these three girls did meets that definition. Of course the actual law may or may not take that into account, but sensible laws usually do. And if it doesn't, it could potentially appealed on First Amendment grounds.

Cats are weapons?

Having a cat thrown at you could be quite painful, seeing as they're naturally inclined to land claws out, but surely the door or even the laptop would be more likely to cause serious injury.

Good idea?

It's nice not to scare the fish and all... but aren't they asking for their £20,000 gear to be chomped by a shark (or other underwater predator)?

Some good points

Even though I still don't see a problem with the concept in principle, some good points were raised above about how it was carried out.

First of all, they paid a large sum of money to crooks for the access to the botnet. I wasn't clear about that from in the initial description. That violates the no harm principle. Even though these 22000 computers were most likely compromised ahead of time, it supports and encourages the people who did it.

Second, I agree that the way they chose to inform the users was somewhat naive. Users should not be in the habit of trusting strange messages like that. On the other hand, I don't know what a better option would be, unless they could actually make the "bot" uninstall itself.

Exactly

"A single well-placed post from a Symantec official would likely have nipped most of it in the bud"

Just what I was thinking. All the had to do (assuming they really are on the level) is put a pinned thread at the top of the forum. Something like "We are aware of pifts.exe error, and are working to correct the problem. In the mean time, rest assured that It does not pose a security risk."

Would that be so hard?

Meh

But fictionwise books are still DRMed, right? I don't see the appeal. Who cares what format they use if you're not allowed to use it where you want.

No reason?

"There's no reason they need to show where all a school's air ducts are and the elevator shafts and all the entry and exit points..."

A friend of mine is a teacher in California. As it happens he's on the "site council" in charge of making emergency response plans, including evacuation routes. As you can imagine, having aerial photos of the school came in handy for that. Three guesses where he got them.

ths shd suprs no1

Why is anyone surprised? Reading and writing improves literacy. It doesn't matter so much what you read or write, just as long as you do it. I learned to read and write on the computer back in the days before everyone knew what LOL* meant. It figures that some kids today are learning largely by texting.

*My father told me it stood for Lots Of Luck.

"effectively cold-blooded"

So says Wikipedia. Might not that have more to do with their longevity than any fancy proteins? Isn't this just the converse of Live Fast, Die Young?

@Charles

It's also possible that the worm creator was able to break the security on the signature. I say that without knowing any details of how it works, but it's not inconceivable. Only as strong as its weakest link, and all that.

Am I being a typical American or...

Doesn't it seem like they should have just used 911? I'm guessing that due to Hollywood it's the most recognized emergency number around. Or use the UK's 999, which I understand was the first such number.

Considering it's kind of important that people remember it in an emergency and all... why complicate things by inventing a whole new number?

What?

"view pictures with information about your parking preferences"? That doesn't even make sense.

I might be able to see her side

if this wasn't the same loony who sued people to prevent them from reading her book before the official publication date.

Malware by any other name

Whether you want to call it DRM or not, it's hostile code. If it's designed to get in my way, not help me, I don't want it on my computer.

Richard raises a good point

If people want to let MS know where they surf that's their business, but MS is going to have to be very careful how they share those URLs with the public (which is, after all the point of the feature). The safest thing would be to share only the domain name, but as Richard points out that might not be enough if the site is something like Blogger that include a million different sub-sites. But sharing the whole URL would risk giving away user IDs or even (on an exceptionally poorly made site) passwords. But it seems to me theres a middle ground.

And come to think of it, it has alot to do with "search terms or data you entered in forms", AKA query strings. Basically URLs have three levels of detail. "example.com", "example.com/example.php" and "example.com/example.php?foo=example&bar=sample". The middle one should almost always be safe to share, and still provide enough detail to work with most sites. But the last one could definitely be a privacy risk. Ideally IE8 wouldn't even send that part back to MS, only the part to the left of the "?".

@Sid

> No, I'm not saying people who view this stuff are 'inferior' I would never hold that view. But I don't equate it with normal behavior. Surely normal behavior is behavior that is carried out by the majority of the population.

Indeed. But "sick" is a value judgment. If you had just said initially that looking at "extreme porn" was not normal, I would have to agree, but if you're going to call it sick, you should offer some evidence that it's harmful or otherwise "bad".

> Arrogant is the wrong word to use. Intolerant would be a better one.

Yes, you are intolerant for sure, but more than a little arrogant too.

> If a snail was sexually abused and physically violated then had its picture taken before consumption, then yes I would be happy for the outlawing of eating snails, since it is'nt, I have no opinion on the subject.

I wouldn't have figured you for an animal rights guy, but more to the point it sounds like you're talking about non-consensual violence now. Why? That's not what concerns most people about the law. If two adults get off on having their genitals bitten or want to stab each other with spikes prior to sex, why would it be wrong if I wanted to watch?

Shockly bad idea

How can the same people who would have us believe there's a paedo behind every bush act like giving the personal details of "at risk" children to almost four hundred thousand people is acceptable? To say nothing of what happens when they leave the data on a bus.

That much you'd think even a typical Daily Mail reader could grasp. Though my concern is more about what the database will turn into once mission creep sets in.

@Brian Ribbon

And Vice Versa. Many people seem to think a nude picture of a minor is automatically child porn, even if the law says different.

@Jason

>only 2 non legitimate sites have been blocked.

If you seriously believe that, you're incredibly naive. Only two non legitimate sites *that were big enough to notice* were blocked. Considering ISPs chose to dishonestly claim the banned URLs were "not found" it's going to have to be big to notice. You don't seriously think the first questionable judgment they ever made just happened to be on one of the largest sites on the internet, do you?

Other child porn blacklists--when investigated, which is difficult--have a notoriously high false positive rate. I would frankly be surprised if IWF's is really that much better.

In addition to the more obvious flaws...

Linking this warning to ESRB ratings makes no sense. First of all a game could easily have a Teen rating without any violence to speak of. And more importantly ESRB is private company and has no right to assign ratings with legal power.

Paul

I'll give him credit for having a novel solution to his financial woes, but he really needs to work on his planning skills. Which, come to think of it, may be the reason he was in that mess to start with.

@Ash

GPL style what? GPL is one of the most legalistic and obnoxiously long EULAs out there. That would hardly be an improvement.

@Daffy the Duck

No, not at all. There are quite a few martial artists in the tech field. (Or a bunch of techies into martial arts, whichever.) There were a whole mess of them in the dojo I went to.

But regarding the story, 30 hours isn't very impressive. I'm sure they've found somebody who will skip straight to the rip-a-man's-heart-out-and-show-it-to-him-before-he-dies type techniques and not bother with the usual niceties, but still, you can't expect to get really good at something by spending less thana week on it.

"far less sensitive"

Considering compromising this account put him in a place to forge communications from president elect of the Unites States among many other people, yeah I'd say that's pretty sensitive.

Also, no proxy? Looks like the cracker was as dumb as the twitter admins. It shouldn't be too hard to track him down assuming twitter even bothers to keep logs.

Antitrust?

What's that? I thought they'd pretty much given up on busting monopolies these days. I'll be darned. Now could we do it with something people care about?