Imagine this (ficticious scenario)... it's 8 am on Monday morning and you arrive
at work, sit at your desk, and turn on your PC's screen.
You've left your PC going over the weekend because last thing Friday you'd
started the regular weekly full-system backup -- a process that takes a couple
of hours.
Your normally cheerful disposition changes to anxiety however when, instead
of the Windows desktop, your PC displays the "blue screen of death."
"Damn Windows" you exclaim quietly -- as you reboot.
Things then get suddenly worse -- your computer won't reboot. It comes up
with all kinds of errors about missing or corrupt files.
A virus? A trojan? Hardware failure?
No -- your PC has been legally trashed by the Police, SIS, GCSB or some other
government operated department as the result of a bungled hacking attempt.
You have an important proposal to get to a major client by 10 am and it's going
to take at least half a day to rebuild your system -- who's going to pay for
the massive loss your business might suffer as a result of this state-sponsored
cyber-attack?
It's not even as if you had been doing anything to incur the interest of authorities --
they simply got the wrong (IP) number and attacked your computer by mistake.
Of course the little story above hasn't happened yet (as far as we know) but where
are the guarantees that, if the proposed "anti-hacking" law is passed, it won't?
Now -- how do YOU feel about the government being legally authorised to remotely
hack other people's PCs across the Internet as this proposed
new law would allow?
Submit your comments, marked "for publication" where
desired.
Courts Go A Step Too Far?
That vexatious issue of whether hypertext links are legal has again raised
its ugly head -- but this time a German court has made what would appear to
be a stupid decision that bans one site from performing deep links to another.
The debate over what's legal and what's not is nothing new -- there have been
numerous cases contesting that such links might infringe a publisher's copyright
or branding. Almost all of them have, however, been settled out of court
or commonsense has prevailed.
In the links section (below) there's a story which documents the latest case
in which a recruiting company has succeeded in getting an injunction to stop
another site from linking directly to its job ads.
What concerns me most about this case is that we have people who are prepared
to spend a fortune on expensive litigation when an hour or two of a decent
programmer's time would have solved the problem using any one of many available
techniques.
Duh!
The Weekly Trickles Out
This week's edition of the Weekly has started trickling out. It will probably
take a day or so before they're all sent but they're on their way.
As always, your feedback is welcomed and...
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Did you tell someone else about Aardvark today? If not then do it
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