|
At last,
the contents of Aardvark's "million-dollar ideas" notebook
are revealed for all to see!
|
|
More stuff you probably didn't know was out there on the WWW:
Are You A Spammer?
The official website of Spammers Anonymous, this site offers you the chance
to find out whether you're a closet spammer or not.
404 Not Found
Are you disappointed when that really cool page you thought you were going
to find has gone and all you get is an error 404? Well this site offers
a little light-hearted compensation.
The Latest on Long-Running Experiments
Get the latest breaking news on several of the world's longest-running
scientific experiments. There's even mention of Otago Uni on this site!
Courts Versus Crackers
There's a trial going on at present in which alleged Net-bad-boy Andrew Garrett
is facing charges that he hacked into other people's PCs and stole their
passwords.
Garrett has denied much of what is being suggested by the prosecution and
claims numerous anomalies in the evidence offered against him.
Now I haven't been in the court room and am not prepared to offer any opinions
as to his guilt or otherwise -- but I see a very large problem with trying
crackers in our court system: the ease with which your average juror might
be bamboozled by the prosecution or defense.
Would it be unreasonable (from a juror's perspective) to assume that in the
case of "an (alleged) evil "hacker," trying to beat a rap, the defense is
going to tell lies about what it did and didn't do?
Would it also be unreasonable (again from a juror's perspective) to assume
that the prosecution are simply telling the truth so as to bring an evil
scoundrel to account for his actions?
The big problem as I see it is, how many jurors have the "computer/Net savvy"
to tell the lies from the truth?
Let's face it -- if you appear in court on a driving charge and the prosecution
alleges that you were driving your 1985 Toyota Corolla at 300 mph through
downtown Auckland then the jurors will have enough knowledge to realise that
this is simply not possible.
Tell those same jurors something which may be equally ludicrous about how
an "evil hacker" broke into hundreds of computers using some clever piece
of software and they have no way of determining the veracity of the claim --
it's simply one counsel's word against another.
Once again let me say that I'm not advocating for or against Garrett, I simply
use the fact that his case is currently being heard as an example of where a
jury is perhaps being asked to believe things of which they likely have
a totally inadequate level of understanding.
While I'm sure that the judge will be doing his utmost to advise the jury
in a manner that aids their understanding of the complex issues before them,
surely it's still a disturbing situation and potentially one where he who
might tell the most convincing lies can win regardless of the facts.
Perhaps justice would be
as well served by having the lawyers stand up and engage in a dialogue that
goes something like this "did" -- "didn't" -- "did" -- "didn't"...
More On Computer-NZ
I'm presently engaged in an email dialogue with Rosanne from Computer-NZ.com
and I hope to bring you good news soon.
All I need do is convince her that the current setup for their email
newsletter is too easily abused by the few idiots out there who haven't
got a life.
While on the subject of spam -- and just in case any of you still thought
that opt-out email was sensible and ethical, I received an email today that
offered to sell me the email addresses of 15 million people who have been
stupid enough to use the "remove" facility accompanying other spam.
So how do you tell when an opt-out is valid and when it's just another
scheme to collect "premium" email addresses? The truth is that you
usually can't -- so the entire validity of opt-out is negated.
Aardvark also makes a summary of this daily column available via XML using
the RSS format. More details can be found
here.
= open in new window