Man Reportedly Jailed for Using Lynx 912
wezzul writes "A Londoner made a tsunami-relief donation using Lynx on Sun's Solaris operating system. The site operator decided that this 'unusual' event in the system log indicated a hack attempt, and the police broke down the donor's door and arrested him." Honestly, though, aside from a BBC article about a tsunami fund hacking probe that doesn't mention user agents there's little to corroborate this. Hopefully Lynx users need not worry too much yet.
He could still have tried to break in... (Score:3, Insightful)
Hope he gets the sysadmin locked up (Score:4, Insightful)
governments are funny. (Score:3, Insightful)
I would speculate that the browser inadvertently sent some malformed HTTP POSTS or otherwise made some "usual" as in "unusual garbage posts to credit card processing engine" and spooked the sysadmin who had far to much time on his hand and the local police number on speed dial.
poor bastard..I bet if he was using linux this wouldn't have happend
No, *I* am Spartacus! (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, with all the embedded Flash around, some sites will be totally inaccessible... which would maybe teach them a lesson about accessibility.
I don't believe it (Score:2, Insightful)
There is something more going on here than just using a different browser. Police would never arrest someone just because of the browser he was using. Was he trying to hack into the website? If he did that, then it is a crime and the police had the right to arrest and jail him (hopefully for a long time).
Re:governments are funny. (Score:5, Insightful)
Will police arrest somebody if I claim they killed somebody, or do they still need evidence?
Re:He could still have tried to break in... (Score:2, Insightful)
But aside from the joking, being a brit and having used BT for ADSL; yes I would say they are moronic enough to have done something as stupid as this.
Insightful??? (Score:5, Insightful)
Where is the connection of the two? Parent puts some claim in the room, based on a connection which doesn't exist, and is modded up?
Re:I don't believe it (Score:2, Insightful)
you see, BT = big corpration. big money. police = BT bitches. what BT says, police does. no questions asked.
though it looks like in this case, the unquestioning obedience of the police to BT is going to backfire in this case.
this is not too different from what happens in the usa. police being at the beck and call of big business. and every once in a while a PR disaster as some big corp makes a mistake and the police get a black eye for unquestioningly following it without any investigations.
Re:Insightful??? (Score:5, Insightful)
So far, all comments are supporting one of two hypotheses:
a) The story is a hoax, no one was arrested.
b) The story is true, OMG they are after us just for using Lynx!
Grandparent pointed out a possible third alternative:
The person was using Lynx, the bastard really tried to hack the tsunami relief site, and that's why he was arrested.
Re:Hope he gets the sysadmin locked up (Score:3, Insightful)
If you are wrongfully jailed you'll get compensation. BUT they'll subtract "housing and food", i.e. the value of the bed and the food in prison from your compensation. Which lead some journalists to report that you're supposed to "pay for jail".
We have no confimation of the Lynx bit (Score:5, Insightful)
imagine how many non-standard (Score:3, Insightful)
I bet there's a ton of LWP requests hitting BT as we speak.
Re:well (Score:5, Insightful)
Can we up the bar a LITTLE?
Re:Where's the buggy-eyed smily when you need it? (Score:3, Insightful)
What's next? Sometime in the near future: Man tries to buy chocolate bar with paper money! Shock! Horror! Maybe this is just a little too random but that's where my mind travelled to.
We are already at the point where making a large purchase with paper money is unusual.
About two years ago, I decided I wanted a dishwasher. I went down to my bank, took out some money, checked a few places, and finally paid for a small dishwasher in cash.
Had some extremely strange looks from the salesperson.
Re:Insightful??? (Score:2, Insightful)
- Most crackers are geeks.
- Many geeks use non-IE browsers.
- Therefore, among the population of non-IE using people, the percentage of hackers is slightly larger than in the general population.
So there might be indeed a weak correlation between lynx usage and cracking activity, even if this particular user was not trying to do anything wrong. Think of it like "browser profiling"...Re:I don't believe it (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:I don't believe it (Score:5, Insightful)
I think we'll see a lot more of this sort of thing. Hopefully we'll get more info so the words "you got a customer arrested because you were too ignorant to do your job properly?" follow this guy around for his entire career - if justified.
I use lynx regularly, as do many others, any sysadmin who has never heard of it is inexperienced. If someone in a workplace is browsing pr0n for eight hours a day, the only safe way (grannies doing what?) to confirm that the URLs have dodgy content is lynx or similar things, or it's the simplest way to see if your web server is up or not from a console in the cold depths of a server room.
Re:I don't believe it (Score:5, Insightful)
BWAAAHAAAAAHHAAAAA!!! No wait, this is not even funny.
1) The police arrested him because they thought he was hacking stuff, not because he was using Lynx.
2) The police arrest people for insane reasons all the time in 99% of all countries. While I firmly believe there was no evil intent from enyones side in this particular case, you really need to wake up: The police are only human and most of them do whatever the people who pay their bills tell them to (that means the government, not the taxpayer).
3)The fact that the guy was released in a few days shows us that the system is limping along OK. The "sysadmin" making the hacking claim OTOH, should now be arrested for criminal negligence/incompetence or something
Re:HAHA YES THAT IS VERY FUNNY (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hope he gets the sysadmin locked up (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Ask the horses mouth (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, the tsunami is a disaster, but unfortnualtely there are many countries that are fare worse off. Just because you don't go there on holiday doesn't make it right to ignore it.
Re:Thank God for people.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, your own IP still shows up in the Received headers of the mail, but anybody who spots it there has to have at least a minimum of understanding how the network works (Microsoft Outlook (tm) doesn't show these headers by default)
Same reasoning as for change of address notices, really: if you inform some business that you changed addresses, make sure to never mention your old address (or at least not completely...), or else you can be sure that some drone will attempt to confuse old and new, and revert back the change that one of his colleagues already did...
Re:Where's the buggy-eyed smily when you need it? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Where's the buggy-eyed smily when you need it? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:HAHA YES THAT IS VERY FUNNY (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Where's the buggy-eyed smily when you need it? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah; as far as I know, this is the truth.
And I used to get annoyed about the English not accepting Scottish banknotes; but later on I grew up and realised that since most English (or Welsh or people from Northern Ireland for that matter) wouldn't be familiar with Scottish notes, they would have trouble differentiating the real thing from fakes.
If *I* was running a business in England, I'd be quite happy to let my staff refuse Scottish banknotes if they weren't familiar with them, for that very reason. Pissed off customers could talk to me about it...
No, we don't know it's a hoax (Score:2, Insightful)
The reason for spreading the news about something like this is that whether it's true or false, more information may come to light about it. That's how something like the recent faked documents scandal in the U.S. was exposed - by bloggers who questioned CBS news, and who had or were able to discover more information.
IOW, you no longer have to sit back and suck your news from the BBC's tit, nor should you, unless that thin and sour milky substance is all you can handle.
Re:And for good reason! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Where's the buggy-eyed smily when you need it? (Score:2, Insightful)
Never seen a piece of your own currency issued from a bank less than two hundred miles away? As an American I have a hard time believing that.
Has the automobile not yet been introduced to the UK?
Why don't the bills circulate more? I've got in my wallet two American notes, (A $10 and a $5), If the serial numbers still run the way they used to then neither of them was issued by the nearest federal reserve bank; One of them was issued by the next one over, and one of them was issued halfway across the country!
Do people go out of their way to segregate the money?