Man Reportedly Jailed for Using Lynx

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.

And for good reason!

[by Anonymous Coward]

Thats right; He shoulda been using "links" anyhow!

Where's the buggy-eyed smily when you need it?

[PreDefined (787636)]

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.

Re:Where's the buggy-eyed smily when you need it?

[ActionJesus (803475)]

Up here in Scotland, we have our own paper money. Although its legal throughout the UK, a lot of english shopkeeps will give you funny looks if you give them a scottish fiver.

However, wheres fivers and the like merely look different, apparently the english dont have a paper £1 note (and we do, although they're much rarer these days).

How long until we get arrested for paying for something with "funny money"? Remember, every time you use a non-standard currency, your funding terrorists!

WHY!

[by Anonymous Coward]

Why oh why wasnt it "Man Reportedly Jailed for Using IE"

Re:WHY!

[Hoagy (767703)]

what about "Man Reportedly Jailed for Creating IE"

Thank God for people....

[Homology (639438)]

actually reading logs, now, if only they could understand them.

Bonus Browser

[orangeguru (411012)]

Lynx - the adventure browser ...

Man Reportedly Jailed for Using IE

[SpikyTux (524666)]

In an unrelated news, A Londoner made a tsunami-relief donation using Internet Explorer on Microsoft Windows operating system. The site operator decided that this usual event in the system log indicated the user has zero clue on how insecure Internet Explorer is, and the police broke down the donor's door and arrested him.

Technical in-joke

[Neo-Rio-101 (700494)]

So the police saw "Lynx" and busted him? Just as well he didn't script a PERL WWW-lib useragent:-

#!/usr/bin/perl

use LWP::UserAgent;
$ua=LWP::UserAgent->new;
$ua->ag ent("I p0wnz j00 d00dz hax0r/v.10 rev. fuq2 ");

Because everyone knows

[L.Bob.Rife (844620)]

That hackers would never think to forge a browser agent tag.

Did he file a bug report?

[node 3 (115640)]

BUG 6397: "Save As..." dialog doesn't work properly under certa...
BUG 6398: Lynx unexpectedly quits when Japanese text is...
BUG 6399: When browsing tsunami relief site, users are arrested by the police...
BUG 6400: Choosing "cyan" for visited links causes all links to show up as cyan...

Re:Did he file a bug report?

[js7a (579872)]

Ha! "Works for me, can you attach a scan of your police report?"

What's that ?

[Liquid Len (739188)]

Hopefully Lynx users need not worry too much yet.
You mean the three of them ?

Probably a fake story but if it were true...

[Slashdot Insider (623670)]

Serves him right for not using a digitally signed [slashdot.org] and approved Internet! How could he trust Lynx?

The real headline...

[bani (467531)]

BT, astonished by having seen the first correctly formatted HTTP request ever in their logs, reported the incident to police.

"Nobody follows RFCs these days -- microsoft has firmly established that standards are there to be ignored. Anyone following the HTTP RFCs as strictly and to the exact letter as this individual did is obviously up to no good, so we reported the incident to police as an obvious terrorist act.".

I am so paranoid

[tearmeapart (674637)]

I am so paranoid that I use lynx.
I am even more paranoid that I use BSD. (Security is more important than speed, new developments, a friendly environment, etc.)
The paranoia continues because I use BSD's jail to secure lynx.

My command to open lynx:
'/usr/sbin/jail -U poor_england_guy /dev/null dummy233 192.168.2.233 "/usr/local/bin/lynx -disable_cookies -ssl-only -referrer='http://www.google.ca' -nocolor https://www.dec.org.uk/"'

So lets see:
1. You cannot save data about me because I disabled cookies.
2. You cannot see data that I receive or send because I use ssl.
3. You cannot use somekind of frame trick to send me to a site where I do not want to go.
4. You cannot use popups on me. Lynx does not exactly have any windows.
5. No frame tricks either. Lynx does not support frames.
6. If some hole is found in lynx, my automatic secure update (/usr/ports with freebsd) with fix it. It's secure and uses ssh2-like things, so it will take a few thousand/million years to get past that security.
7. Even a virus gets on the machine:
a. I can just restart lynx.
b. I boot off a CD. The filesystem is read-only. Really read-only.
c. Virii are unheard of on bsd.
d. I can switch to links or wget.

Conclusions:
1. I find it a good probability that this system admin saw the person's lynx setup (comparable to mine) and was extremely jealous. After a few minutes of being stuck on "hostname#", the system administrator just gave up and decided to sue this guy.
This jealousy is similar to SCO's jealous of Linux.

2. Everyone should switch to a similar setup. I am sure everyone would enjoy the interface, and some would especially enjoy the ASCII pr0n.

We have no confimation of the Lynx bit

[Kris_J (10111)]

So far there is a single, mostly unknown, source for the portions of the story pertaining to Lynx. This is notable more for how opposite the Blogsphere and mainstream media positions are on the story. Currently, only the man arrested knows the real story and I have even seen a quote from him yet. We certainly haven't been exposed to any decent journalism yet.

Re:governments are funny.

[L.Bob.Rife (844620)]

But the real question is, did this request go through a judge to get a warrant, or was it simply some sysadmin making a claim (which could be easily refuted by an expert) and the police arresting somebody on one mans word.

Will police arrest somebody if I claim they killed somebody, or do they still need evidence?

Insightful???

[by Anonymous Coward]

"Just because he eats apples doesn't mean he is not a child molester"

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:Insightful???

[LarsWestergren (9033)]

I actually thought it was pretty insightful, but I'll post instead of mod.

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:https?

[Dicky (1327)]

Lynx has (optionally) supported https for many years now - I used to use it for my online banking (one of the reasons I'm impressed by my bank's service - it uses javascript and stuff, but works fine without it) before I caught this nasty GUI bug...

Re:I had to use Lynx once

[by Anonymous Coward]

Using Lynx is just plain wrong!!!

No, using Lynx is just plain text.

Re:Well I think JWZ put it best for Lynx users.

[Ober (12002)]

Lynx users might remember this from www.jwz.org

#
Greetings, Lynx users. There is a reason this page doesn't use ALT tags
on the images. The reason is that the bozos responsible for both MSIE
and Netscape Confusicator 4.0 decided that they would display the ALT
tags of images every time you move the mouse over them -- even if the
images are loaded, and even if they are not links. The ALT attribute
to the IMG tag is supposed to be used *instead of* the image, not *in
addition to* the image.

This looks absolutely terrible, so I don't use ALT tags any more in
self-defense.

If they wanted to implemented tooltips, they should have used the TITLE
attribute to the A tag. That's in the HTML 1.2 spec and everything.

I had to decide between making this page look good for the vast majority
of viewers, or making it be readable by the miniscule minority of you
stuck in the 70s. Those of you in the retro contingent lost. Sorry.
#

reference:

http://web.archive.org/web/20000303115840/http:/ /w ww.jwz.org/

Re:First Post - CowboyNeal called the cops

[Anonymous Cowherd X (850136)]

First post with Lynx!

And your last post here, you hax0r, you!

Re:I don't believe it

[koi88 (640490)]

Police would never arrest someone just because of the browser he was using.

I hope you're right. The link provided in the article [bbc.co.uk] doesn't provide much information about the nature of the attack.

Searching on BBC for "lynx" shows that this browser is very popular in Britain, they even named a real animal [bbc.co.uk] after it.