damaged people dot com

News story: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/4195339.stm
Inside story: http://www.boingboing.net/2005/01/27/ja ... g_a_n.html

In a nutshell:

Jailed for using a nonstandard browser
A Londonder made a tsnuami-relief donation using lynx -- a text-based browser used by the blind, Unix-users and others -- 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. From a mailing list:

For donating to a Tsunami appeal using Lynx on Solaris 10. BT [British Telecom] who run the donation management system misread an access log and saw hmm thats a non standard browser not identifying it's type and it's doing strange things. Trace that IP. Arrest that hacker.
Armed police, a van, a police cell and national news later the police have gone in SWAT styley and arrested someone having their lunch.

Out on bail till next week and preparing to make a lot of very bad PR for BT and the Police....

So just goes to show if you use anything other than Firefox or IE and you rely on someone else to interogate access logs or IDS logs you too could be sitting in a paper suit in a cell

Dood... I USE LYNX... a LOT!

Egad, much as I like the brits, who needs that flak?

"Paranoia, the Destoyer"

I use Lynx sometimes too, from home and from work. When I'm ssh'd in somewhere and have not gui, but I need to download some patch. . . etc.


This reminds me of an OSI incident in our National Guard squadron one time.


What is wrong with the following sentence?

"Which is better, MS Windows or Linux GNU? Decide for yourself."

Can't guess? It's got NUDE smack in the middle of it. Yes kiddies that's right. The pron filters at the OSI caught that, and started disciplinary actions against an individual for improper use of government equipment (namely surfing to pron sites using a military computer).

Some quick explanations and a printout of the log later. . . Helloooo, duh. . . maybe your filter should look for whitespace and punctuation? The incident was put away, and the person involved cleared of any wrong doing. That same person later became the network administrator for the unit.

So I guess now they can surf all they want and purge the logs themselves. hehehe.

We should fire up Lynx and flashmob the BT site. It would amuse the hell of their engineers no doubt.