Jailed for using Lynx
p2pnet.net News:- A 28-year-old man from east London in Britain has been arrested and released on bail in connection with a bid to hack into the Disasters and Emergency Committee (DEC) site set up after the Asian tsunami, says the BBC.
Nasty. Who’d do such a thing?
“Chief executive Brendan Gormley reassured the public that ‘every penny’ donated over the internet was safe and had reached the DEC,” says the Beeb..
A boing boing post tells a different story, however.
“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,” says the post, going on:
“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 style 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 
“
(Thanks, Spike)
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See:-
Nasty – Tsunami fund ‘hacking’ is probed, BBCÂ News Online, January 22, 2005
boing boing post – Jailed for using a nonstandard browser, boing boing, January 27, 2005
January 28th, 2005 at 12:02 am
…thats a disturbing scenario.
Thank goodness for the EFF et al, otherwise things would probably be a lot worse….
whats that saying…
“the price of freedom is eternal vigilance”
- I think that applies to the net more and more everyday.
TT
January 28th, 2005 at 1:41 pm
Telephone Cartel and cops need their pants sued off off them. This kind of crap is enexcusable.
January 29th, 2005 at 11:17 pm
This is an outrage. They obviously don’t know what they are doing.
What’s next? Going to jail for FTP, NNTP?
Sheesh, you can make any browser not report itself. That shouldn’t be a crime!!!!!
January 28th, 2007 at 10:32 am
Don’t be too hasty to believe all you read on these sites. Cops can make mistakes, but it doesn’t look like it this time…the guy even changed his story to “I was just testing the security of the site”.
Yeah right – nice man, keep your Lynx stories to yourself in future!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/4317008.stm