Are You Safe on the Web?
Tue, 12 June, 2007 – 9:09 pm
You would imagine that your day to day activites on the web are safe. You send and receive email, you visit your favourite sites, a friend sends you a link to another site which you go to and suddenly your entire computer screen is full of sites and photos that are pretty X Rated, or even worse, involve children.
One such person was unlucky back at the start of the year. Julie Amero was found guilty last week after she visited a site which then filled her screen with popups of pornography, unfortunately this happened in front of a classroom of minors. She was sentenced to 40 years in prison for a crime that isn't really a crime. She didn't do it maliciously, she couldn't control it. Whilst she is to blame simply because she shouldn't have been surfing the web whilst in charge of a class of children, she should be disciplined by her employer, not the judicial system.
Luckily, some computer experts have stepped in and managed to get her case re-examined. They've testified that the computer she was on was so out of date, not protected from spyware and adware etc. that meant she probably didn't have much of a chance of preventing this from happening. She innocently visited a site and that site essentially took over her computer and what she saw on it. I've seen it in the past. Not pornography but I've visited a site and so many popups kept opening that I had to kill the computer to get them to stop.
But it makes you realise that we're not safe. All it takes is an 'online friend' who is in reality a complete stranger, sends you a link to a site or a file and suddenly you find yourself in a whirlwind scenario where, despite your claims of innocence, you're assumed guilty, afterall you have complete control over your computer – right?
One of the experts quoted in the re-examined article is Chris Boyd. Chris runs his own security blog called Vital Security which is well worth a read. Let's hope Chris, along with the other experts around, can get the law enforcement and legal systems to start to understand more about this thing called the internet.
No Responses to “Are You Safe on the Web?”