There’s a story on Arstechnia about a substitute teacher who was nearly imprisoned for 40 years for allegedly showing porn to students, after an event that can only be explained by a fairly standard popup attack on an unprotected classroom computer: She went to the bathroom, and returned to find students clustered around the attacked machine.
Through some bizarre hole in the legal system, she was found guilty of intentionally exposing the students to pornography and was looking down the barrel of 40 years imprisonment. After the completion of the original trial, the computer in question was re-examined, and the judge admitted there are new findings that contradict the original findings.
The teacher’s attorney was quoted saying “the lesson from this is all of us are subject to the whims of these computers.” It worries me what this says about the legal system! Lets hope this gap is filled soon.
There’s something very wrong with the state of computers when an attack of pop-up windows is a “fairly standard” event.
There is something wrong with the legal system in that she was found guilty, but that the law lags the state of technology is about as breaking a revelation as that of the fact the sky is blue.