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from the shades-of-"Weev"-and-Aaron-Swartz dept.
Thanks in part to America’s ill-defined hacking laws, prosecutors have enormous discretion to determine a hacker defendant’s fate. But in one young Texan’s case in particular, the Department of Justice stretched prosecutorial overreach to a new extreme: about 440 years too far.
Last week, prosecutors in the Southern District of Texas reached a plea agreement with 28-year-old Fidel Salinas, in which the young hacker with alleged ties to members of Anonymous consented to plead guilty to a misdemeanor count of computer fraud and abuse and pay $10,000 in restitution. The U.S. attorney’s office omitted one fact from its press release about that plea ( http://www.justice.gov/usao/txs/1News/Releases/2014%20November/141120%20-%20Salinas.html ), however: Just months ago, Salinas had been charged with not one, but 44 felony counts of computer fraud and cyberstalking—crimes that each carry a 10-year maximum sentence; adding up to an absurd total of nearly a half a millennium of prison time.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Sunday November 30 2014, @06:50PM
The CD and USB things are ion MS. Nobody made them implement the obviously harmful autorun feature.
The whole email and document virus thing is on them as well. I remember well at the time they were busily making documents and emails into executable code they were warned that no good would come of it. Until then, email viruses were somewhere between urban legend and a mildly funny joke (the honor system virus for example).
Arguably, since you'd be insane to even read email or browse the web without a 3rd party AV installed, Windows is in itself incomplete.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Monday December 01 2014, @08:10AM
Oh please, you are STILL bitching about fucking Windows XP? You wanna bitch about how you could bypass login on Windows 98 by hitting cancel while you are at it? You DO know that Windows XP was FOUR, soon to be FIVE releases ago, yes? And that autorun was disabled in SP 2 IIRC which was in 2003?
Oh and just FYI the whole autorun thing was REQUESTED by the OEMs who got fucking tired of having support calls that said "I put teh CD in and it did nuffin!" because they were too damned dense to open Computer. Also FYI but that is now why you get a dialog box when you stick in a CD with the option of running it, because they just removed autorun with SP2 and the users fucking HOWLED in rage at the thought of having to open Computer!
I personally find it hilarious that MSFT gets shit if they do what the users ask of them, then get shit if they DON'T do what the users ask of them, is it any wonder that Balmer got fed up and tried to turn Windows into an oversized cellphone just to shut them up?
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Monday December 01 2014, @04:07PM
You still seem pretty hot about it yourself. They could have done what Gnome does. Just open a file window showing the contents of the CD. If the user doesn't know about click the little picture to make things happen, they're simply incapable of using Windows at all.
But as for current issues, have they yet made their interface show the user the difference between opening data and running a program? That confusion is certainly a big part of the problem with Windows machines getting trashed.