Quote:
| Until recently, Julie Amero says, she lived the quiet life of a small-town substitute teacher, with little knowledge of computers and even less about porn. Now she is in the middle of a criminal case that hinges on the intricacies of both, and it could put her behind bars for up to 40 years. She was convicted last month of exposing seventh-grade students to pornography on her classroom computer. She contended the images were inadvertently thrust onto the screen by pornographers' unseen spyware and adware programs. |
http://www.cnn.com/2007/LAW/02/13/te....ap/index.html
As a network administrator I've seen plenty of weasels who will try to get away with anything they possibly can. But I've also experienced precisely what happened to Mrs. Amero. Once my wife was putting together a baseball themed party for a co-worker. She did a search for "baseball clip art". Of course, numerous hits came up and the first few she visited were perfectly normal. The final link she clicked read simply "baseball clip art"...exactly the terms she searched for. As soon as she clicked on the link the extremely graphic pop-ups began with a vengence. Many opened in such a way that the "X" to close the window was placed off of the screen. Luckily there were witnesses to the entire proceding and no children were present, but she was flabberghasted. My wife is quite an experienced computer user and when she was faced with the unwanted material she didn't know what to do. She certainly didn't consider unplugging the computer...it all happened so quickly. She was experienced enough, however, to bring up the task manager to break the loop, but the average user doesn't know anything about such procedures.
It will be a travesty if Mrs. Amero's conviction isn't overturned. Anyone who has spent a reasonable amount of time surfing the Internet has experienced unwanted pop-ups. Strangely, a computer crimes detective testifying for the prosecution stated that "You have to physically click on it to get to those sites" In my experience this is not the case. Even now with various pop-up blockers, I still see the occasional advertisement. At this very moment I have an entry in my history for a pop-up that I experienced just yesterday. On top of that, it seems that the prosecution admitted that they did not conduct a search for spyware on the computer in question. How ill-equiped must Mrs. Amero's defense lawyer be?
The woman paniced and did what most people would do, try to close the windows. But the intrusive nature of some (but not all) porn sites can have this crap thrown at you no matter how hard you try to remove it. If anything this should show that the teacher was niave about porn sites and everything that happened was an accident.
