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A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

arstechnica.com

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Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

#171

Post by codetiger »

Dilettante_ wrote: post #144
codetiger wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This case can be the best example of human hallucinations. They made a mistake in username, and assumed everything after that was facts. All that had to be proved was the person is the owner of the mistaken username.

There should be/does anyone know if there is a name for this? When you truth-check exactly once and then just blindly runaway after that? Edit: Apparently in medicine there exists the concept of "premature closure", where the carer settles on a diagnosis early and stops considering other possibilities. Seems like a decent match?

In LLM (AI) terms, we call the same effect as "models are hallucinating".

Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

#172

Post by ahoka »

Aurornis wrote: post #15

> Nothing linked Klayme to the girl. No intimate images were found. Klayme did have a Kik account, but cops couldn’t even show that he had accessed the service during the period in question. > Still, Klayme was arrested and hit with three charges: > Luring a person under 14 years of age by means of telecommunication > Providing sexually explicit material to a child > Possession of child pornography > The case went to…

How could they prove the possession?

Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

#173

Post by laszlojamf »

The scary thing is that it's unclear to me what would have happened if the guy hadn't had a Kik account, and the real perp had used just one underscore. Can you just pick somebody's username from another service to frame them for grooming? Couldn't you do this to anyone in that case, if that's all that it takes? I sure hope this article is leaving something out, otherwise this is some kangaroo court shit...

Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

#174

Post by ktallett »

yieldcrv wrote: post #28

Remember when Saudi Arabia indicted Canada on its human rights and everyone laughed? Got to separate the message from the messenger

Huh? I am not sure Saudi Arabia can hold the moral high ground and this is definitely not the way to do it.

Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

#176

Post by pinkmuffinere »

OsrsNeedsf2P wrote: post #129
qingcharles wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about the Canadian justice system, but it's very hard in the USA for defendants to get expert witnesses. The state is supposed to pay, but it's almost never done, and when it is they pay bottom rate for the defendant while having unlimited funds for their own experts.

Oh something I can comment on! A friend of mine was facing a mountain of criminal charges. Photo evidence proved the cops lied. We needed an expert testimony explaining the camera angle and why the photo explained how the cops lied. I think we called every service qualified for providing such a testimony in Ontario, and a good portion of them across all of Canada. Some were even happy to work with us, until they foun…

> I think we called every service qualified for providing such a testimony in Ontario, and a good portion of them across all of Canada. Some were even happy to work with us, until they found out we were testifying against the police. We ended up going international but without luck, and ended up with no expert testimony

This is absolutely horrible to hear!! I know you probably don't want homework, but would you ever consider taking this story to news outlets? I suspect there'd be no compensation, but the uproar might (eventually) result in change.

Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

#177

Post by inigyou »

phyzix5761 wrote: post #161
Aurornis wrote: post #15

> Nothing linked Klayme to the girl. No intimate images were found. Klayme did have a Kik account, but cops couldn’t even show that he had accessed the service during the period in question. > Still, Klayme was arrested and hit with three charges: > Luring a person under 14 years of age by means of telecommunication > Providing sexually explicit material to a child > Possession of child pornography > The case went to…

As a software engineer the legal system scares me. How can we put someone in jail (for the rest of their lives in some cases) based on nebulous rules and personal interpretation/application of the law?

Worse, several people will have an aortic dissection tomorrow. Their main arteries will split apart and they will just die from internal bleeding. And the next day, and the next day, and the next day. But only until next week because that's when false vacuum decay will get us.

Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

#178

Post by inigyou »

stkdump wrote: post #130
esafak wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it surprising? Every time you log in your IP is recorded, and the ISP can handle the rest.

One of the rare cases where a vpn actually does help. Though of course only if they don't also turn over records.

I thought everyone knew that hiding your IP address from the government was a big reason to use trustworthy VPNs.

Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

#179

Post by inigyou »

leonvoss wrote: post #49

This is always going to happen with these types of laws, because they can be broken with very little effort from anywhere. That directly causes it to be easy to frame people for breaking them, by accident or on purpose. If the crime is purely the transmission of the incorrect byte pattern, the evidence is always logs, server and local. Eventually a bug will lead them to people who did not transmit the wrong bytes, bu…

Theres a site called AbuseIPDB where you can report that someone is portscanning you. Some server hosts watch this database and will suspend any server that's accused by it.

Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

#180

Post by echoangle »

laszlojamf wrote: post #173

The scary thing is that it's unclear to me what would have happened if the guy hadn't had a Kik account, and the real perp had used just one underscore. Can you just pick somebody's username from another service to frame them for grooming? Couldn't you do this to anyone in that case, if that's all that it takes? I sure hope this article is leaving something out, otherwise this is some kangaroo court shit...

I don’t get the hypothetical, the perpetrator and the guy arrested were both using Kik and the account names were confused. There was no other service in this case.
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