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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

#181

Post by echoangle »

lefra wrote: post #121

This is a mistake that shouldn't happen. It means that someone commiting crimes could trivially hide and get the wrong person accused by using homoglyphs [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoglyph

A bit off topic but is there a reason why the Cyrillic letter in the example image is slightly different than the regular “a”? Did someone redraw it from scratch and it looks kind of different or did someone actually take the “a” glyph and slightly modify it to make it Cyrillic? Because the small difference is so small that it can’t really be on purpose to make them look different, right?

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

#182

Post by Ukv »

denkmoon wrote: post #113
koolba wrote: post #80

All of this boils down to an extra underscore in his username. It’s the type of thing I’d hope our LLM-powered future solves for the common man. Catching typos like that would be load bearing for someone armed only with a public defender.

Insane. An LLM is just as likely to hallucinate a missing/extra underscore and ping the wrong person. A machine cannot be held accountable.

> Insane. An LLM is just as likely to hallucinate a missing/extra underscore and ping the wrong person

If it's just for "Catching typos", a hallucinated missing/extra underscore would just be a false positive to dismiss.

> A machine cannot be held accountable.

Seems unlikely that his lawyer, the law firm, the judge, whoever made the typo, or the police department will be held accountable either.

Nor can any of the tools they used, since that's not really the level at which it makes sense to hold accountability, but that's no reason not to use a tool that could find errors and reduce the chance for an innocent person to spend time in prison.

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

#183

Post by entropy47 »

binaryturtle wrote: post #17

Stupid question: wouldn't a simple comparison with the body(parts) from the inappropriate pictures sent to the girl have helped the innocent guy? I mean those thingies all look different, no, like some sort of "fingerprint"?

I don't think it would matter - the crime is sending images, not necessarily sending images of you. Entirely plausible a perp might use a random image they found online rather than a genuine personal photo for a multitude of reasons.

Terrible luck and a terrible legal defence. The stuff of nightmares!

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

#184

Post by expedition32 »

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…

Weird in my country we have a culture were scientists love going after eachother- its what they live for! Nothing gives you more fame than destroying other people's reputation.

And overturning convictions gets you straight into the history books. It gets so ridiculous that people make their life work out of redoing cases from the 90s.

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

#185

Post by sirsinsalot »

inigyou wrote: post #177
phyzix5761 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Other than misplaced nihilism what's your point?

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

#186

Post by PxldLtd »

femto wrote: post #73
Macha wrote: post #16

What the article doesn’t mention, since this was an incorrect conviction that led to a served 18 month sentence, loss of income from the loss of whatever job he had, and likely life long reputational damage (as this kind of conviction now needs to be explained and some people will adopt a “where there’s smoke there’s fire” attitude…) was there any compensation for this man? It sounds like all he got was voiding the c…

Probably no compensation. Under "English" law (Canada is a Commonwealth country), the wrongful conviction will probably to taken to be without malice and reasonable given the information the US provided, so tough luck. He might be able to negotiate an ex gratia payment, but this will be entirely at the whim of a politician, who will be looking to avoid being criticised for giving away government money

We used to charge innocent men for room and board in prison after being released here in the UK not long ago. They only changed this in 2023 after uproar in a recent case of an innocent man being freed.

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

#187

Post by inigyou »

sirsinsalot wrote: post #185
inigyou wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Other than misplaced nihilism what's your point?

The justice system isn't the only thing that randomly kills you.

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

#188

Post by GJim »

tancop wrote: post #166
gblargg wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would people get jury trials if bench ones were better? Is it only when the person is innocent?

because they think jury trials work the way they are supposed to work. the system is broken because juries are not required (or even allowed ) to explain their decision, and the selection process is not that good at removing bias. thats how you get cases where the jury is racist or not following the law. but the idea of using a group decision instead of individual is great, and the jurors not being judges/lawyers avo…

> selection process is not that good at removing bias

I'd say it introduces bias.

Here in Blighty, jury selection is *entirely* random. A juror is only going to be 'deselected' in extremis; for example, it turns out they are related to the prosecution or defendant.

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

#189

Post by d1sxeyes »

echoangle wrote: post #181
lefra wrote: post #121

This is a mistake that shouldn't happen. It means that someone commiting crimes could trivially hide and get the wrong person accused by using homoglyphs [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoglyph

A bit off topic but is there a reason why the Cyrillic letter in the example image is slightly different than the regular “a”? Did someone redraw it from scratch and it looks kind of different or did someone actually take the “a” glyph and slightly modify it to make it Cyrillic? Because the small difference is so small that it can’t really be on purpose to make them look different, right?

It's not required, you can re-use the exact same glyph. The letters are effectively the same (both descendants of the Greek 'alpha').

Generally when this happens, it's because they copied the Latin glyph and then made some tweaks to the whole Cyrillic alphabet to make it look more even, etc., and the changes to the 'a' may not even be intentional, but the 'a' got caught up in a batch change or something.

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

#190

Post by victorbjorklund »

jojobas wrote: post #69
jasonfarnon wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"the only possible evidence they had was the wrong username." Out of curiosity and definitely not defending this prosecution, but if the chain "unique Kik username -> unique gmail address -> unique ISP user -> guy living alone, happens to have Kik on his device" weren't screwed up by the investigators submitting the wrong username, would you say that's enough for a jury to convict ? I don't know about Canada but in t…

No, there are open wifi routers, there are WPA attacks, friends that were given wifi passwords, and a lot of other things. Convicting on IP address match should disqualify the trial judge.

Happens all the time. You have to then say ”the ip address does not prove it because X”. If prosecutor have a photo of you committing the murder it is enough evidence. But then maybe you will say ”that isn’t me. That’s photoshopped” and then court needs to evaluate if that can be the case or not. But if you don’t give any plausible explanation to the photo it will be used against you.
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