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January 13, 2007
Norwich Porn Case 
BoingBoing recently posted this: http://www.boingboing.net/2007/01/13/teacher_faces_40_yea.html
A substitute teacher was convicted of exposing children to pornography.
Her defense: she went to a hair website , which launched a slew of popup ads. The school's firewall filter expired, so it didn't block porn. She even complained to other treachers and the principal. The state was quick to prosecute, and didn't even test the box for adware.
The following link suggests why she was probably convicted -- and I'm dumbfounded:
http://www.norwichbulletin.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070106/NEWS01/701060312/1002/NEWS17
But Smith countered Horner's testimony with that of Norwich Police Detective Mark Lounsbury, a computer crimes investigator. On a projected image of the list of Web sites visited while Amero was working, Lounsbury pointed out several highlighted links."You have to physically click on it to get to those sites," Smith said. "I think the evidence is overwhelming that she did intend to access those Web sites."
Mark Lounsbury is an idiot - as are the offense. Either that, or they're crooked pieces of shit deliberately misleading the jury and public ( I live in Brooklyn -- so I'm used to corrupt politicians, thats all we have.)
Highlighted links mean that you've visited the url the link points to- they do not mean that you clicked on that exact link (ie, the link on that page). I've yet to encounter a browser that highlights links based on a 'click origin'. All that proves is that her browser had visited the URL for the link -- it could very well have gotten there because of a popup , popunder, or one of those indidious endless redirect cycles. No clicking is necessary.
Don't believe me?
Copy/Paste the text below into a file named "a.html" , and copy that file into b.html and c.html
Open a.html in your browser - "a" will be highlighted. Then change the url in the location bar to b.html -- note how "a" and "b" are highlighted. click on "c" -- now all 3 are highlighted.
I've also set up a demo here: a.html
Posted by Jonathan at January 13, 2007 6:23 PM
Comments
I think they're generally referred to as the prosecution, not the offense. And yes, they're idiots.
Posted by: tojo2000 at January 15, 2007 3:55 PM
I could be wrong, but I don't think the article used the word "highlighted" in the technical sense. It sounds to me like they showed a slide that someone had used (for example) a highlighting marker on.
If I'm interpreting the article right, the prosecution was saying "the spyware won't activate unless you click these links; therefore, she must have clicked these links."
But again, I could be wrong. The article's phrasing is ambiguous; hard to tell exactly what they meant.
Posted by: Jed 
at January 27, 2007 3:28 PM
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