From Decius:

More evidence that sex offender hysteria motivates corrupt legislators to produce policy that is fucking stupid.

The facts are pretty darned sad. Barely more than a child himself at 19, Bradshaw was charged with statutory rape for having sex with a 15-year-old girl. Fine. That’s punishable. I’d prefer it had been kept out of the criminal justice system (see here for more) but its punishable. He gets 5 years.

After he gets out he gives an invalid address. For that, too, he pleads guilty and is sentenced to time served. When released he moves in with his sister but can’t live there because Georgia’s draconian sex offender law won’t let him live within 1,000 feet of a recreation center!

He moves in with an aunt but can’t stay there because the home is within 1,000 feet of the First Baptist Church! Growing desperate, he finds a family friend but this time inadvertently transposes the street address!

Now the cops move in. Bradshaw is arrested because he hadn’t moved into the friend’s single-wide trailer within the legally required 72 hours — and lied and said he did! His mandatory sentence for this infraction is life in prison.

A Georgia lawyer in this thread says that many of these people end up being homeless because they cannot find a place to live that complies with the law, and then they end up getting arrested for being homeless.

Fortunately we have elected representatives who are capable of forming logical thoughts:

Sen. President pro tem Eric Johnson (R-Savannah) said the law is clear.

"I wish it hadn't happened, but there are consequences for people's actions," said Johnson, a chief sponsor of the offender law. "What would have happened if he had given the wrong address and had lived in a place and was harming a child next door? The law is trying to protect children. Justice has to be blind to motive."

1. Eric Johnson recommended these particular consequences. He has to defend why they are appropriate, and not refer to them as if they are beyond his control!
2. This person is not a pedophile.
3. This is not an attempt to protect children. Strict statutory rape laws are designed to attack teenagers for having sex out of wedlock. In this case coupled with a hysteria driven over broad sex offender registration rule intended as marketing fodder for political campaigns.
4. No, justice does not have to be blind to motive! There is a difference between malice murder and involuntary manslaughter. If you don't understand that you shouldn't be writing laws.

Georgia Supreme Court considers proportionality in sex offender case

Billy strikes again:

In response to all the Mass SQL Injection attacks this year, Microsoft approached HP and the Web Security Research Group (formerly SPI Labs) for assistance. While there was nothing they could patch, Microsoft wanted to provide tools to help developers find and fix these issues. After a month of development HP created Scrawlr.

Scrawlr (short for SQL Injector and Crawler) is a free tool that will crawl a website while simultaneously analyzing the parameters of each individual web page for SQL Injection vulnerabilities. Scrawlr was designed specifically to help protect against these mass injection attack which are using Google queries to find older web applications and automatically injection them. As such, Scrawlr crawls a websites using the same techniques as a search engine: it doesn’t keep state, or submit forms, or execute JavaScript or Flash. This Scrawl is finding and auditing the pages that would have been indexed by the search engines.

To reduce false positives Scrawlr provides proof of the vulnerability results by displaying the type of backend database in use and a list of available table names. There is no denying you have SQL Injection when I can show you table names!

Microsoft Advisory
HP Web Security Research Group Blog
Scrawlr Download
Scrawlr FAQ

Introduction Scrawlr: a free Crawler + SQL Injector tool

Peter Swire testifies to a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on why laptop searches of Americans returning from overseas is a violation of privacy.

Peter is a co-worker of mine. Click through to read his testimony.

No, You Can't Search My Laptop

Comedian-actor George Carlin, known for his raunchy, but insightful humor, died Sunday in Los Angeles, his publicist said. He was 71.

Jeff Abraham says Carlin went into St. John's Health Center on Sunday afternoon, complaining of chest pain. Carlin died at 5:55 p.m. PDT, the Associated Press reported.

Carlin, who had a history of heart trouble, performed as recently as last weekend at the Orleans Casino and Hotel in Las Vegas.

R.I.P. George Carlin

Warrantless Laptop Searches at U.S. Borders

Decius

U.S. customs agents have begun randomly searching the contents of laptops carried by individuals across U.S. border checkpoints. Personal laptops contain increasingly vast and intimate collections of information about their owners, and cannot be easily sanitized for government inspection prior to travel. The privacy implications of this policy are obviously tremendous. There is presently a debate in the U.S. court system about the constitutionality of these searches. This talk will cover the developments so far, explaining (and criticizing) the basic legal framework in which this debate is occurring as well as the reasoning employed by the courts that have heard this issue. Related topics will also be discussed, such as recent controversy over the Fifth Amendment right to refuse to reveal an encryption password to the police and the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. Attendees will be armed with a deeper understanding of these present threats to our fundamental rights.

Decius will be speaking at Hope next month in NYC. A number of other people connected with MemeStreams are also speaking. It should be a good time.

The Last HOPE - July 18-20, 2008 - Hotel Pennsylvania - New York City

China denied accusations by two U.S. lawmakers that it hacked into congressional computers, saying Thursday that as a developing country it wasn't capable of sophisticated cybercrime.

"Is there any evidence? ... Do we have such advanced technology? Even I don't believe it," Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang told a regularly scheduled news conference.

This deflection is actually really quite insulting. They played the developing country card? Seriously?? What a load of crap!

Once information technology is widely available to people who take an interest in it, it's only a matter of time before there are hackers capable of preforming offensive information operations exist. The biggest factor I can think of, is if there are numbers of kids that have easy access to computers. The only universal thread in common with all the rockstar hackers I know is that they all got interested in the stuff real young, and just got more and more devastatingly capable as they matured and got more access to information and other hackers.

No one expects the avenues of Xinjiang to start flowing with 0day anytime soon.. But I assure you, places like Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Guangdong have no shortage of capable hackers. Beijing damn well knows that, and isn't afraid to use it strategically.

Hackers sprout given enough people, time, technology, and access to information. They manifest themselves in different ways. If you have an economy that can support a technology sector, you get one. If you don't, you get cybercrime. If your military wants the capability to do information operations, it will get it. Even the DPRK was claiming to have infowar capabilities at one point..

China denies hacking into US computers - Yahoo! News

Tim Russert, NBC News’ Washington bureau chief and the moderator of “Meet the Press,” died Friday after a sudden heart attack at the bureau, NBC News said Friday. He was 58.

Russert was recording voiceovers for Sunday’s “Meet the Press” program when he collapsed, the network said. He and his family had recently returned from Italy, where they celebrated the graduation of Russert’s son, Luke, from Boston College.

No further details were immediately available.

I'm really bummed out. Russert was one of the greats.

R.I.P. Tim Russert

The electricity is back in D.C. after a huge outage that left the downtown area in the dark during the height of the morning rush hours Friday.

It left traffic lights out, Metro commuters hoofing it up steep staircases and thousands of employees on the streets waiting for the electricity to come back on.

"It's blacked out a fairly good sized area of downtown, north to U street, south to F Street, over to Dupont and east to 3rd," Pepco spokesman Bob Dobkin tells WTOP.

The outages included a lot of office buildings and federal buildings, he says.

During the outage, people milled about the streets, waiting for the electricity and air conditioning in their offices to come back on.

The morning of Friday the 13th was not a good time to be an operations guy in downtown Washington, DC.

All of the facilities I'm responsible for had no power. Server rooms were silent and dark. Hallways were filled with the sounds beeping UPSs.

Fun fun fun. This was the second power outage I've had to deal with this week...

Electricity restored after massive D.C. outage

Los Angeles city Councilman Dennis Zine:

"We believe that the Constitution needs to be upheld [but] at the same time, we need to protect our celebrities."

Something about that quote sends a chill down my spine...

Ken Starr helping lawmakers fight paparazzi - CNN.com

COLUMBIA, SC (WIS) - Authorities say a four-year-old girl from Salley is recovering after she grabbed a gun out of her grandmother's purse and shot herself in the Harbison Blvd. Sam's Club Monday.

Where's video surveillance when you need it?

Imagine getting to write a lede/headline combination like that? Wow.

Grandmother from Sam's Club accidental shooting a magistrate judge