CFC OKLAHOMA

Geek Week: Google Wireless, Vista SP1, and other thought crimes

Click a link, go to jail. From Declan McCullagh at CNet comes a story sure to chill the heart of any geek who's ever spent time trolling the Net's dark underbelly. Temple graduate student Roderick Vosburgh is looking at three to four years in prison for clicking on the wrong link. Vosburgh was visiting an adult message board and followed a hyperlink to a site that claimed to host images and videos of sub-18-year-olds cavorting in a hormonally induced fashion. Except that the link was posted by the FBI, and the site was a honeypot that did not serve up any naughty images but did collect his IP address. A few months later Vosburgh found himself face down on the ground in front of his house, wearing handcuffs. A jury recently convicted him of "attempting to download child pornography," a federal crime that carries a maximum sentence of 10 years. Not viewing kiddie porn, not possessing it, but attempting to. (Though they did also find him guilty of possessing two thumbnail images of naked kids, which could have gotten on his computer in any number of ways.)

Nobody can possibly condone kiddie porn, but this case suggests a scary precedent. If I created a site called www.underage-p***y.com where I posted pictures of kittens in provocative poses, you could be guilty of intending to do bad things based on what you thought might be there, not what actually is. At the very least, you could experience an unpleasant visit by the Feds, where they dragged you off and impounded your computers and every storage device in your house. Personally, I would like to see my tax dollars being spent chasing bigger fish than lonely grad students sitting at their PCs at night. Orwell wasn't wrong, his timing was just a little off.

Spectrum analysis. In cheerier news, it appears Google lost its bid in the FCC's wireless spectrum auction. Why is that cheery? Because the G-men succeeded in their quest to open up that swath of bandwidth to any devices that want to operate on it. It appears Verizon snagged most of that bandwidth via a cunning series of bids covering different regions of the country, and AT&T gobbled up most of what was left. Verizon will be forced by FCC rules to allow Android phones to use that 22-MHz segment. So Google gets what it wanted without the hassle of actually delivering wireless services -- no need for a G-Mobile after all. Unfortunately for the rest of us mere mortals, this means we're stuck with Ma Bell's bastard offspring for a while longer.

Don't ask, don't WinTel. First Microsoft twisted itself into a pretzel to accommodate Intel, labeling systems with its underpowered 915 graphics chipset as Vista Capable even though they really weren't, just so Intel could make its quarterly numbers. Now the Vista SP1 is choking on -- yes, you guessed it, drivers for embedded Intel graphics chips, only this time it's the more advanced 945G Express chipset. Microsoft has published a list of commonly used drivers that cause the service pack to roll over on its back and stick all six legs in the air. It's reassuring to know that, despite the breakneck pace of technology, some things never change.

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Posted by Robert X. Cringely on March 21, 2008 07:43 AM