Saturday Funnies #2: Not funny - FBI uses link clicks to entrap

From the CNET story:

Well, the suspect's lawyers have not used the entrapment defense, since you pretty much need to be forcibly coerced into doing something by law enforcement for that to work.

Even a challenge to the warrant, based on the IP lease information from the ISP, to the house that had an open access point, didn't fly. Nice - so someone with a WEP cracker (10 minutes) can download porn, click on the wrong link, from my connection and I get searched?

I mean - I am sure I could find "suspicious material" on everyone's computer. We're all guilty of something, after all. Heck, a link to here, with its link to cryptome.org is probably enough to get you sent to a secret prison somewhere. Maybe this post contains a secret link to make sure a kiddie porn picture is downloaded to your browsers cache from an FBI computer. You guilty sex offender, you.

Considering how many people click "OK" without reading the sentence above it, how viable is this really?

Don't get me wrong - those links were clearly labeled as child porn with all sorts of disgusting descriptions, so there is cause to be suspicious, but when you see what the convictions are really for (two images in a thumbs.db file) it's a bit of a stretch.

The Saturday Funnies #1: noreply.com apparently gets your mail

Funny for a couple of reasons. Or sad.

So this guy registered donotreply.com (Washington Post, warning, reg req'd sometimes) as a joke in the 90's, and gets confidential emails from all sorts of places - Halliburton's now-famous KBR in Iraq, some banks, and with them all sorts of legal threats from technical luddites who seem to think he's wrong for opening or reviewing emails sent to his address. Sweet.

I guess the really cool thing is he keeps it all on a good natured blog, and if he's mailed a copy of a donation to an animal charity he'll take down the ostensibly offensive post.

It's not like he's posting SSNs, account numbers, or classified information here, although stuff does end up in his inbox, I am sure.

And, instead of hassling the guy, the DHS should give the guy a medal - otherwise their misconfigured emails would end up in the hands of the Russian mob.