dave
Premium,MVM
join:2000-05-04
not in ohio
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 ·Verizon FIOS
| reply to Link Logger
Re: How 'bad' are spyware cookies??
quote:
Any person who knowingly writes or reads files from another person's computer by personal or robotic means for whatever reason whatsoever and without the permission of the party involved, with full knowledge of the activity each and every time the action is performed, is guilty of a felony and subject to fine and imprisonment not to exceed $10,000 and one year in prison for each offense."
So, if I have a web site that presents content in the MIME type 'application_octet_stream/bananamatic', and this causes your browser to read its config files to see whether it can handle the bananamatic format, then I've committed a felony?
How is this, mechanically, any different from my web site causing your browser to read a cookie file?
Come to think of it, if I deliver a fairly large graphic to your memory-constrained PC, haven't I just caused your paging file to be written?
Legal codes are supposed to be unambiguous, and that wording certainly is full of ambiguity. We could start by discussing the word 'file', which I suspect is loose enough to drive a truckload of lawyers through.
The fundamental problem, as I see it, is that by you pointing your web browser at my web site, you have in fact invited my web site to alter things in your running computer. That's simply the nature of the beast. If you don't want any state changes that you did not explicitly authorize, then you'd be better off sticking to something less interactive, like ftp.
Lest you misunderstand me as having sympathy for scumbags: I don't. However, I wouldn't want to see a law that's either (a) so full of loopholes it provides no protection, or (b) so overreaching that any web site anywhere is subject to nuisance law suits from idiots. |
