micromux

Network Dependency

While traveling this past holiday season, at one of the many airports a kid was busy talking on her cellphone and complaining about how she was having such difficulty finding a phone number. At the other end, it sounded like her mom was navigating through her Facebook page to locate the phone number in question. Have we really become so dependent on network connectivity?
Read Network Dependency >>

Laptop Absconding at Best Buy

It seems pretty common practice to bring malfunctioning computers to get repaired, something that Raelyn Campbell did when she brought in her faulty laptop to a local Best Buy. Unfortunately, in the process of fixing the computer it was lost and now Raelyn is seeking a financial remedy for her situation.
Read Laptop Absconding at Best Buy >>

Universal Health Care

Most developed countries offer a form of universal health care, the only real exception to this is the United States. Today, Barack Obama offered another solution to universal health care for Americans, but will this succeed where others have failed?
Read Universal Health Care >>

Unreasonable Search and Seizure

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated

Our government has been busy listening to personal telephone communications. While the President claims we are targeting international phone calls, there is really nothing to prevent the government from arbitrarily tapping conversations of citizens domestically.
Read Unreasonable Search and Seizure >>

Stealing Your Music

There are a number of ways your computer could be employed to download copyrighted content illegally. The RIAA wants to prevent this from happening and has been taking unsuspecting P2P users to court in an effort to protect intellectual property. Patricia Santangelo is the among the latest of these plantiffs, and rather than accept a settlement she has spent more than $25,000 to take them to court.

Patricia contends that she is innocent because she has no computer literacy, which would make it impossible for her to have downloaded this music illegally.

What if Patricia owned a gun and failed to secure it with a trigger lock? Imagine if her children had friends visiting the house and they found the unsecured gun, would Patricia be innocent if these kids used the gun to kill someone? Even if the murder was accidental, Patricia would be held accountable because she neglected to store a dangerous weapon in a proper fashion.

Now let’s turn to the question of how she should have secured her computer. If the kids were using the system in an unsupervised fashion, Patricia should have password protected the machine and they should have not been allowed to access it with any superuser (Administrator) privileges. It was her responsibility to understand how to properly configure her computer, imagine if a gun owner could plead innocent because they were shotgun illiterate.

If the kids were restricted from installing any new software and if Patricia had taken the time to secure her computer using a properly configured firewall, then it would have been unlikely they could have used her machine to download music.

Obviously, this kind of protection won’t always be sufficient. A truly capable hacker would be able to circumvent virtually any restriction once they are afforded physical access to the computer. For example, boot the computer from a USB thumb drive and circumvent access restrictions on your operating system altogether. This could also be accomplished remotely using malware or perhaps by exploiting a weakness in your operating system.

If you have taken every reasonable precaution to secure your PC, and a malicious hacker still finds a way to gain privileged access to your machine, are you still guilty if the RIAA discovers copyrighted music on your hard drive? This is a much more difficult question, and won’t be something that the courts will need to consider in Patricia’s case.