Jailed For Using A Nonstandard Browser
A Londonder made a tsnuami-relief donation using lynx -- a text-based browser used by the blind, Unix-users and others -- on Sun's Solaris operating system.
British Telecom, the site-operator, misread an access log and saw it as a non-standard browser not identifying it's type and doing strange things. They decided that this "unusual" event in the system log indicated a hack-attempt, traced the user's IP and had the police go in SWAT style to arrest the donor while he was having his lunch.
The man is out on bail till next week and preparing to make a lot of very bad PR for BT and the Police.
I think this is very dumb of British Telecom. They should know better than that.
Anyway, there's one more good reason to move to Firefox. Either you do or you risk being arrested and jailed :P
[Via: Boing Boing]
[In The News: BBC News]
Firefox Takes 25% of Browser Market Anti-Iraq war US soldier jailed Another Arab Journalist Jailed For Doing Their Job Opera Browser Goes Free Opera Voice BrowserI don't understand your point. What's the problem with sending people to jail for not using firefox?
Best
Cass
I don't see anywhere in BBC article where they mention lynx, or this version of the story. Even, Boing Boing is giving the same link to BBC. So I wonder may be you are missing a link.
Posted by: whatever? at January 27, 2005 04:45 PMWell, the link to the BBC tells the story the way the media tells it.
The details apparently come from a mailing list that told the whole thing.
Posted by: MMM at January 27, 2005 05:01 PM