Jailed for using a nonstandard browser

Cory Doctorow 12:08 am Thu Jan 27, 2005

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. The site-operator decided that this "unusual" event in the system log indicated a hack-attempt, and the police broke down the donor's door and arrested him. From a mailing list:

For donating to a Tsunami appeal using Lynx on Solaris 10. BT [British Telecom] who run
the donation management system misread an access log and saw hmm thats a
non standard browser not identifying it's type and it's doing strange
things. Trace that IP. Arrest that hacker.

Armed police, a van, a police cell and national news later the police
have gone in SWAT styley and arrested someone having their lunch.

Out on bail till next week and preparing to make a lot of very bad PR
for BT and the Police….

So just goes to show if you use anything other than Firefox or IE and
you rely on someone else to interogate access logs or IDS logs you too
could be sitting in a paper suit in a cell :(

(Thanks, Patrick!)

Update:: The source that told me about this has corroborated it with more detail in private email, but is leery of going public. I hope that more publicly available details appear soon, and will post them when I have them.

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