
How to stop cybercrooks: take their pals to court - evo_9
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/07/how-to-stop-cybercrooks-take-their-pals-to-court.ars
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nickolai
> The list could only cover a few, few universally recognized crimes, like
> theft, fraud, and criminal trespass. In other words: this wouldn’t work for
> politically inflammatory speech or copyright infringement;

Copyright infringment _is_ theft for a non-negligible segment of the
population (mostly the one in power).

Also, I have some doubts about the 40 billion figure. most of it seems to come
from "IP theft" which I would love to see defined in more precise terms.

I agree with the general idea of suing phishers and spammers into oblivion.
Though I guess a lot of precautions must be taken to avoid the collateral
damage described above (abuse of the law for political reasons) which makes it
way less simple.

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btilly
I would like to see the same strategy used to identify and shut down botnets.
Unfortunately this requires making ISPs liable for the traffic that goes over
their networks. Which gives them a very, very good argument for not having net
neutrality.

But I personally think that it would be a significant improvement to move
responsibility for finding machines on botnets from Joe Q. Public to the ISPs
that are routing those attacks. There is no way to get the general public to
understand enough about computers to recognize when they are the problem. But
ISPs are supposed to understand something nontrivial about networking.

