Tagged with 'computer'

Is it a federal crime to violate the service terms of a Web site? Some Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles think so, and they are waiting to find out from U.S. District Judge George Wu, who presided over the case against Lori Drew, the Missouri mom convicted of three misdemeanor counts for unauthorized access to MySpace’s computer system. Drew used MySpace to create a fake account for a fake 16-year-old boy named “Josh” in order to romance her daughter Sarah’s then 13-year-old classmate to find out if she was spreading rumors about Sarah. The plan was to then dump the girl, Megan Meier, over the internet, a girl known to be under treatment for depression. Meier hanged herself in her bedroom closet shortly after a final message from “Josh” saying, “The world would be better off without you.”

Drew’s attorney, Dean Steward, has argued that the verdict should be thrown out on the basis that “prosecutors failed to show a crime was committed because his client violated MySpace service terms.”

According to a recent AP story, Steward wrote in his dismissal motion,

“Is it a federal crime to violate a Web site terms of service? The correct answer should be a resounding no.”

This is despite the fact that according to a December story on wired.com’s blog Threat Level, jurors in the original case wanted to find Drew guilty of all four felony charges against her, but settled on the lesser charges for some very compelling reasons (which you can read more about in the Threat Level story). Drew was charged with three felony counts of obtaining illegal access to MySpace’s computers and one count of conspiracy. Charges were levied under the Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which in the past has been used in hacking and trademark theft cases, when Drew and her 18-year-old employee, Ashley Grills created the fake account.

The jury forewoman told Threat Level there just wasn’t enough evidence:

“Trust me, I was so for this woman going away for 20 years,” Valentina Kunasz told Threat Level. “However, on the harsher felony charge, it was very hard to find her guilty on the specific [evidence] given to us.”

One piece of critical evidence the jury was not allowed to consider was that of the third and final email send from the fictitious 16-year-old boy.

Kunasz said jurors were given printouts of three conversations between Megan and “Josh” as evidence of Drew’s three alleged felony violations. But Kunasz said the final message that Megan received wasn’t among the printouts, and the three that jurors did receive weren’t malicious.

“They were ‘oh you’re so hot,’ ‘I love you’ and who-loves-who messages,” she said. “It wasn’t something that to me personally — and I think the rest of the jury felt the same way — was malicious in mind.”

Kunasz said jurors were not allowed to take into account the last message sent to Megan, because the message was not sent through MySpace. Ashley Grills testified that she sent the message through American Online’s instant messaging service.

To find Drew guilty of a felony or misdemeanor, the correspondence had to involve interstate communication, but prosecutors never introduced evidence discussing whether the final AOL message involved interstate communication. The AOL message also would not have been covered by MySpace’s terms of service, which were at the core of the case against Drew, hence the message was not included in the juror’s evidence packet. Testimony did establish, however, that the three messages jurors
saw that were sent through MySpace were interstate communications because they traveled from the Drew computer in Missouri through MySpace’s servers in Los Angeles County.

“The last message was a huge piece of evidence,” Kunasz said, “but we had no way of knowing whether it was interstate or not. I honestly think that if they gave us a little more solid, hatred-type e-mails or MySpace messages it would have been a lot easier [to convict her].”

Eight of the jurors also wanted to convict Drew of the felony conspiracy charge, but the decision was deadlocked because:

“Four jurors felt that because Megan and Sarah Drew had a opened a MySpace account months earlier to meet boys, that Megan was emotionally functional and should have known what she was getting herself into by communicating with “Josh.” She should have been prepared to be rejected by “Josh.”

“This was a very serious subject for every single one of us. We wanted to make sure that we came to the right decision and that there was no question on anything,” said Forewoman Kunasz.”

The misdemeanor convictions were clearly meant to punish Drew in some way for the death of this young girl. The prosecutors simply didn’t present enough evidence to make the felony charges stick.  But Threat Level reported Thursday Drew’s attorney sees the verdict as one that raises the question:

“. . . whether it mean(t) the jurors found Drew guilty of cyberbullying “or was it no finding at all,”

A 45-minute hearing Thursday to determine whether the verdict against Drew should be thrown out ended with no decision by Judge Wu. A sentencing trail has already been set for April 30 and Wu has indicated he will issue a written ruling before then.

It’s evident this is new ground for cyberlaw. Or is it?  Are we letting the “forum” on which these crimes were committed dictate whether a crime was committed at all?  If Drew had put a real 16-year-old boy up to this hoax knowing what they knew about Meier’s state of mental health would it be so easy to dismiss?

And what about that third message that was sent via IM rather than MySpace?  Did prosecutors mess up by filing charges of violating a web site’s user agreement rather than a broader charge?  Is there a broader charge they could have used?

This case is complex, and I plead ignorance in my knowledge of the law, but ought Drew be guilty of something? I encourage you to read the articles cited here and give us your thoughts. Should this conviction have ever been based on violation of a web site user agreement? Under the circumstances, should the charges stick?

As Forewan Kunasz told Threat Level when asked the same question, “When it’s gross circumstances of someone killing themselves…. ”

The first computers took up the space of a three-car garage. It’s amazing to think that all the computing power of those vacuum tube behemoths can now fit on a silicon chip the size of your fingernail, with processing room besides. However, even with all these advances in technology, we find it’s still not enough.

As a multimedia guy, I recognize two governing laws of data:

• The availability of our resources dictates our current needs.
• Our needs always expand beyond the capacity of our resources.

It is because of these two laws that more businesses are drawn to the facilities that cloud computing has to offer.

Before they reach this decision, they usually first follow a process similar to this:

• Build a bigger system.
• Compress the bigger system into a smaller space.
• Connect systems together to share resources.

My Dad is Bigger than Your Dad

Our first inclination is to put more stuff into the existing box. Where previously we would add more vacuum tubes to give our computers the ability to calculate floating point numbers, nowadays we install faster processors (or multiprocessors), larger hard drives, and more powerful graphics cards with higher video display RAM. The more technically inclined may even tweak the hardware to improve the speed of the data path between each of these components as well.

These bigger systems initially appear to provide all the computing power we need. We are able to run virtually any application, and store all of our data, on a single machine. Before long before we begin to realize new problems:

• These devices are finite. Disk space is a concrete measurement, and fairly soon we are horrified to learn we can’t store the digital photos of little Mischa’s tenth birthday party because our hard drives are already maxed out.
• These devices are insecure. Because all the applications and data reside on the same machine, that information is not safe in the event that computer is stolen, or worse, destroyed during a disaster.

Mainframe Computing

What if we were to instead invest in a mainframe computer—a really large computer that can hold our vast quantities of information? Then all our data would be in a centralized location safely protected from the elements. Also, theft of mainframe computers is really not an issue: I doubt very much that even a useful part of one would fit inside a hockey bag.

In a mainframe environment, to use any of our applications, all we’d need to do is connect a dumb terminal to this mainframe. Without any processing ability of its own, the terminal provides all the power of the mainframe at our disposal. Connect several hundred dumb terminals to the same mainframe and we can run an organization called IBM.

Reality Bites

While the processing power of mainframe computers is high, the upfront cost to install a mainframe environment is also high, and prohibitive to the average user. But what if we take our powerful desktop computers and connected them all together? For small- to medium-size enterprises, network computing is a lower-cost alternative to investing in a mainframe.

Most local area networks are set up as one or a combination of two ways:

• Peer-to-Peer: Applications and data are stored on individual computers. Users run applications on their own computers and can allow other users to work with their files from across the wire.
• Network Server: Applications and data are stored on a central computer or group of computers. Users can run applications installed on their local computer or on the network server. While users are encouraged to store their data on the central server, there is usually nothing to prevent a user from storing files locally as well.

In a networked environment, the security of the data is still at risk, because unlike mainframe components, a network server, usually the size of a standard desktop computer, can fit into a hockey bag. Also, even though a network setup can cost less than a mainframe, to properly configure it and continue to secure it requires a full-time IT specialist, which adds additional overhead. And once again, space is finite. An organization could easily outgrow even the highest capacity hard drive on their network server.

Head in the Cloud Computing

Through cloud computing, you can have all the power of several mainframe computers, the interconnectivity of a network system, the security of all your data being backed up on a regular basis, and the expertise of several IT specialists, all with a cost equivalent to buying lunch for your staff once a week. With faster Internet connection speeds becoming the norm, many users are already experiencing the benefits of cloud computing and not even realizing it.

Cloud computing is described on Wikipedia as, “…a style of computing where IT-related capabilities are provided ‘as a service’, allowing users to access technology-enabled services ‘in the cloud’ without knowledge of, expertise with, or control over the technology infrastructure that supports them.”

If a computer network provides the combination of computing power, storage capacity, user availability, and security that we want, cloud computing is a really large network, with all those features on steroids. Applications and data can be stored on any computer on this network, and while these computers may vary in size, several of them have the processing capability of mainframe computer systems.

We haven’t quite returned to the days of dumb terminals, however. Instead, we use the features of a standard web browser to access Rich Internet Applications (RIA) that simulate the smooth look and feel of a desktop application.

Soft Serve, Not the Ice Cream Kind

Cloud computing provides tangible benefits, available to users on request. Providing these features “as a service” means that the resources can be shared between several users without any noticeable decrease in performance.

Software as a Service (SaaS) reduces the need to install and upgrade software on users’ desktops. The user always opens the most up-to-date copy of the software, because it is maintained at all times. Google Apps and Zoho are examples of companies providing common application software. Both systems even provide an offline mode for times when users aren’t connected to the Internet. Their files are uploaded as soon as their computers are reconnected.

Hardware as a Service (HaaS) provides users with additional computing power, whenever they require it. For instance, if a retailer has a short-term need to process a high volume of point-of-sale (POS) transactions on Boxing Day, applications can be set up to share the processing across additional computers as necessary.

Platform as a Service (PaaS) is another growing enterprise. These shared hosting systems provide a development environment for developers to build their own applications using prebuilt modules or custom code.

Accessibility, availability, scalability: The salient features of cloud computing. But when you boil it down to brass tacks, cloud computing is just a new take on an old idea. I didn’t even get to discuss virtualization, which is what gives all these “as a service” features their power. Because of virtualization, while the two governing laws of data still apply, it will take a LONG time for our needs to “expand beyond the capacity of our resources.”

Read, Watch, and Learn

• Wikipedia entry on cloud computing
• Explaining Computers on Cloud Computing
• Various thought leaders discuss What is Cloud Computing?