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more on how popups can brand you a pervert or a crook
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Thu, 14 Dec 2006 06:57:29 +0900
Begin forwarded message: From: Jonathan Zittrain <zittrain () law harvard edu> Date: December 13, 2006 10:28:49 PM JST To: dave () farber net Subject: more on how popups can brand you a pervert or a crook Dave and IP,I'm troubled by Lauren's advice even though I understand its logic. Prefetch is a useful function; it'd be a shame for people to think they should avoid it (or more important, that software architects should stop building tools that use it) lest legal authorities mistakenly think that surfers are voluntarily visiting every pre- fetched site. The more this is a standard behavior, the less sensible that assumption is. Consider news articles mistakenly advising people how "dangerous" it is to run an open (or Fon-enabled) wi-fi access point -- when in fact I think running open wi-fi legitimately would give rise to doubt that any site visited by the owner's IP address could be tied to that owner without further evidence. Mileage might vary in places where the rule of law is weaker, and people want to appear as innucuous as possible, but in free societies we should not avoid crafting good tools for fear of mistakenly being branded a crook. ...JZ
At EST 04:14 PM 12/12/2006, Lauren Weinstein wrote:
I'd like to point out a potentially much more serious problem related to pop-ups that can access arbitrary Web sites -- they could be used for purposes that could get innocent Web users into major legal problems.
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- more on how popups can brand you a pervert or a crook David Farber (Dec 13)