more on how popups can brand you a pervert or a crook

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

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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