Lawyer uses Facebook to get keys to house.

In another example of convergence on social networking sites, an Australian couple are to receive, via Facebook, a legally binding notice that they are to hand over the keys to their home to their mortgage lender because they defaulted on their loan payments.

PWNED! via Facebook

Apparently such notices have been served via text message and email, but this is the first time it’s been tried via Facebook.  The lawyer for the mortgage lender claims he had tried other avenues to contact the couple and resorted to using details provided on the loan application form to hunt them down on Facebook.  He was able to find them because they had not used the security options to keep their pages private.

Kudos to the judge who has ruled that Facebook can be used to serve the notice as he also imposed the restriction that the lawyer must use the private mail system in Facebook rather than posting a comment on the womans’s Facebook wall.  Clearly this judge is a rare find as someone in the judiciary who at least has an inkling of how social networking (or any web 2.0 system) works.

I might be wrong here, but I had a quick look at the settings on Facebook and couldn’t see a way to set up spam filters on the internal message system.  Given the tactics of some of the latest malware to send spam amongst friend networks on the bigger social sites, I don’t think it will be long before we see such filtering options become available.  On my Hotmail account I have a number of filters set up to block spam containing words such as ‘viagra’, ‘sex’, ‘enlargement’, ‘porn’ and ‘mortgage’.

If I had such filters set up on Facebook, would a message such as the lawyer above was trying to send, containing the word ‘mortgage’ be blocked? And could I therefore honestly deny receiving the notice?

This of course may already have happened in other cases where notices have been served via regular email.

Of course I will never read one of these in my email inbox anyway, because I’m always being told email messages purporting to be from my bank are scams.

Pop-ups, Porn and One Poor Teacher

The only warning you get at Norwich Public Schools

The case of Julie Amero, the substitute teacher who was convicted of felony counts for endangering minors last year has been well publicised.  If you hadn’t heard about it by now in a nutshell she was found guilty of exposing her students to pornography because a computer in the classroom she was substituting in was infected by malware which caused the offending pop-ups to appear.

It’s a scary story for anyone working with children and technology.  What gives me hope though is that this was the ‘perfect storm’ of incompetence and could surely not be repeated.

There are so many questions which I hope will be answered when the truth finally comes out which it has a tendency to do.  When it does, there will be a lot of egg on a lot of faces.

How did the malware get onto the computer? Why were there children left unsupervised with access to the internet? Was there any filtering in place? Did the school have any policies or procedures in place covering this type of issue and were staff informed about them if it did? Why were other staff so unhelpful? Why did no-one else know what to do? Was there a reporting mechanism? Why wasn’t a forensic investigation carried out sooner and why did it take a volunteer with such skills to intervene before one was? How could law enforcement have been so incompetent in their collection of evidence and the courts have been so incompetent in their running of the case which sounds like it should have been thrown out straight away?

This case would have gone nowhere if the school district had been more proactive in putting in place some sound strategies.  There is no excuse for a computer in school not having the most basic electronic security in place which includes anti-malware, a firewall and system updates.  Content filtering, while proven to be next to useless at stopping determined users may well have stopped random pop-ups from inappropriate sites appearing.

Likewise, there is no excuse for the school not having a set of policies and use agreements covering access to the school ICT.  Robust templates are freely available from numerous websites. The best ones are educative and push for the signatories to be made aware and reminded often of their obligations. They also place some responsibility on the school to ensure staff are suitably skilled to deal with such situations, and have clear procedures in place which include a requirement to document such incidents including the responses made.

None of these measures by themselves would necessarily have stopped the incident occurring in the first place. But had the school district had at least some sort of plan in place for dealing with issues of online safety then the focus may well have been on looking for where the plan had holes rather than the typical knee-jerk reaction so common in these cases which is to find a scapegoat for management’s incompetence.

Shame on that school district, shame on everyone involved in the prosecution, and shame on the Judge for allowing Julie Amero to be shafted into losing her teaching license.

The Dangers of Phorn (phone porn)

"Would you like phorn with that?"

The Shermans of Arkansas are suing McDonalds for emotional distress, embarrassment and damage to their reputations after they allege employees posted nude pictures of Mrs Sherman on the internet.

Tina Sherman says she began receiving offensive calls and text messages about the pictures from her husband’s mobile phone after he left it at the McDonald’s on 5 July.

Phillip Sherman says that when he realised he’d left his phone at the restaurant he called and arranged for staff to secure the phone until he could collect it.

The case raises interesting questions around our perception of electronic files. Would Mr Sherman have been so blasé about leaving an envelope lying around stuffed with titillating pictures of his wife? Would the McDonald’s staff having found such an envelope rushed to the scanner, downloaded them to the office PC and uploaded them to whatever sleazy website the pictures eventually ended up on?

The convergence of technology allows us to photograph, video, record, store, view and display all manner of media and documents. We can carry all of this around in our pockets (or purses). Not only that but we can make multiple copies to distribute among our devices and our friends.

The thing is, even though they are in digital form the files are just as important as if they were printed and stored in a folio. Ask all those who have lost confidential information on a stolen laptop.  Likewise with music, film and written publications those files have value to the copyright holders and just because we can copy them till our heart is content, doesn’t mean we should.

There is one thing that the Shermans don’t seem to be suing McDonalds for and that is breach of copyright. They should.