13 ms·
How Japanese Police Turned Cyber Prank into Arresting Cases
- hcheemskerk 8y ago>1. Electromagnetic records that do not operate in accordance with other persons' intention, or gives unauthorized commands which act against their intention, when another person uses a computer. This makes most software I use punishable by Japanese law.
- giancarlostoro 8y agoHeh, yeah. There's no way a programmer can account for user intent, that is, each and every single user's intent. I can't say how many times I've clicked something thinking it would do something else only to be disappointed.
- 0_gravitas 8y agoI clicked on the button and my dick did not get 6 inches bigger as advertised; please arrest this man
- giancarlostoro 8y agoI had a good chuckle at that, I have not seen one of those ads in many years, I swear it was 90% of the ads in the early 2000's but maybe I don't go on the same kind of sites anymore. I know Newgrounds had some of the sketchiest ads when you think about the age of most people going on that site.
- b_tterc_p 8y agoWorks just fine for me? What browser are you using?
- paulific 8y agoThat is the point. The Japanese approach to creating legal documents is to make them as ambiguous as possible so that they can be interpreted any way the creator likes. This is somewhat true of overbroad legislation in other jurisdictions as well. The authors of the legislation don't want to create a fair and empirical test, what they want is the discretion to arrest anyone they feel has crossed a subjective line.
- mratsim 8y agoI thought that was the universal approach of legal documents? cough patents cough.
- giancarlostoro 8y agoSadder yet is that modern browsers let you disable these sort of dialogs. I know Firefox does it, I assume Chrome does as well. Wondering what the browser landscape looks like in Japan if it was serious enough to mandate police force?
- kalleboo 8y agoIE is still the second-most common browser with 14% of the market after Chrome with 58%
- kevin_thibedeau 8y agoLooks like IE is nice enough to run it in a separate process.
- DarkWiiPlayer 8y agoFor anyone who wants to try if their browser blocks it: javascript:for(;;){alert("am%20I%20bloc%20yet?");} Just copy that into the URL field of your browser (In a new tab, because it will block whatever site you do this from (duh))
- behringer 8y agoOff to jail.
- Dylan16807 8y agoHuh, I'm surprised it doesn't have the checkbox to block future alerts. (in chrome, also it stripped the javascript: when pasting)
- DarkWiiPlayer 8y agoYes, chrome seems to automatically strip the javascript: I assume that's a security measure.
- scottishcow 8y agoJust to remind you all, this is coming from a country whose cybersecurity minister claims to have "never touched a PC in his life". https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46222026 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46222026
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- justinjlynn 8y agoSounds about right...
- james_s_tayler 8y agoFun fact my waifu confessed she never touched a computer until entering University. She's terrible at using any technology in general as a result. It's mildly fascinating.
- sk0g 8y agoDoes your comment really add to the discussion, aside from weirding some people out?
- f-jin 8y agoAside from using the term "waifu" instead of something like "wife" / "SO" / "girlfriend", the comment itself seems fine to me. I've heard stories of low computer literacy in Japan from other sources as well, it is quite interesting.
- mikekchar 8y agoIt will be interesting to see if this is prosecuted. The percentage of prosecuted cases in Japan is much lower than in many other countries. Unless the reporting has got something wrong (always a possibility!) it doesn't seem to get over the bar for quality as I understand it (which, to be fair, is not very well).
- cranej 8y agoCoinhive case IS harmful and they are not that innocent - if "posting Coinhive on their web sites" means "mining use visitors' browsers".
- dcbadacd 8y agoI'd say ads are harmful as well, don't see people fighting those this much.
- cranej 8y ago“People does not fight harmful ads for now“ does not mean coinhive should be added to web sites without users’ consensus. And It’s more harmful than ads as users know explicitly whether there are ads on web sites and have a choice to not visit them anymore. But silently mining without warning users of that is worse.
- dcbadacd 8y agoBut ads are okay to add without users' consensus? Not really. I wouldn't say mining was explicitly without warning, computer fans usually spun up.
- imtringued 8y agoThe police started acting long after the website owner removed Coinhive from his website.
- DarkWiiPlayer 8y agoThat really depends; if it's communicated to the user that, by having the website open, they are mining cryptocurrency for the website owner as a sort of "payment" for being able to use the site, then that's totally ok. If they weren't informed, then it's still just a minor issue, at least compared to large-scale tracking of users that many other sites do.
- soraminazuki 8y agoYou're confusing morality with legality. The morality regarding coinhive is a controversial topic, but its legality should still be defined under the rule of law. The Japanese police is acting on dubious legal grounds in arresting coinhive users given the lack of legal precedence and the vague wording of the law. Regardless of our opinions on coinhive, it is still worrying to see the police make arrests for seemingly arbitrary reasons.
- ptero 8y agoI think there are two things here: first is that Japan is so safe that police is actively looking for cases to pursue. I remember reading of police putting (as a trap) a case of beer in an open car at a shopping plaza, monitoring it for a week before finally nabbing a retiree who opened a door (whether to "steal" the beer or just to investigate). In and of itself such safely is, IMO, something to celebrate. The second is that the justice system is structured so that the state is always right and the criminal system famously has a conviction rate that exceeds 99%. Couple this with the vaguely defined laws (as cited in the article) and the desire by police to find some criminals, somewhere, and the results can be ugly. Dangerous to the bystanders at best, enabling local dictatorial powers at worst. My 2c.
- toxicFork 8y agoI don't think we can assume that "Japan is so safe that..." from these cases.
- shhehebehdh 8y agoWe don’t have to assume that Japan is safe. We have statistics for that.
- jbm 8y agoUnless you are a woman. I was sadly not surprised when I heard from a friend that she had been groped as a preteen in a department store. Worse yet, none of the rest of us were surprised to hear it. It’s normal and unreported. Likewise, there are some claims I’ve read that the suicide rate is high because of murders treated as suicide by police (who have their own quotas) and age inflation due to relatives who don’t report the death of relatives in order to collect pension funds. TLDR: Statistics are based on reported crime. It’s safe but not as safe as statistics show.
- shhehebehdh 8y agoSadly, those kinds of misreportings are common in other countries and places too. My own home of New York City has been hit by a number of underreporting scandals. I have no reason to believe they are less common elsewhere than Japan. So I still think national crime statistics provide the best basis for comparison.
- mbrumlow 8y agoThluopllkllk
- white-moss 8y agoI'm Japanese studying cyber security at university, and very nervous now. Sigh.
- foamclutching 8y ago"This page seemed to have been around since a few years ago, and it appears that there were quite a number of people who posted each other this URL on some particular internet forums. It is still not clear why only these three were arrested by the Hyogo Prefectural Police under such circumstance. They may not have any specific reasons for that." Maybe the police only wanted to make an example of those three people and discourage the rest of posting the URL.
- DarkWiiPlayer 8y agoThis decision seems to have been deeply irrational and poorly informed in the first place, so I don't see much of a point in looking for logic in their actions.
- Lambdanaut 8y agoI'd like to shed some light on this(and other Japanese tendencies) from a different perspective. Human societies can be seen as humonculus to the humans that make them up in many ways. One such way is that societies tend to reflect the broad strokes of Freudian tendencies that the citizens tend towards. The culture reflects the society. Not hard to understand. In the case of Japan, it is clear after consideration that the society is incredibly super-ego driven. (That correlates to "Parent" driven for you Transactional Analysis folks). So how that translates to the society is that parental, guiding, cohesive, social, aesthetic, moral rules are favored over Id or Egotistical rules. In contrast, The United States is a primarily ego-tistical country(Adult-dominant, in Transactional Analysis terms). That's just as fine as a Superego-leaning society, but it is DIFFERENT. An ego-tistical society will focus on the power of the individual, and will honor rationality and purpose foremost. Group cohesion and like-mindedness will fall to the wayside unless picked up by the superego driven parts of the culture. A problem arises when any one of the three parts (id, ego, superego) of a culture become too imbalanced in a specific direction. In this case, the parental superego is overriding the will of the individual. The society is asking too hard what they "SHOULD" be like rather than "WHY" they should be like it. "Should" is the heuristic function for superego decisions. "Why" for ego decisions. * Notice that when a child starts figuring out that they're an individual with choice they start asking "why?" quite often. Sometimes ad nauseum. Why why why why why. The egotistical little buggers. Uncle Sam would be proud. But that's not a problem for Japan. They have the problem of the child that learned just because they can do something, doesn't mean they should. It's a valuable lesson clearly, but not if you forget why you're doing all of this in the first place. We create society to empower the individual, and we create the individual to empower society. Lean too hard in either direction and the cycle breaks down, eventually disempowering both the individual and society. I'm not claiming that either the USA or Japan are leaning "too hard" in either direction, but they are leaning. Lots of apparent insanity has been cropping up in Japanese news lately. The freudian psychoanalyst might try to deduce the imbalanced parts of the patient's psyche that have given rise to such "insanities". *If you're interested in finding an adjective for a primarily id-driven society like Brazil, you may consider how you would "LIKE" to be.
- Tsubasachan 8y agoYeah I live in a country were we try to balance individual freedom with a social Borg collective. Because neither Japan OR the US are very appealing. Its bloody hard. Trying to put a square inside a triangle like those children puzzles.
- Tsubasachan 8y agoAt least nobody died. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Wichita_swatting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Wichita_swatting
- jsjw7sbw 8y agoRelated: https://github.com/hamukazu/lets-get-arrested https://github.com/hamukazu/lets-get-arrested
- codedokode 8y ago> 1. Electromagnetic records that do not operate in accordance with other persons' intention, or gives unauthorized commands which act against their intention, when another person uses a computer. They should arrest every second mobile app developer. They collect data from the phone without permission. And then please arrest Google Analytics developers as well.
- skybrian 8y agoHas anyone ever been harmed by Google Analytics? I am skeptical.
- sli 8y agoAre you implying that a Javascript redirect loop -- something fixed by simply closing your browser -- is actually harming people in some way? Minor annoyance is not harm.
- nwallin 8y agoThat's precisely the point. The law doesn't make code which causes harm illegal, it makes code which does not operate in accordance with the user's intention illegal. Think about that for a second. Think about every program ever written which did not operate in accordance with the user's intention. Literally every bug is punishable by three years in prison. This is a classic example of legislators saying "We don't understand the problem, so lets just make everything illegal and rely on the police and prosecutors using their discretion to only put the real criminals in prison," followed by the police and prosecutors not using their discretion and putting a non-criminal in prison.
- skybrian 8y agoThank you, I missed the sarcasm. I thought the comment was quoting and agreeing with the law.
- cdf2theworld 8y agoExceptional explanation!
- innocentoldguy 8y agoI don't have a lot of respect for Japanese police. It seems they while away their time inventing entrapment scenarios, arresting people for pranks, apparently, and measuring car accidents for hours on end, but don't do a damn thing when something serious is going on. For example, there have been several cases in the news over the years where women go to the police to complain that they are being stalked, only to have the police do nothing. Far too often, the woman ends up raped, assaulted, or dead. The most famous case of the police being a bunch of bumbling idiots (or at least the one that haunts my mind the most) is that of Junko Furuta (which happened right after I first went to Japan in 1989). She was kidnapped, raped by over 100 men, held captive in the house of her abductor, and tortured to death over a period of 44 days. Around the two-week mark of her ordeal, someone told the police they thought a girl was being held against her will in the house. When the police showed up, the perpetrator told them, there's nobody in our house, and the police said that was good enough for them and left. Fuckers! Those two officers were fired, but that isn't an isolated case. Police not doing anything and people being injured or losing their lives seems to happen far more than it should in Japan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Junko_Furuta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Junko_Furuta The 30th anniversary of Junk Furuta's death is next week, on April 2nd. ALL of her perpetrators are roaming free in Japan.
- AnaniasAnanas 8y ago> raped by over 100 men I think you mean less than. The wikipedia article that you listed said that "approximately 100 people knew about Junko Furuta's captivity" and that only some of them participated in the rape. Still, that's quite horrifying.
- innocentoldguy 8y agoI'll have to check. I've read a lot about this case and I know there is some conflicting information on the Internet about it. I remember reading on a Japanese site that it was around 100 men who raped her. If I can find an English citation, I'll add it. Either way, what that girl suffered was horrific and it didn't need to be that way, had the police done their job.
- deleted 8y ago
- johnwyles 8y agoFinally someone is going to jail for Javascript
- shkkmo 8y agoSo every newspaper with ads that track you can be prosecuted in Japan?