disLEXia

Tuesday, 24. September 2002

How the greek came to ban gaming

Mrs. Irini Vasselaki, who is by the way the chair of the criminal law special interest group in the german society for justice and informatics ond of greek origin, explained on the anti-censorship conference last week how the greek government decided to ban gaming.

There was a recent problem with small private casinos in greece. A lot of people were getting addicted and lost all their money. Society decided in the newspapers, talkshows etc. that this was a major problem and the politicians had to do something about it. So they rushed to make a law against the casinos.

I guess in greek there is -as in german- only one word for gambling and playing. So they messed up the law, prohibiting all establishments offering gambling or playing. And now some law enforcement doesn't get the difference eigther.

This shows again that lawmaking shold be don slowly, carefully and that you should have some technologists at hand to find such issues.
01:00 | permanent link | mail this

Court: password no proof of identity

There is an interesting ruling by a court just around the corner from my place: The parties where disputing the existence of a contract settled by an Internet auction. The court ruled:

The fact that the biding was done by somebody knowing the password of the account is no sufficient proof that the biding was done by the account owner since the security-standard of passwords is not known.

Watch your Hat

news.com has a pice on black, gray and white hat hackers which I consider naive.

Edward Felton doesn't like how he is categorized by the article, coining a poaragraph I will keep under my pillow for some days:

As a researcher, my job is not to make vendors happy. My job is to discover the truth and report it. If the truth makes a vendor look good, that's great. If the truth makes a vendor look bad, so be it.

Developers + Domo-Kun = Domopers

I just found one of the strange videos they where showing all the time at devcon X capture the flag.
17:17 | permanent link | mail this

disLEXia, a research project by Maximillian Dornseif