House Approves Penalties for False Web Records

cnn.com ^ | 09/21/2004 | REUTERS

[Liz]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday approved a bill that would increase jail time for identity thieves and other fraudulent Web users who register sites under false identities.

The bill, which passed by voice vote, would not directly outlaw the use of fraudulent registration information.

Rather, it would increase by up to seven years the prison terms of those convicted of felonies.

It must be approved by the Senate before it becomes law.

Online investigators frequently find that suspects have filled out Web-site registration records with clearly fraudulent information -- providing "555-555-5555" as a phone number or "Small Wok Way, Chopstick Town, WI" as a street address.

As many as 10 percent of the Internet's 30 million domain names may be registered under false identities, according to a study released last year.

"The government must play a greater role in detecting those who conceal their identities online," said Texas Republican Rep. Lamar Smith, a sponsor of the bill.

© Copyright Reuters Ltd. All rights reserved. The information contained In this news report may not be published, broadcast or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of Reuters Ltd.

[Liz]

The bill also establishes fines and jail time for those who use legitimate-looking labels to trick consumers into buying illegally copied music, software and other copyrighted materials.

Dumbocrats are gonna go after bloggers after the TANG forgeries episode.

[Jim_Curtis]

They are creating false trust which only leads to more fraud. They won't be jailing Chinese scammers, they are only enabling these foreign scammers.

[KingKongCobra]

Let's read carefully before we freak out. This is aimed at people who register a site, not at people who register to a site.

[Brilliant]

What they need to do is ban people from loading spyware onto your computer without your permission.

[af_vet_rr]

Let's read carefully before we freak out. This is aimed at people who register a site, not at people who register to a site.

If you think they'll stop at domain registrations, you've been smoking some of that stuff that the libertarians want to legalize. Sure, they might not now, but five years from now they'll decide that people who conceal their identities online are either perverts or terrorists.

Howard Dean and others wanted us to all have to ID ourselves online, so that anything we did could be tracked. Now, he maybe a crackpot, but there are many others like Joe Lieberman who hold positions of influence or power who would push something like this through.

[stainlessbanner]

great idea....no Brilliant idea

[Lexinom]

This is partly your resposibility as a computer user, just as you would lock up your car when you leave it.

Having said that, Micro$oft and modern CS theory deserve a lion's share of the blame for bloat: Why do today's PC's, which are 8,000+ times more powerful than home computers of the 1980's, actually take longer to boot? My ancient Apple IIe, sporting a 1Mhz 8-bit 65C02 CPU, kicks the snot out of my 1.8Ghz Althlon when it comes to simple, practical tasks like booting to a usable state, or even loading a Word Processor. All the bells, whistles and (as you mentioned) spyware are killing PCs, and we expect far too little from them considering the (useful) processing potential.

Go into the Registry, search for "RunOnce", and then navigate to the key right above it ("Run"), and you'll get some idea of what gets loaded when you start up. Anything over 5 or 6 items is deadwood, eating cycles and bandwidth, and compromising your privacy.

[mabelkitty]

Buh-bye Texas 527s.

[Lexinom]

While I don't like government interference in most areas of life (where no harm is caused by its nonpresence), there is a strong case for vigorous enforcement of consumer rights and privacy. Clear misrepresentation of required information is an indicator of dishonest parties. If they end up in jail for 8, 10 or 15 years to register something like (for example) webforkids.com as a porno site, I have no sympathy for these scoundrels. Honest people have nothing to fear.

Here's a spam e-mail I got today. I have no desire to recieve such things, but whenever you go to a "Remove Me" site, your e-mail just gets dissemniated to 10 other spammers.

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[Jack Black]

The (first) American Revolution was fought by men inspired in large part by annonymous 'pamphleteers'. The internet is the new town square. King George no doubt wanted badly to know who the men were writing under pseudonyms.

I don't have a problem with people having anonymous web sites. Many blogs are effectively annonymous. Why should this be illegal?

[Brilliant]

I do all that. I spend hours trying to get this junk off my computer that I did not put on there. I have several software programs that are supposed to prevent it from getting on, and others that are supposed to take it off. Still, the stuff gets on, and causes my computer to freeze up in some awkward circumstance. I will take some of these programs off my computer, and then 20 minutes later, they are on it again. They ought to at least pass a law requiring that companies not load these products onto any computer more than once. If I take it off, then they should not be putting it back on.

The guys in Washington are too busy dealing with stuff that doesn't matter, or is not their job, to deal with the important stuff.

[Lexinom]

Look at your hosts file (2 of them:

C:\WINDOWS\I386\HOSTS
C:\WINDOWS\DRIVERS\ETC\HOSTS

Some of these parasites are clever and will contact the server from which they originated if they are removed (a separate, companion startup program sometimes checks for them and does this).

I got just such a parasite a few weeks ago when a DSL outage forced me to connect directly to the Internet without a router. Sure enough, the DSL came back up while I was at work and someone stuck spyware on my machine. The Ethernet light on the modem was going crazy when I got home - while the computer was sitting there (ostensibly) idle. A number of legitimate-looking programs, with names like "Class", were part of the cluster of executables comprising this particular annoyance. All had to be removed - deleted from the Registry and physically renamed and then deleted on the hard drive, with several intervening reboots. It can be done, however.

In most modern networks, your HOSTS files should be empty. Forgive me if any of this seems overly pedantic as I've no idea of your level of technical experties.

[lowbridge]

Online investigators frequently find that suspects have filled out Web-site registration records with clearly fraudulent information -- providing "555-555-5555"

There goes the Lovenstein Institute

555-1212

[Brilliant]

Unfortunately, I'm not expert enough to do all that myself. I just run 3 spyware removers & hope that does the trick. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. I had to pay a repairman $60 to fix it once. The spyware was so thick I couldn't even get my spyware removers to update themselves. I think these spyware programs must have ways to sabotage the removers.

They need to do something to shut these guys down, or at least make it more difficult for them.

[OXENinFLA]

Got a bill #???

[OXENinFLA]

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-5376656.html

[OXENinFLA]

33 . INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY PROTECTION AND COURTS AMENDMENTS ACT OF 2004 -- (House of Representatives - September 21, 2004)

[OXENinFLA]

Intellectual Property Protection and Courts Amendments Act of 2004 (Engrossed as Agreed to or Passed by House)

108th CONGRESS

2d Session

H. R. 3632

AN ACT

To prevent and punish counterfeiting of copyrighted copies and phonorecords, and for other purposes.

HR 3632 EH

108th CONGRESS

2d Session

H. R. 3632

[Liz]

Contact your Congressman.

[Eagle9]

You can greatly reduce the amount of spyware that you unknowingly pick up as you surf the web by using a browser that's more secure (not totally secure) than Internet Explorer and using a software firewall.

You still need to run the anti-spyware programs on a regular basis, but you'll see a great reduction in the spyware that you must delete.

A highly rated browser is Firefox. Easy to download and install, and it will automatically import all of your Favorites or Bookmarks from IE. http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/

ZoneAlarm is a highly rated firewall. http://www.zonelabs.com/store/content/catalog/products/sku_list_za.jsp

The browser and firewall are both free.