On 5/14/2012 11:25 PM, Antony Van Couvering wrote:
I thought a criminal was someone convicted of a crime by a court.
criminal (noun): a person who commits a crime crime (noun): activities that involve breaking the law I actually find it pathetic that we are debating this. But here goes... We all (should) know we cannot simply walk into a stranger's house and steal his property. Nor can we go into his bank and pretend to be him, stealing his money. The virtual nature of the net does not change that. What it does change is it's international reach allowing criminals to evade prosecution. Yet the crimes are still as real. If it takes a conviction to label the actions parties criminal or label those committing fraud criminals, we would have hardly any criminals on the net. I find it sad that the laws of most countries have clauses like losses under XXX, losses over XXX. Effectively that means most criminals will never be prosecuted due to the international nature of the internet. This is an insult to the victims of "under XXX" who will never see justice, yet they also have rights. If you explain the happy-go-lucky unaccountable nature of the Internet, they cannot belive it. The current system is failing these victims. We can quote those lovely terms like the "The Budapest Convention on Cyber Crime" etc, yet the reality is it is not stopping cyber crime since even these agreements do not cover all the countries. Even where they do, the one country may attach a different priority to it since they are not affected. Even most of the lottery/pet/fake-shop/auction scammers know how to stay under the radar by regularly changing identities and defrauding in small amounts, using all those anonymizing mechanisms the internet provides free of charge to "protect your privacy". This hypocrisy is even apparent at some domain registrars and resellers, selling trust and stability away $10 a shot then turning a blind eye to the wrong doing. How many real victims to fraud do we have vs the hypothetical political refugee trying to use the net for his plight? Why should those daily real unwilling victims be sacrificial lambs for the hypothetical politically prosecuted? What gives the one more right than the other? I would love to see how many refugees use the domains on the net as a platform vs actual daily victims to fraud. I am sure those hypothetical refugees would not be registering in their own domains anyway even if the wanted to. They would be sure to find a trusted sponsor abroad. So let's keep this real please. Cyber crime is no less real than crime. Those victims also have rights. I have met many victims to cyber crime (three again today alone). But I have yet to meet "that" political refugee wishing to register a domain in his own name using a proxy service to voice his opinions. Derek