Pop-Up Predicament

I've been trying to teach my six-year-old daughter about computers lately, and let me tell you, it's a minefield out there. I pull up my supposedly spam-filtered email, and I have to delete two or three spam messages that advertise lurid photos. I show her Google, but I click the wrong button -- and I end up on a page that's about as far from Disney as you can get without being arrested.

It happens to all parents, I guess. And it's also what happened to Julie Amero, a substitute teacher in Norwich, Conn., who inadvertently showed her seventh-grade class a whole series of pornographic pop-up pages back in 2004. And earlier today, Amero finally got a new trial -- and a measure of justice.

Amero was convicted earlier this year of exposing her students to pornography, drawing a sentence of up to 40 years in jail -- and the sympathy of anyone who has ever seen spyware in action. While the prosecution contended that Amero's "display" could not have been a mistake -- she showed page after page of lurid content -- computer forensics experts leaped to show the courts how such a display could be caused by a single error.

Thanks to those sympathetic forensics experts, earlier today, a Connecticut judge set aside the Amero verdict and granted her a new trial. Prosecutors conceded that their own "computer experts" gave erroneous testimony at the first trial, and the state took no position on pursuing a new trial, which means that there probably won't be one.

So justice was done, and kudos go out to those that helped Amero make her case, especially after the verdict was handed down.

But I can't help thinking that none of this has done much to prevent this sort of thing from happening again the next time I go online with my daughter. Every time the makers of spam filters and pop-up blockers think they have their problems under control, someone invents a new way to circumvent them.

So today, I'm happy for Julie Amero, who finally got to go free. But I'm wondering when the technologies that caused her plight might be fixed -- or outlawed -- so that it doesn't happen quite so often.

— Tim Wilson, Site Editor, Dark Reading