greenfreak
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Member since 9/06 11483 total posts
Name:
greenfreak
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Suffolk County myspace predator caught by code from Wired News
Kevin Poulsen is a previous hacker-turned-good, he's a staff writer for Wired News:
Six months ago, Wired News launched an investigation of MySpace with the goal of comparing the company's 120 million user profiles against public sex offender registries to see how many matches we could find.
The project began when Wired News contributor Jenn Shreve found a handful of matches based on a random search. How many would you find with a software script that systematically went through those records and compared them all?
We decided to find out. I wrote a series of Perl scripts and began sifting the data.
The technique was crude, like searching for a needle in a haystack. When I began checking ostensible matches by hand, false positives registered in the thousands.
Nevertheless, after several weeks of part-time work on the project, I was led to one suspect whose behavior was so disturbing I contacted New York's Suffolk County Police Department for comment. The suspect, Andrew Lubrano, was arrested earlier this month on attempted child endangerment charges.
Some 700 other matches were also confirmed, though none of those individuals could be linked by public MySpace posts to actual evidence of wrongdoing.
Today, Wired News is releasing the code used in this investigation (click here to download the gzip file). Anyone is free to take the software, look at it, validate (or invalidate) the methodology, discuss, tinker and improve the code.
This is a link to the whole article:
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,71976-0.html?tw=rss.index
And this is a link to a detailed article on Andrew Lubrano:
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,71948-0.html
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Tah-wee-ZAH
Kisses
Member since 5/05 15952 total posts
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Re: Suffolk County myspace predator caught by code from Wired News
I've been flamed for saying it in the past but as a teacher and future momma I have seen nothing good come from myspace. It's filled with perverts and cheaters.
Well, unless you count all of the spouses that CATCH their SO's cheating via the internet.
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