Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

Hans Reiser was recently convicted for first degree murder for killing his wife in 2006. The six month trial and three days of Jury deliberation reached the guilty verdict primarily based on circumstantial evidence and poor testimony from Hans Reiser:

In a murder case with no body, no crime scene, no reliable eyewitness and virtually no physical evidence, the prosecution began the trial last November with a daunting task ahead. By the time prosecutor Paul Hora rested his case February 14, he had called some 60 witnesses, but presented mostly circumstantial evidence demonstrating animus between Reiser and his wife, and suspicious behavior by the defendant following Nina’s disappearance in September, 2006.

The turning point in the trial came when Reiser took the stand in his own defense March 3.

In his 11 days of testimony, Reiser offered lengthy and verbose explanations for every piece of circumstantial evidence. But Reiser’s version of events often drew disbelieving head shakes from jurors — and occasional smirks from the trial judge.

Namesys, who develops the ReiserFS and Reiser4 linux filesystems, is essentially dead after the verdict. The Namesys website is down due to a DNS problem, and a potential private sale of the company found no buyers. Worse, ReiserFS sucks, according to Kerneltrap:

Reiserfs might be suitable for very specific applications, but to use it in production machine, you need to have some guts.

My last reiserfs partition was blown up two days ago, because of a bad sector, plus a fatal oops, looping endlessly. This was the second time, and the last one, as none of my ext3 filesystems *ever* had similar problems, despite numerous other bad sector issues. Not mentioning the funny “recovery” tool, which generally finishes to trash your data.

And in a bit of off-the-mark dark humour, an anonymous Wikipedia editor added a new column to Comparison of file systems:

There are some irregularities surrounding the Hans Reiser trial, namely that “Sean Sturgeon, a one-time friend of Reiser, and alleged ex-lover of Nina, confessed to killing eight other people and leaving a ninth for dead. However, he claims he did not kill Nina. According to preliminary court testimony, Sturgeon dated Nina, but she broke off the relationship in January 2006.”

Update: Wired is reporting that Hans Reiser is offering the location of Nina’s body in exchange for a reduced sentence. Interestingly, he refused a deal of an “11-year term in exchange to pleading guilty to manslaughter” before the trial started.

The two who posted a Craiglist ad saying that anyone could take what they wanted from a home in Oregon have been tracked down and arrested by following their IP address. The stunt was a diversion to steal two horses.

It’s nice to see that internet crime doesn’t pay. Unfortunately, it’s also troubling to read this article and realize that had this couple simply used an anonymizing service, a proxy chain, an internet cafe, or a TOR node, there would have been no way to catch them from what they posted on Craigslist.

According to Om Malik, Facebook needs $300 to $500 million in order to make its site safe for children to use:

The New York attorney general has started investigating the safety measures Facebook has put in place, and based on his preliminary investigations, he is not happy. His staff has found sexual predators and a wide variety of pornographic material, including images and videos, prompting him to issue a subpoena.

Unfortunately, I think the premise is ridiculous. Facebook provides a large number of privacy controls that would allow children to:

• Prevent people finding them in searches
• Prevent strangers from viewing their profile
• Prevent their profile from showing up in Google and other engines

I see Facebook as a piece of infrastructure, like a telephone address book and cellphone, that you find and communicate with people. Generally that lets friends talk to each other, or lonely people find other lonely people nearby; sometimes it lets perverted old men call up kids. The problem isn’t technological; it’s social, and perhaps medical.

Facebook and MySpace are just the tubes; what goes through them isn’t, and shouldn’t be, their concern.