Surely the BBC broke the law?

Tomorrow the BBC technology program 'Click' will demonstrate how botnets are used to send spam and attack web sites. Botnets are networks of compromised PCs running malware that can be controlled to undertake distributed computing tasks usual for nefarious activities.

What has caused concern is the fact the BBC bought its own botnet to do the job. The murky backwaters of the internet is full of sites and chat rooms where hackers and criminals are happy to sell their wares - apparently.

The BBC took control of almost 22,000 computers to create up Click's network of hijacked machines, which has now been disabled. Which they used to launch a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack and to generate spam.

However as a number of experts have pointed out, they have broken the law in doing so. From The Telegraph

Security expert Graham Cluley from Sophos, a UK-based antivirus company, pointed out on his blog that: "The Computer Misuse Act makes it an offence in the United Kingdom to access another person's computer, or alter data on their computer, without the owner's permission." He says:

Sure, a TV report like this can raise awareness of the serious problem of computers being controlled by hackers. But is it appropriate for a broadcaster to use innocent people's computers without their permission for the purposes of their experiment?

Struan Roberrtson, a technology lawyer with Pinsent Masons confirmed that the BBC "appears to have broken the Computer Misuse Act," adding: "It does not matter that the emails were sent to the BBC's own accounts and criminal intent is not necessary to establish an offence of unauthorised access to a computer."

The maximum penalty for the offence is two years' imprisonment, but Roberrtson does not expect a prosecution "because the BBC's actions probably caused no harm. On the contrary, it probably did prompt many people to improve their security," he said.

The BBC responded that there was

"a powerful public interest in demonstrating the ease with which such malware can be obtained and used," and that it would enccourage people to defend their PCs from such attacks. Also: "The BBC has strict editorial guidelines for this type of investigation, which were followed to the letter."

That makes it ok then!

BBC News - They broke my favourite website

"Change for change sake", "If it ain't broke, then don't fix it" are all comments I've read about the new look BBC News website. The site adopted a new look at the start of the month and at first sight I hated it, and so did many others judging by the comments on the BBC Editors Blog. The old site design, which won awards and almost universal praise was a clean compact design and reminded me of reading a newspaper column. The new design was all spaced out had now had more white space than text and I found it difficult and almost unreadable.

To their credit and responding to comments the BBC have made minor tweaks to improve the look and feel. However one gripe I still have is many pages seem to render incorrectly in Firefox.

This is an example of a 'broken' page - it looks fine in Microsoft Internet Explorer



However in Firefox, odd things happen to the font sizes and alignment of text and pictures



While it may be something unique to my machine and/or is probably a simple fix I have seen it quite often on numerous pages.

One of the strengths of the old design was it seemed no matter what platform or browser you used (with the possible exception of lynx) it's compact size and simple design meant it always looked the same.