spoonfork

A Canadian who masturbated at a window in his house has won his appeal against a conviction for indecency after Canada's top court ruled there was no evidence of intent to commit an indecent act, and a home was not a public place.

The Supreme Court of Canada noted that British Columbian, Daryl Clark, had agreed it was an indecent act to have masturbated "in an illuminated room near an uncovered window visible to neighbours."

But Justice Morris Fish, writing the 9-0 decision, said such acts have to be done in public places to be a crime -- and a home was not a public place. The law also says indecent acts are only crimes in every location if the person intends to give offence.

Clark was convicted of an indecent act in a public place and given a four-month sentence after a prosecution that followed complaints from his neighbour, named in court documents only as Mrs. S.

The woman said she spotted Clark while she was watching television with her two young daughters in their family room.

She alerted her husband, and the couple observed Clark from their darkened bedroom for 10 or 15 minutes -- also using binoculars and a telescope -- before summoning the police, who said the upper part of Clark's body was visible from just below the navel.

"In my respectful view, the trial judge ... erred in concluding that the appellant's living room had been converted by him into a public place simply because he could be seen through his living room window and, though he did not know this, was being watched by Mr. and Mrs. S. from the privacy of their own bedroom 90 to 150 feet away," Fish wrote.

The supreme court ordered that Clark be acquitted.

Listening to: Foo Fighters - My Poor Brain

After failing to fill up my blog's comment - I've used captcha to achieve this, the spammers are back again, this time they're attacking my referrer logs. Of the top 20 referrers, 5 are in the top 10, while the remaining 15 occupy the remaining spots. OK, no worries, time for a more aggressive offense. Apache's mod_rewrite will do the trick. The following mod_rewrite will block referer spams (I'm still building the list).

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://*.techrep-inc.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://*.learnhowtoplay.*$ [NC,OR]

The NC is for case insensitive match, and OR is for, well, or matches. Also, I create a list of spam words, and if the referer matches any of the words, they will be denied access:

SetEnvIfNoCase Referer 
".*(holdem|poker|mortage|xanax|best-buy).*" 
BadReferer
Order deny,allow
deny from env=BadReferer

This is a better way since you are matching based on keywords rather than URL.

There, if you are using Apache (I hope you are), you can put the codes above in a .htaccess file in your web root. You can add as many spam sites to the rewrite rule as you wish - most of the list are available on the net.

Listening to: Iggy Pop - Lust for Life

Opensolaris is now open for business, and to show their seriousness, the source code for dtrace is available for download. Brian Cantrill blogged about it here.

Gentoo, on the other hand, hopes that it will become an important factor for Opensolaris' success.

We're able to build on prior experience with Gentoo ports to non-Linux operating systems, we've had the technology preview of Gentoo for Mac OS X, we've got developers working full-time on Opendarwin support, and we're well out of the starting blocks for the race to Gentoo-ified BSD kernels and userland applications," he says. "But even I wasn't quite prepared for my Sparc booting with a Gentoo bootsplash," laughs Pieter.

The unofficial Portaris or "Portage for Solaris" project has been maintaining Gentoo's package management system on top of Solaris 9 and 10 systems. Its two biggest contributors, Sunil Kumar and Jason Wohlgemuth (who, like Pieter, is a member of Sun's pilot program for open-sourcing Solaris), have invested a tremendous amount of their time in this project, culminating in a veritable installer for Solaris that has been available to a small, knowledgeable Solaris user community for several months already.

I'm pretty sure Gentoo developers will be able to contribute to Opensolaris' success based on their experience. After all, they've already have some of the tools developed. Now it is a matter of getting things worked out with the Opensolaris developers. One of Gentoo developers made a point about Opensolaris here.

There appears to be four different possibilities as to how things will be opened.

1. Code written by Sun is made open source.
2. Sun contacts outside vendors from whom they've licensed code, to ask them for permission to release their code. (Unlikely, IMO)
3. Sun removes copyrighted code and rewrites it and releases it as Open Source.
4. Sun removes copyrighted code and allows the community to write an Open Source replacement for it.

Mom Allegedly Kills 12-Year-Old Daughter For Having Sex. A woman angry with her 12-year-old daughter for having sex forced the girl to drink bleach and sat on her until the child died, a police detective said.

The girl's 9-year-old brother was forced to watch the attack, Detective Warren Cotton testified Thursday in a preliminary hearing for Tunisia Archie, 31.

Archie is charged with capital murder in the asphyxiation death of her daughter Jasmine. If convicted, she could be sentenced to death or life in prison without parole.

Cotton said Archie, who has been jailed without bond since shortly after her daughter's Nov. 26 death, told authorities she was disturbed because "her daughter told her that she was no longer a virgin."

She said she poured bleach into Jasmine's mouth and the child vomited, he said, then sat on her until she stopped breathing, Cotton testified.

Archie forced Jasmine's 9-year-old brother Jacorey to watch the attack and "told him that if he shed a tear that she was going to kill him, too," Cotton testified.

Police Charge Woman With Giving 4-Year-Old Son Crack Cocaine. A mother has been arrested on charges that she gave crack to her 4-year-old son to "calm him down."

Michelle R. Shelton, 32, of Kansas City, was arrested Thursday on a child endangerment charge.

Police said the boy did not suffer any obvious injuries from taking the highly addictive drug. He remains in state custody.

Police first began investigating Shelton a year ago when officers said they saw her escorting drug users into the apartment complex where she and her son lived. Police said some residents at the complex told investigators Shelton sometimes gave the boy crack cocaine to "calm him down."

Social workers were sent to the apartment where they took hair samples from Shelton and her son to test for illegal drugs. The tests came back positive, police said.

According to court records, Shelton told detectives she found empty crack bags and drug paraphernalia throughout her home after parties her son attended. She said it was possible the child found some of the drug.

Woman threw sex parties for teenagers. A 40-year-old woman held sex and drug parties with teenage boys, telling police she wanted to be a "cool mom," authorities say.

Sylvia Johnson allegedly provided marijuana, methamphetamine and alcohol to eight boys at parties held at her suburban Denver home in 2003 and 2004. According to court papers, she admitted having sex with five of the boys.

One of the boys told his mother, and Johnson was arrested in December and charged with offenses including sexual assault and contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

According to court papers, Johnson told investigators she was not popular in high school and had finally started "feeling like one of the group."

"She described herself as a 'cool mom,'" police said.

Authorities did not say how many children she has or whether any of them were at the parties.

A message left at the number listed for Johnson was not immediately returned.

It's not yet official, but you can see for it yourself at video.google.com or www.google.com/video. And oh, Ben Goodger, Firefox's lead engineer, has started work at Google.