A personal apology to Julie Amero
There was great news today on the insanity that is the Julie Amero conviction:
A judge has granted a new trial to Julie Amero, a former substitute teacher in Norwich, Connecticut who was convicted in January on four felony counts of risking injury to minors after she was unable to prevent pornographic pop-ups from showing up on a computer in a classroom in 2004.
The city’s prosecutors did not oppose the motion for a new trial, raising the possibility that Amero will not be tried again.
It’s about time. Her original conviction was one of the most insane things I had ever heard about. However, further down in the article, the computer forensics firm that analyzed the computer in question came up with something that really makes me cringe:
Sites analyzed a copy of the hard drive provided to him by Amero’s first expert witness, and found that computer was infected.
“There was definitely adware called new.net,” Sites said. “It was downloaded by a screensaver installed for Halloween by the teacher Amero was subbing for.”
Argh! If this is the same New.net that schleps domains in bogus TLD’s, then I worked for them back in the day. It’s the only job I ever walked off of, (I honestly hated every hour that I put towards their efforts) but still: I feel bad for having any part in them existing if their software in fact played a part in causing this to happen. So if this is the case: I’m sorry for not letting new.net die on my watch.
(Note: I have no idea if that particular New.net actually deals in Spyware. I sure hope that they don’t.)