Innovation is a lot like love, everyone knows when it happens, but nobody really knows what it is - Dean 'Mr Segway' Kamen
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Wired editor's code nabs MySpace predator
Senior editor Kevin Poulsen wrote the script for New York's Suffolk County Police Department. It searches through MySpace's profiles for registered sex offenders.
MySpace has always said that such code was impossible and wants laws that would make it easier to ban sex offenders from the site through an e-mail registry.
But Poulsen's code found 39-year-old Andrew Lubrano, who had a string of convictions for sexual abuse against kids, and was starting to build a friends list of teen boys.
Poulsen thinks that his software has found 744 sex offenders with MySpace profiles, after an examination of about a third of the data.
He admits that there is some weak points to the search as a method of catching criminals on MySpace. It only works on those that are dumb enough to use their real names.
However he is releasing the code under an open sauce licence for coppers to use to catch the dimmer sex pests. µ
L'INQ
Wired
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