Jail for Hong Kong techie who exposed stars' sex snaps The Hong Kong techie who exposed over 1,000 compromising pics of film star Edison Chen and a parade of starlets has been sentenced to eight and a half months in jail. Sze Ho-chun, 24, swiped the snaps when Chen dropped his laptop in for repairs back in 2006. The pics showed Chen cavorting with a string of women including …
Apart from the tech being a n asshole —
What was the other guy up to? ifuckasianstarlets.com? Why would you give away your computer with compromising pictures, let alone such an amount of them, to some random repairman? Either he was extremely eager for publicity or he's extremely... dumb.
NOTICE TO ALL FAMOUS PEOPLE WHO ARE READING THIS:
If you truly value your privacy then take out the hard drive your self and destroy the hard drive.
Best way to destroy your own hard drive is to use a drill and drill all the way through to the other side.
Saving dats is what USB keychains are for.
he was authorised (I guess) to access the PC. He removed pics (naughty), but then gave the pics away to women.
"three charges of gaining access to a computer with a view to dishonest gain for himself or others."
Did he gain or try to gain anything? Did he know the women were going to flog them or did he think they may of wanted some battery assisted quiet time with the images?
Section 161 of the HK Crimes Ordinance (based on UK law!) is "access to a computer with dishonest intent". The access doesn't need to be unauthorised, you don't need to actually gain anything, it can even be your own computer - you just have to access the computer with some kind of dishonest intent that fits in the very wide-ranging categories. So they could even argue him accessing a suspicious folder labelled "Pictures" was with dishonest intent, and as soon as he made a copy he had "view to dishonest gain for himself or another" which ensures he was ready to be banged into prison.
(You can find it online here http://www.legislation.gov.hk/ Chapter 200, section 161).
"1000 nude photos...."
Most of the pictures were spliced from videos to increase the ... *ahem* body count. This merely caused more grief to netizens across Asia who tried to review criminal case at *cough* fist hand, hence the abundance of GIF files which were subsequently merged by altruistic parties to recreate the original experience....
"Why would you give away your computer with compromising pictures, let alone such an amount of them, to some random repairman?"
Edison claimed he'd deleted the files from his lurvely pink Mac. So much for MAC users who, a) don't realize you can recover data 7 deletion levels down, b) too busy fawning over their own stylish self to empty the trash.
USB keychains are easy to loose. The correct approach is to classify your data, and encrypt (in storage and in transit) data that should be kept confidential. The storage medium is then irrelevant.
Perhaps we should demand ISO27001 -certified celebrities?
Mine's the one with the data awaiting classification in the pockets.
...the press has gone batso with this case since it broke last year. Here's a couple of notes:
- Edison Chen was an extremely popular young star until the photos were leaked.
- Although Hong Kong movies have become world-famous in recent years, it's still a highly conservative culture. Unlike UK/Europe or even Hollywood, top HK actresses do not do topless or nude scenes, as it usually stops their career (yes, I know Shu Qi is the exception, emphasis on "the").
- According to today's local newspaper, the South China Morning Post, the tech "unlocked the encrypted files" on Chen's laptop, which, BTW, was a customized pink MacBook, seriously.
I have no special inside knowledge, all of this info has been published or is generally known, but outside of Hong Kong, it may not be well disseminated.
My personal opinion: young people all over the world take these types of photos, they were intended to be private, and their de-encryption/dissemination has caused great pain to the parties involved, especially the women. Both Gillian Chung and Cecilia Cheung appeared on television earlier this year and expressed extreme anger at having their private images (pun intended) splashed all over the Net. This isn't a Paris Hilton sort of thing, where leaked naughtiness leads to pointless fame, rather, the reverse: the equivalent of a logic bomb with your name on it dropped into the network you admin. Multiple careers were destroyed, Chen's received death-threats, and the whole incident is less fun than may appear at first glance.
In America bad publicity = good publicity but not in conservative Asia. One of the women involved is a 'Twins' singer and actor (not the Olson one) and did a string of English teaching music videos for ESL kids. Never looked at her the same way after...
Don't record yourself by others unless you want to keep it for yourself. (or get paid for it, like Paris)
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