There's a story at Slashdot about a teenaged hacker named Brad Willman who broke into 3,000 computers using a trojan he wrote. He created some infected pictures, and then distrbuted them on child porn groups, using them to gain access to the downloaders compluters. Anyway, he managed to track down a judge who was contemplating abusing a boy, and had him arrested. The Computer Crime Research Center has an article about him. Anyway, it looks like the judge could have got off scott free due to this...
Just to carry on the privacy angle, I'd like to discuss two terms used when relating to personal data: opt-out and opt-in. So when someone collects your data and you have to make an extra effort to stop them giving it to their partners, selling it to marketers, or posting it on the Web that's what we call opt-out. The extra effort could be as simple as clicking some check boxes, it could be obfuscated so you think you're opting out when in reality you're opting in and so forth. Obviously...