More Movie Magic with the Anti-Gun Elite

Geeks at Slashdot bring us a review of the movie Untraceable. I don't care much for the plot, but they point out an interesting bit from the movie.

Batter up! I think that an FBI cyber crime expert would have a pop-up blocker installed, but moving on. If a criminal wanted to gain access to your machine to steal your financial records, tricking you into downloading and installing a trojan horse as part of another program, is probably exactly how they'd do it. (However, a trojan wouldn't automatically and instantly find a file full of passwords, even if she did named it "passwords.txt" as bait.) The biggest slip is that if you upload a trojan horse back to someone who was downloading data from your machine, there's still no way to force the remote criminal's computer to run it, as happens in the movie. And a criminal that smart would probably be running the operation from the compromised PC of someone in another city, not stealing a neighbor's wireless access. (In any case, while having the criminal's IP address would allow you to go to someone's ISP and ask them to turn over the records of where that person lived, the characters should not have been able to narrow an IP address down to a person's house without that extra step.) Also, if I heard right, the FBI figures out who the guilty neighbor is even though he has no priors, based on the fact that he has two registered handguns. That will offend a certain portion of the audience, so viewers of "27 Dresses" in some cinemas may hear angry gunfire coming from the next theater.

Funny that they point to the Michigan Militia as those that would get offended. Not that any one else would see this as more of the same from the left coast. One commenter even points out that if the guy were a criminal there is no reason to believe that he would have registered his handguns.

Of course, this just points to the idea that if you have a gun, legally purchased and registered, you're still considered a criminal.