Case # 217 Cyber Monday Maul
Cyber Monday; the biggest on-line sale day of the year! Incredible bargains, no Black Friday crowds. No queuing on a line in the cold in front of stores. No pushing or shoving. What could be better? ... All from the comfort of his own desk! With a few clicks of the mouse; a lot of savings in the wallet!
David did a bit of searching and in a few short cyber moments found the bargain laptop he was looking for. The site was not familiar to him nor the name, but hey, there thousands of legitimate sites out there. This one looked O.K. In this economy, it is tough to give up on such a bargain...
David slipped big time. Sure it was a bargain and he even got his laptop via the free overnight delivery...but he also got a virulent virus that infected his own desktop computer, deleted files, grabbed his Microsoft outlook address book and unwittingly spread it to all the addresses he had, resulting in the deleting of hundreds of valuable files from his contacts.
How would Torah Law adjudicate this scenario?
Case # 218 Web Woe!
Anyone who uses a computer now knows of the need to have anti-virus software.
On Tuesday, November 1st, Aaron purchased a new laptop and had yet to install anti-virus software on his computer.
Josh sends out a weekly commentary on current events to select friends. On Friday November 4th, Josh sent Aaron a PDF file with his article.
Unfortunately, Josh's file had malicious software embedded in it. The software entered Aaron's Gmail address box and sent out an email to 100 of Aaron's contacts.
In the email, there was a link to a website in China for buying cheap electronic goods. It turned out the web sites were illegitimate and simply collected credit cards numbers; later to use them for fraudulent purposes.
Twelve of Aaron's contacts discovered that their credit card information was then used to buy $50 worth of goods they did not authorize.
So how did email go out to all of these people?
When malicious software (known as malware) is loaded onto a computer, one thing it might do is go to the users email address book and send emails to all or part of the people in the address book.
Web Woe's malware then sent a message directing the recipients to a website where they were promised cheap electronic devices.
They then went to those sites and naively supplied their credit card information.
Is Aaron responsible to pay the $50- for each of the 12 people?
What's the Law?
