Party Vibe

@Requiem 596915 wrote:

Dark Web drug-buying bot returned to Swiss artists after police seizure | Ars Technica

I doubt the feds would have permanently kept the bot (particularly in CH where any offence committed would be very minor on the scale) as the artists did not take or distribute any of the drugs they obtained; but they don’t want to advertise the place as a drugs paradise and I suspect what is not being discussed is what the feds did with the computer in the meantime and how much co-operation may well have occured between the artists and the cops in order to safeguard their reputation and employment (consider how those profs got co-opted into the FBI op to break all those darkweb vendors last year).

cops/courts don’t need to nick anyone for the crime; they’d be far more interested in what their CSI found out about the bot. Bear in mind this is the same country the first webserver was hosted in; they would not be short of decent computer scientists. They can’t nick anyone for any crime as the bot did it; but it was not programmed to break laws, and the artists did take precautions to avoid harm to themselves or others by not taking the drugs (I don’t think CH has official testing for anyone outside Police procedures, may only be UK (since WEDINFOS) and NL in the whole of Europe which does!)

OTOH if some folk had made an actual robot to serve up food to uni students and poison chemicals contaminated the food; they would soon be up before the Courts for doing that.

At least this experiment was done in a neutral country where the UN work out most of the more sensible treaties and which already has a good track record of encouraging consensus based regulation with regard to technology (the tech standards for fixed and wireless communication are all agreed by the ITU in Switzerland)