The ruling of magistrate Shahrizal Shaari on the Internet rumour case in favour of the accused is significant and has brought relief to many email users, said Internet specialist Dinesh Nair today.

Last Friday, Shahrizal, in acquitting and discharging 27-year-old bank officer Marcus Au Yong Wai, said there was no proof by any of the prosecution witnesses to show that Au was the one who had sent and wrote the message although his name appeared as the sender on the e-mail.

Shahrizal added that there was also no intention that the email had been purported to cause fear to the public.

Au was alleged to have spread rumours via the Internet about an alleged "riot" by disgruntled Indonesian migrant workers in Chow Kit in 1998.

Nair said that it is interesting to note that the two Internet-related issues brought before the court to date, the courts have on both occasions came out with decisions in favour of the accused.

"Shahrizal has moved it further, ensuring that the prosecution has to prove the identity of the person who typed the email and not automatically linking the email address to a particular person," he said.

This has come as a relief to people whose email addresses have been forged on Internet discussion groups, Nair added.

He stressed that the public should not believe all the content of the Internet, but should make the judgement on what they read based on their common sense.

"They have to double check any 'rumours' to confirm the truth of the message," he said.

He hoped that the judicious decisions were "right" and could help correct some of the imbalance within the Computer Crimes Act 1997 which states that a sender is responsible for the email messages.

Veteran journalist M.G.G. Pillai, who had been sued by timber tycoon Ting Pek Khing for allegedly posting Internet messages critical of Ting's involvement in the Bakun Dam project, said that the government should have not brought the Internet rumour case to court.

"It is very easy to fix the email address, how are they going to prove that the message under my address is mine?" he said.

Pillai said that KeADILan deputy president Chandra Muzaffar's case relating to another Internet posting had shown that the authority was required to prove that it was written by Chandra, hence the case was thrown out on "technical" grounds.

This contrasted with another case in which Harakah editor Zulkifli Sulong was charged for "sedition" on last January for publishing the same article allegedly written by Chandra, which is still under trial.

The said article, which appeared on Aug 2 last year, accused the media for working in concert with the judiciary in the persecution of sacked deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim. Also arrested on the same offence was the Harakah 's printer, Chia LimThye.

Meanwhile, Nair suggested that the use of mandatory digital signatures would help to alleviate the problem of email authentication.

"For contract or legal documents, they should have digital signatures which have proved workable and commonly used in the international community, but this is optional for the casual email," he said.