A lot of details do not add up in this story.

First, how did they get to 20 years in prison? Possession of child porn is a misdemeanor in California, and he can get only 1 year for that (And AFAIK, the same is true for the federal law). He could get 20 years only if he distributed (or possess with an intent to distribute) child porn material.

Something tells me there are some missing facts in this story, and I guess the prosecution had a lot of other incriminating evidence in addition to those accidentally downloaded CP files.

Nah, I would recommend Gentoo to this guy. After all, he did say:

Given that this is Slashdot, I would definitely go with the first explanation. RTFA? Who the fchk RTFAs? And btw. AP got it's share of love from Slashdot in the past, when they started sending out DMCA take down damands to bloggers who quotes AP stories even though it was a fair use.

And most likely, this paper was never peer reviewed before accepting it to the conference.

I tried to find out some info about CSSE, and apparently the 2008 conference was the first conference ever. This conference takes place in China, and even though it calls itself an "international conference", it is not very international, and most presenters are either from china or a neighboring country.

Furthermore, it has a very wide list of subjects, too wide ... probably any subject in computer science. It close to impossible to get reviewers for one conference that would be qualified to review any possible subject.

My guess is: this conference was either not reviewed at all, or its review process was a joke and everything got accepted (probably less submissions than what they expected). I've looked at the paper and it is sufficient to read the abstract in order to understand this paper is a fake.