Slashdot Mirror
Felony For Refreshing a Web Page?
therandomw writes "An 18 year-old boy was recently arrested in Ohio for telling fellow students to refresh the schools web page in order to slow down the server. He is being charged with a felony and is currently being held in jail. According to Canton City Prosecutor Frank Forchione 'This new technology has created a whole wave of crimes, and we're just trying to find ways to solve them.'"
Fark!
I just commited 7 felonies waiting for this story to appear.
Who will guard the guards?
... after all the /. readers held down F5 to see if it really worked
It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well. - Rene Descartes (1637)
I love the complete bullshit way this article frames the situation. He didn't put a link, he "created a website, which connected to the school's system." ooo.. sinister.. yeah...
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Slashdot is in a heap of trouble.
I read the internet for the articles.
Yeah. If it doesn't work at first, just hit F5 to try again. It'll work eventually...
Boy if they thought a few people in a chat room would be bad....
Or
Witness the firepower of a fully armed and operational slashdotting!!
As a concerned user of fully patched Gentoo, I have tested the "F5 causes excessive reloading" vulnerability. It works on Konqueror, Mozilla and Firefox, with all patches installed, including hardened kernel. Local access to the machine is NOT required; the F5 vulnerability can be triggered when opening a web browser through, e.g., SSH forwarded X connections.
I hope there will be a patch soon!
This new technology has created a whole wave of crimes
Behold the refresh button, the wonder of modern technology.
[sig]
Yes! My city is getting owned.
-gjr
Well, a Manual Distributed Slashdotting Denial Of Service would be an MSDOS. :-) (Lame, but it made me giggle to think it up.)
'Manual Slashdotting Denial of Service' works better. Of course, 'Slashdotting' implies 'Distributed.'
Come to think of it, it implies 'Manual' too.
Cogito, ergo sig.
It's a very valuable page. No wonder the school and police were after this fellow. He wasn't just taking some lousy page that no one read in the last 3 months temporarily out of service, he was trying to stop students from "achiev[ing] their full potential for intellectual and personal growth". Clearly, he had to be stopped before he went on to more illustrious crimes like overwhelming the server that powers the site about sidetalking.
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
Excuse me for pointing this out, but where exactly are the damages that relate to this felony. If this kid finds a lawyer with even an ounce of brains, the court case should last thirty seconds.
Lawyer: Why do you have a web site?
School: So the public can access it.
Lawyer: So, is the same machine running it today?
School: Yes.
Lawyer: Does it run on the same connection?
School: Yes.
Lawyer: And it runs the same software, with the same data?
School: Yes.
Lawyer: So, in fact, nothing was erased or altered on the machine in any way? Correct?
School: Yes.
Lawyer: Did your service provider charge you with any extra fees?
School: No.
Lawyer: So, apart from a handful of extra traffic, which you admit slowed down but did not stop, damage, or destroy hardware, software, or data, and which did not cost you any extra money, you had not other damages?
School: Uhm, well, I guess that's correct.
Lawyer: Tell me, do you sue the driver in front of you if he slows down, or charge the slow walking grandmother holding up the line with a felony?
School: Uhm, no.
Lawyer: Tell me, if all the phone lines are in use at the school because people are calling them, is that a felony? Are prank calls a felony?
School: Er, no.
Lawyer: So, your basis for the "damage" in this case is that a student basically asked his friends to "call-up" the computer until you had a busy signal.
School: Yes.
Lawyer: In fact, your entire web site listed less than 900 hits before it was Slashdotted into oblivion. Tell me, have you started legal proceedings against the news agency that took the story national, or Zonk for posting it on Slashdot?
School: Erm, no.
Lawyer: So, you're only willing to harrass young children? To send a child to prison for what amounts to no more than a phone call where they hang up? Is that what you feel is acceptable? Is that, in fact, what you view as teaching our children?
School: Er, do I have to answer that?
Lawyer: Well, you are making me wait, keeping me busy, I might have to file a felony suit against you for that...
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.
That *was* engrossing, but personally I found this 7.2MB pdf on Zone Change Procedures to be even more informative:
e s/zonechangesample.pdf
http://www.cityofcanton.com/safetyservice/bldgcod
Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others. -Groucho Marx
Population density != intellegence
Actually I have found the reverse to be true, to a point. With a dense population, you have more stupid people per square block.
Just three more hours seapeople and you can finally take me away from this crappy God Damned planet full of hippies