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Feds Drop CFAA Charges Against 'Hacker' Who Exploited Poker Machines
FuzzNugget writes "According to Wired, the two CFAA charges that were laid against the man who exploited a software bug on a video poker machine have been officially dismissed. Says Wired: '[U.S. District Judge Miranda] Du had asked prosecutors to defend their use of the federal anti-hacking law by Wednesday, in light of a recent 9th Circuit ruling that reigned in the scope of the CFAA. The dismissal leaves John Kane, 54, and Andre Nestor, 41, facing a single remaining charge of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.' Kane's lawyer agreed, stating, 'The case never should have been filed under the CFAA, it should have been just a straight wire fraud case. And I'm not sure its even a wire fraud. I guess we'll find out when we go to trial.'"
Yes, but apparently if you profit off a glitch, it is your fault and yu are a bad person however if you simply write a buggy poker machine slot machine game thingy, you are just A-Okay.
To me, this is exactly like charging a person who uses a buggy phone that gives them free calls every other call with fraud. They bought the phone as is, made no changes to it and they are being charged. These guys didn't change the code in the poker machine, they just knew what buttons to press after putting money in. If anything, they should be celebrated as the folks that beat the gaming industry.
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How many undiscovered glitches are there that cause the player to lose unfairly?
It is illegal if David beats Goliath.
New Economic Perspectives
Sure, I'll accept that analogy. Now give me an example where anyone was charged with a felony after an ATM didn't give a customer as much money as was withdrawn from the account. Maybe a misdemenor? A successful lawsuit even?
Corporations make mistakes all the time and the vast majority of them are in their favor. And yet these people who have millions of dollars and trained specialists and lawyers at their disposal... for some reason they are held to a much lower standard of justice. Some kid writes a fairly benign virus, gets charged as an adult and goes to prison. Sony, a multibillion dollar transnational corporation with a legion of lawyers and technical experts at its disposal, designs a rootkit to install itself on the computers of tens of millions of their customers. Result? A few class action lawsuits that offered a refund of the purchase price or a coupon for a DRM'ed digital download version of the album.
I'm not anti-corporation, I just think they should be held to a higher standard than individuals instead of being given a free pass for doing what are otherwise considered to be felonies.
Taking something that isn't yours is stealing, even if the owner makes it easy.
To me, this is exactly like charging a person who uses a buggy phone that gives them free calls every other call with fraud. They bought the phone as is, made no changes to it and they are being charged. These guys didn't change the code in the poker machine, they just knew what buttons to press after putting money in. If anything, they should be celebrated as the folks that beat the gaming industry.
While I agree that using CFAA to prosecute these guys was prosecutorial overreach of the abusive kind, the cellphone analogy does not quite work (close though :-) ) - if the "normal" operating process for the poker machine is "put money in", "play", "complete game", "cash out/play again/insert more money and repeat", and the guys were doing this, then the analogy would work.
But the actual process was one that was so illogical that the only statistically likely way to discover it would be with inside information or via hacking. Probably the prosecutors originally assumed this was the case and were looking at using CFAA, and decided to be lazy and press on with abusive over-reach instead of re-adjusting to use more appropriate legislation when their initial investigations. Alternatively, the prosecutors could actually have, SHOCK AND HORROR, actually done their job properly, and looked at all of the available evidence and THEN decided what statutes they were going to try and run the prosecution under to aim for a conviction based on the actual discovered evidence rather than their own assumptions or that one of them really wanted to try a CFAA case.
Having said that it is statistically likely to have been uncovered with inside information or hacking, the number of times people have played these machines means that there was still a slim but significant possibility of it being discovered by accident as seems to have happened here, and in those cases (as far as I am aware) there is no legal requirement for him to report the "malfunctioning" equipment to either the casino or the manufacturer so the worst thing that could be done to him legally is for the casino to ban him from their establishments and for the casino to take the matter up with the manufacturer, using a civil law suit to recover the lost money from the manufacturer, who then makes a claim on some liability insurance or other (and if I am wrong about him not having a duty to report the problem, then it is a civil problem between the casino and the patron).
Is it stealing if the owner gives it to you mistakenly?
He was presented a game. He played the game. He won. He was prosecuted. He did not cheat to win the game. He did not take anything that wasn't freely given.
Learn to love Alaska
Analogy time: let's say someone discovers that through some wild combination of reflections he can see your younger sister taking a shower off the shiny back of a brand new stop sign. So he videos the shower scene while legally standing on a public sidewalk, and puts in on YouTube. Illegal or a legit use of a bug?
The looking would be legal. Video of a naked sub-18 posted without permission would likely be a crime, regardless of how it was obtained. If your younger sister is over 18, the only issue would be using someone's likeness without permission.
Learn to love Alaska
Taking something that isn't yours is stealing, even if the owner makes it easy.
This is gambling however. It's like playing a game of poker where you aren't supposed to see the cards, but one player is showing them to you. It is HIS/HER fault. Using the knowledge of that players cards in your betting and game is fine-and-dandy with me. Each player should be covering his cards.
This is a slot machine, it is a perfectly legal profit center for casinos and gaming establishments to strip money away from the poor, addicted, weak-minded and the like. This isn't a case where a chap sneaks into a software design company, steals the code for a slot machine and sells it to another developer. This is out and out poor coding that has bitten someone in the ass and they are suing the guy who noticed it. If I was semi-omnipotent (whereby had the power to change who got fined, but not whether they got fined) I would be slugging any fine directly to the company who coded this rubbish in the first place.
And seeing as I am in a somewhat antagonistic mood, please enlighten me on how enticing dim-witted souls into thinking that they have a real chance of winning money, as compared to in reality siphoning off their meager funds isn't stealing. Casinos are nothing short of a way for someone to profit off the addictions, simple-wits and guilability of those beneath them - and this is said from someone who has made a good deal of money from playing poker - the real kind, against other players, not the poker-machine type. If you ask me, they should be totally and utterly, without the slightest hesitation, liable for any mistakes on their part, any badly written gaming machines, or any-and-all dumb-shittery, mental-fuck-up-edness or downright incompetence on their part.
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They are accused of intentionally exploiting a glitch in the machine to fraudulently win hundreds of thousands of dollars.
In gambling, I don't see the problem here. In gambling, it is everyone's intention to take everyone else's money. Why are you at fault just because the house was a bad gambler for once? It's hard to compare this to anything because gambling is specifically a game everyone is trying to take someone else's money while giving nothing in return. As a player I don't have an equal exchange contract when I gamble. I want your money and will take it how ever I can within the rules of the game you have set out for me to play.