You do, indeed, have the legal right to change your neighbor's TV channel. You are free to send whatever signals in the infrared spectrum you want.
You know, in a discussion filled with completely shitty analogies, it's amazing how many people come up with analogies that aren't even against the law.
Except, in this case, to get rid of him, they're willing to set a precedent that says you can't access a computer without express permission, which immediately kills the internet.
And there's already a crime for 'hanging around looking shifty'. It's loitering, and it's a perfectly good crime. Pull him off the streets, tell him next time he's spending the night in jail, and he might get the idea that driving to residential areas and sitting around in his car is frowned on.
They just want to get him on 'unauthorized computer access' because it is, quite rightly, a felony. But what he did is not, in fact, that.
I am not happy when police, in an attent to get rid of a persistent jaywalker, charge them with rape of the street, and I am not happy when the police charge a loiterer with felony computer misuse.
In fact, you can have authentication without privacy.
For example, MAC address filtering.
Sure, it's completely unsecure, but legally you'd be in hot water if you modified your MAC to match your neighbors so you could get on his network. (Unless you could prove you just happened to have that MAC, also.) Spoofing authentication is illegal.
Hell, there could be a web page that you're automatically redirected to that says 'This is a private network. Click here if you are one of the authorized users' and you'd probably legally be in trouble if you clicked.
I am running every open wifi network in existance, and I hereby give everyone permission to connect to them.
What, you think I'm not? Well, perhaps you should explain how we should go about securing permission from a fucking radio signal besides, you know, following the protocols laid out to do so. Because most people don't carry around radio triangulation equipment.
What's more, do people who do not intend other people to use their AP keep them open for three months while others use them?
I'm sorry, that's just idiotic. It's like complaining to the police that someone, every day, walks their dog across the corner of your front yard, and the police arrest them for trespassing, when you failed to ask them to stop.
That would be thrown out of court in a second. They probably assumed that was a public right-of-way or that youhad no problem with it. It's not trespassing until you're asked to stop or it's obvious you shouldn't be there.
I think the fact that he was doing it for three months is a point on his side.
The problem is that if the precedent is set that 'use without express permission' is 'unauthorized use' under the law, the Internet dies tomorrow, or it would be if such a thing were enforcable.
I'm serious here. Does anyone here have permission to view any web site?
And while you might have permission to email other people, I'm willing to bet that almost none of them do not have the right to grant you accesss to their mail server. And before you pull up an AUP, you need to explain how you got to that AUP without permission.
Just like every other network protocol in existence, there are ways to deny access on wifi networks, of various security levels.
Even the minimum 'deny access to everyone but these MACs' or a web page that comes up and says 'Click to confirm you are an authorized users', while trivial to get around, would be enough to de-authorize users. The point isn't the security level, it's merely any indication it's an private network.
Just like lame-ass Javascript protection is enough to legally protect a web page.
But a ruling saying 'Everything is private by default' destroys the entire Internet.
If your neighbours forget to close the curtains, do you have a right to use read their credit card bills on their desk, using a high powered telescope?
Um, yes. You do.
When did the total idiots invade this place? There's absolutely no law against reading things through windows.
A very very few juridictions have laws against aiming telescopes over a certain power more than X degrees downward, but as that's an utterly unenforcable law, you can probably count those places on one hand.
Now, going onto people's property and looking through the windows is probably illegal under various 'peeping tom' laws, but that's based on trespassing concepts...while you have assumed permission to go up to their front door for the purpose of knocking on it, you presumably do not have their permission to look in the windows.
But no peeping tom law applies to someone standing on public property, or someone else's property. It is perfectly legal to look through any windows you want from the road, for any reason at all.
Do you then have a right to use the CC numbers?
No more than if you'd been left in their office for ten minutes with their credit card bills, and copied them down. Or if they'd handed you their credit cards to run purchase gas at the gas station you work at.
The fact you gained the numbers by 'spying' is completelly irrelevant. Credit card fraud is credit card fraud.
Or are you attempting to imply the mere act of sex is somehow degrading to women, which is possible the most offensive thing I've ever heard spoke in 'defense' of women.
Oddly enough, there is actually nothing in the bible to ban a non-virgin woman and any (non-related) man from having any sex they want.
This is because sex outside of marriage, in the bible, is basically consided 'theft by conversion', thether she's consenting or not. (Because she's her father's property.)
OTOH, divorce is condemned. Mainly because it leaves a worthless woman flapping around loose, which is fairly cruel to her.
Oddly enough, I also refuse to accept pamplets on the street from people who cannot afford to have pamplets printed.
Of course, that's rather self-policing.
However, there are plenty of free ways for people to get their opinions out there. Community sites galore, with blogs and journals and all sorts of crap. This isn't 1998, where everyone was blogging pictures on their cats on Geocities, before we knew what 'blogging' was.
But if someone wants to put up 'a website', they can spend the absurdly small fee for five megs of space at a real webhost. Someone I can learn the identity of needs to be standing behind what a site is doing to my computer, or be otherwise trusted (Well-known pseudonym.), or I will not knowingly go there.
That isn't the same thing as knowing the identity of the person providing the content. The content can be anonymous as it wants.
But if the site tries to harm my computer, there better be someone I can point at, or at least someone who has to walk away from their hosting account.
And, frankly, geocities and other free hosters should be more responsible. For example, they shouldn't allow executables without some confirmation of identity, and, no, email does not count.
No DRM at all. Lossless encoding, perferable FLAC, but I can convert. Full albums.
I'd like album covers and other stuff you get with CDs, but that's optional.
I have yet to find anyone who has that. (Beside the quasi-legal Russian one.)
That's what I get with the CD, and I refuse to pay for anything less unless the price is much less, too.
I'd also like the ability to try out songs. (Yes, with DRM and lossy encoding, I'm not crazy.) And to purchase a song or two, and then 'upgrade' to the album at a discount. But those are absurd pie-in-the-sky concepts when the music industry can't even get the basics right.
Pssst. I agree with you completely, on everything you said. Insulting me isn't getting you anywhere.
If you had been paying attention, however, you would have noticed I was insulting the particularly repugnant 'If you disagree with the government you are a traitor' Republican idiot.
When in reality it's his kind of talk that is rejection of all this country stands for. (But, admittedly, does not actually reach at this point in time.)
Critizing people because they critize the government is crazy in any Republic. You can (and should) critize them because you disagree with their disagreement with the government, but saying 'I don't approve of disagreeing with the government in general' is absurd.
It implies the government is somehow supposed to be outside the control of the citizens. (Yes, I know it is, but it's not supposed to be.) As the government is The People, advocating that anyone except The People run the government is traitorous speech, just like advocating that England invade and run our government is traitorous speech.
Of course, in this country, people can speak traitorous speech all they want. I just think it's a bit absurd they are calling people 'unpatriotic' for doing their duty in complaining what they disagree with the government about.
He complained, quite rightly, that trashing irreplaceable data for lack of a quarter of a million dollars makes the US government look very very stupid.
And in addition to appearing that way, it actually is very very stupid. (Do I need to mention what the two unsolved mysteries in physics lead to 100 years ago? Here's a hint: Einstein won a Nobel Peace Prize for solving one of them, but is most famous for solving the other one.) We should have teams of scientists working on figuring out this mysterious force.
It is not, despite what you may think, 'unpatriotic' to point out when our government is doing stupid things. In fact, pointing out flaws in the current operating procedures of the government is the definition of patriotic in a republic like this one.
When we see the people running the government are operating it incorrectly, we must point this out to them, and, if they fail to listen, we must replace this, this is our duty as Americans and citizens in a republic.
Something that is not our duty is to care about what the outside world thinks about our internal politics.
OTOH, maybe we should pay some attention to what they think about our politics in relation to them and other countries, simply because you can't have political relationships with other nations unless they come, too.
Oh, wait, you're one of those people who think you owe your loyalty to your party, not your country. So while your party is in power, you translate party=country=government.
Well, here's a clue. No citizen of the US owes anything to the US government. The US government works for us, we own it. There are places where governments are 'owed' loyaties, but the US is not one of them. Even soldiers do not swear allegience to the government, but to the Constitution, and there's a reason for that.
And you can owe your party whatever you want, it is, obviously, a free country.
But, like I said, what you owe your country is the best government you can give it. You can either do that by operating the government, or by chosing people to do so, and complaining when they fail.
I'm sorry, we must have not gotten the memo that said 'mysteries of physics' were unrelated to defense.
We'll clear all our research labs out by the end of the day. You can ship us all the integrated circuits, lasers, and nuclear weapons you will no longer be using. We'd like them by the end of next month.
The thing I care about, and what most of slashdot cares about, is saving the data. We could care less if it's analyzed now or ten years from now. Because we know that some scientist is going to come along and decide to do it when he has a theory about it. (In fact, it makes no sense to talk about 'analyzing' the data without a theory that roughly matches what happened. We already know the facts.)
However, he can't do that if no one can get to the data because morons at NASA trashed the readers without copying the tapes first.
We know they have the space. They can probably fit the entire data stream in the same space as ten minutes worth of data from any recent rover project.
I don't know what the hell is wrong with NASA. This is just idiotic, or possibly the Planetary Society are a bunch of liars.
50 dollar? Where the hell have you been? You can get them for like 8 dollars.
And the point is that no one would ever know. You insert the drive, grab a few files, and you're owned.
Honestly, people. Pretend you're in a place with public computers with your laptop. Someone walks up and says 'I can't seem to read files off this drive on the machines here, something about permissions, and I really need one of them. Can you read it, and if so, can you copy important.doc to this floppy for me?'. So you stick it in, you grab a perfectly innocent.doc and copy it to the floppy, being careful not to run anything off the drive or even open anything. (And like all sensible people, you have autorun off.)
And you just got owned. At the system level.
I not only would have done it before this article, I have done it before.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it doesn't start by default, but wireless routers don't magically fly into your house and hook them to your DSL, either.
Ergo, by your logic, since people might start up a webserver without realizing it is open to all, accessing all webservers is illegal.
You know, in a discussion filled with completely shitty analogies, it's amazing how many people come up with analogies that aren't even against the law.
And there's already a crime for 'hanging around looking shifty'. It's loitering, and it's a perfectly good crime. Pull him off the streets, tell him next time he's spending the night in jail, and he might get the idea that driving to residential areas and sitting around in his car is frowned on.
They just want to get him on 'unauthorized computer access' because it is, quite rightly, a felony. But what he did is not, in fact, that.
I am not happy when police, in an attent to get rid of a persistent jaywalker, charge them with rape of the street, and I am not happy when the police charge a loiterer with felony computer misuse.
For example, MAC address filtering.
Sure, it's completely unsecure, but legally you'd be in hot water if you modified your MAC to match your neighbors so you could get on his network. (Unless you could prove you just happened to have that MAC, also.) Spoofing authentication is illegal.
Hell, there could be a web page that you're automatically redirected to that says 'This is a private network. Click here if you are one of the authorized users' and you'd probably legally be in trouble if you clicked.
What, you think I'm not? Well, perhaps you should explain how we should go about securing permission from a fucking radio signal besides, you know, following the protocols laid out to do so. Because most people don't carry around radio triangulation equipment.
I'm sorry, that's just idiotic. It's like complaining to the police that someone, every day, walks their dog across the corner of your front yard, and the police arrest them for trespassing, when you failed to ask them to stop.
That would be thrown out of court in a second. They probably assumed that was a public right-of-way or that youhad no problem with it. It's not trespassing until you're asked to stop or it's obvious you shouldn't be there.
I think the fact that he was doing it for three months is a point on his side.
I'm serious here. Does anyone here have permission to view any web site?
And while you might have permission to email other people, I'm willing to bet that almost none of them do not have the right to grant you accesss to their mail server. And before you pull up an AUP, you need to explain how you got to that AUP without permission.
Just like every other network protocol in existence, there are ways to deny access on wifi networks, of various security levels.
Even the minimum 'deny access to everyone but these MACs' or a web page that comes up and says 'Click to confirm you are an authorized users', while trivial to get around, would be enough to de-authorize users. The point isn't the security level, it's merely any indication it's an private network.
Just like lame-ass Javascript protection is enough to legally protect a web page.
But a ruling saying 'Everything is private by default' destroys the entire Internet.
Um, yes. You do.
When did the total idiots invade this place? There's absolutely no law against reading things through windows.
A very very few juridictions have laws against aiming telescopes over a certain power more than X degrees downward, but as that's an utterly unenforcable law, you can probably count those places on one hand.
Now, going onto people's property and looking through the windows is probably illegal under various 'peeping tom' laws, but that's based on trespassing concepts...while you have assumed permission to go up to their front door for the purpose of knocking on it, you presumably do not have their permission to look in the windows.
But no peeping tom law applies to someone standing on public property, or someone else's property. It is perfectly legal to look through any windows you want from the road, for any reason at all.
Do you then have a right to use the CC numbers?
No more than if you'd been left in their office for ten minutes with their credit card bills, and copied them down. Or if they'd handed you their credit cards to run purchase gas at the gas station you work at.
The fact you gained the numbers by 'spying' is completelly irrelevant. Credit card fraud is credit card fraud.
Lesbian porn.
Or are you attempting to imply the mere act of sex is somehow degrading to women, which is possible the most offensive thing I've ever heard spoke in 'defense' of women.
This is because sex outside of marriage, in the bible, is basically consided 'theft by conversion', thether she's consenting or not. (Because she's her father's property.)
OTOH, divorce is condemned. Mainly because it leaves a worthless woman flapping around loose, which is fairly cruel to her.
Ah, the morality we learn from the Good Book.
I'm sure you can find a legal copy somewhere. I've got two just laying here from computers that do not exist anymore.
But it's nice to not have to go all the way to the righthand side.
Luckily, I have an extension that makes the close button appear after a quarter second. So if I'm changing tabs quickly, I can't hit it.
Still work? Huh?
Yes, it's a great media player if you're comparing it to fucking Winamp.
They just don't get to make a website.
Of course, that's rather self-policing.
However, there are plenty of free ways for people to get their opinions out there. Community sites galore, with blogs and journals and all sorts of crap. This isn't 1998, where everyone was blogging pictures on their cats on Geocities, before we knew what 'blogging' was.
But if someone wants to put up 'a website', they can spend the absurdly small fee for five megs of space at a real webhost. Someone I can learn the identity of needs to be standing behind what a site is doing to my computer, or be otherwise trusted (Well-known pseudonym.), or I will not knowingly go there.
That isn't the same thing as knowing the identity of the person providing the content. The content can be anonymous as it wants.
But if the site tries to harm my computer, there better be someone I can point at, or at least someone who has to walk away from their hosting account.
And, frankly, geocities and other free hosters should be more responsible. For example, they shouldn't allow executables without some confirmation of identity, and, no, email does not count.
I will certainly look into that, thanks!
No DRM at all. Lossless encoding, perferable FLAC, but I can convert. Full albums.
I'd like album covers and other stuff you get with CDs, but that's optional.
I have yet to find anyone who has that. (Beside the quasi-legal Russian one.)
That's what I get with the CD, and I refuse to pay for anything less unless the price is much less, too.
I'd also like the ability to try out songs. (Yes, with DRM and lossy encoding, I'm not crazy.) And to purchase a song or two, and then 'upgrade' to the album at a discount. But those are absurd pie-in-the-sky concepts when the music industry can't even get the basics right.
Einstein, for the record, won a Nobel Prize. Not a Nobel Peace Prize.
If you had been paying attention, however, you would have noticed I was insulting the particularly repugnant 'If you disagree with the government you are a traitor' Republican idiot.
When in reality it's his kind of talk that is rejection of all this country stands for. (But, admittedly, does not actually reach at this point in time.)
Critizing people because they critize the government is crazy in any Republic. You can (and should) critize them because you disagree with their disagreement with the government, but saying 'I don't approve of disagreeing with the government in general' is absurd.
It implies the government is somehow supposed to be outside the control of the citizens. (Yes, I know it is, but it's not supposed to be.) As the government is The People, advocating that anyone except The People run the government is traitorous speech, just like advocating that England invade and run our government is traitorous speech.
Of course, in this country, people can speak traitorous speech all they want. I just think it's a bit absurd they are calling people 'unpatriotic' for doing their duty in complaining what they disagree with the government about.
He complained, quite rightly, that trashing irreplaceable data for lack of a quarter of a million dollars makes the US government look very very stupid.
And in addition to appearing that way, it actually is very very stupid. (Do I need to mention what the two unsolved mysteries in physics lead to 100 years ago? Here's a hint: Einstein won a Nobel Peace Prize for solving one of them, but is most famous for solving the other one.) We should have teams of scientists working on figuring out this mysterious force.
It is not, despite what you may think, 'unpatriotic' to point out when our government is doing stupid things. In fact, pointing out flaws in the current operating procedures of the government is the definition of patriotic in a republic like this one.
When we see the people running the government are operating it incorrectly, we must point this out to them, and, if they fail to listen, we must replace this, this is our duty as Americans and citizens in a republic.
Something that is not our duty is to care about what the outside world thinks about our internal politics.
OTOH, maybe we should pay some attention to what they think about our politics in relation to them and other countries, simply because you can't have political relationships with other nations unless they come, too.
Oh, wait, you're one of those people who think you owe your loyalty to your party, not your country. So while your party is in power, you translate party=country=government.
Well, here's a clue. No citizen of the US owes anything to the US government. The US government works for us, we own it. There are places where governments are 'owed' loyaties, but the US is not one of them. Even soldiers do not swear allegience to the government, but to the Constitution, and there's a reason for that.
And you can owe your party whatever you want, it is, obviously, a free country.
But, like I said, what you owe your country is the best government you can give it. You can either do that by operating the government, or by chosing people to do so, and complaining when they fail.
We'll clear all our research labs out by the end of the day. You can ship us all the integrated circuits, lasers, and nuclear weapons you will no longer be using. We'd like them by the end of next month.
However, he can't do that if no one can get to the data because morons at NASA trashed the readers without copying the tapes first.
We know they have the space. They can probably fit the entire data stream in the same space as ten minutes worth of data from any recent rover project.
I don't know what the hell is wrong with NASA. This is just idiotic, or possibly the Planetary Society are a bunch of liars.
And the point is that no one would ever know. You insert the drive, grab a few files, and you're owned.
Honestly, people. Pretend you're in a place with public computers with your laptop. Someone walks up and says 'I can't seem to read files off this drive on the machines here, something about permissions, and I really need one of them. Can you read it, and if so, can you copy important.doc to this floppy for me?'. So you stick it in, you grab a perfectly innocent .doc and copy it to the floppy, being careful not to run anything off the drive or even open anything. (And like all sensible people, you have autorun off.)
And you just got owned. At the system level.
I not only would have done it before this article, I have done it before.