He was found to have violated an injunction from accessing ANY of the plaintiff's websites. This injunction was issued on August 4th, 2005.
That being said, he wanted to argue in the face of the injunction that any access to a public web server was de facto authorized. The judge ruled (correctly) that though all the information remained on the "public" internet, that any access by Ritz after the injunction was unauthorized.
Ritz, however, performed the zone transfer query in question on February 27, 2005. Read that as almost 6 months before any injunction was made against his access. The judge ruled (astoundingly incorrectly) that the query was unauthorized. ANY access request from that is not subject to authentication from the Internet at large should be considered authorized. The moment you put a notice or a 1 character password it becomes unauthorized. The judge's HUGE gap in application of the law was to rule that ANY specific access of a publicly accessible unauthenticated computer system could represented unauthorized access. Publicly accessible unauthenticated = authorized.
The participation in Usenet Death Penalties is not a mark against Ritz, but in his favor. The vast majority of the findings look to establish Ritz as a menace to Sierra, when in fact his advocacy for the Internet as a whole is what puts him in conflict with them. The judge's ruling fails to consider that this man is not a vigilante out to slander and misinform and declare UDP fatwas against random ISP's. He is in fact a citizen performing tasks that anyone investigating a suspected bad net neighbor would be expected to use. His possible harassing behavior aside, he was found in violation of nothing other than unauthorized computer access, a claim that, absent the injunction, is not able to be supported by the common understanding or practice of access to computer systems since the inception of the first networked computers.
This guy was also found to be the Bastard Operator from Hell. The BOFH is actually named Simon Travaglia, but whatever.
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He was found to have violated an injunction from accessing ANY of the plaintiff's websites. This injunction was issued on August 4th, 2005. That being said, he wanted to argue in the face of the injunction that any access to a public web server was de facto authorized. The judge ruled (correctly) that though all the information remained on the "public" internet, that any access by Ritz after the injunction was unauthorized. Ritz, however, performed the zone transfer query in question on February 27, 2005. Read that as almost 6 months before any injunction was made against his access. The judge ruled (astoundingly incorrectly) that the query was unauthorized. ANY access request from that is not subject to authentication from the Internet at large should be considered authorized. The moment you put a notice or a 1 character password it becomes unauthorized. The judge's HUGE gap in application of the law was to rule that ANY specific access of a publicly accessible unauthenticated computer system could represented unauthorized access. Publicly accessible unauthenticated = authorized. The participation in Usenet Death Penalties is not a mark against Ritz, but in his favor. The vast majority of the findings look to establish Ritz as a menace to Sierra, when in fact his advocacy for the Internet as a whole is what puts him in conflict with them. The judge's ruling fails to consider that this man is not a vigilante out to slander and misinform and declare UDP fatwas against random ISP's. He is in fact a citizen performing tasks that anyone investigating a suspected bad net neighbor would be expected to use. His possible harassing behavior aside, he was found in violation of nothing other than unauthorized computer access, a claim that, absent the injunction, is not able to be supported by the common understanding or practice of access to computer systems since the inception of the first networked computers. This guy was also found to be the Bastard Operator from Hell. The BOFH is actually named Simon Travaglia, but whatever.