"Hmm, actually right now we're seeing cheap reality TV crap,
reruns, and commercials, so I'm not clear on what you're trying to
predict will change 'if the model breaks down'?"
I'll admit there's a flood of reality TV shows (especially due to the
previous threat of a writers' strike), but there're also still a
number of decent, normal shows being produced. In an advertising-free
model, I see TV either becoming completely pay-per-view or near public
access in quality level. The latter would make the current round of
cheap reality TV crap look good in comparison.
Still, you make a good argument with the protectionism issue.
However, I'm not sure whether or not I'd consider the ReplayTV/network
sharing issue specific protectionism or the general protectionism
implicit in the entire copyright system. The "pick shows by keyword"
issue, on the other hand, is just absurd whatever way you slice it.
Because an Oscar nomination is a hell of a lot of free advertising.
"A Beautiful Mind" is currently at 7th for the past weekend's box
office figures. "Lord of the Rings" isn't in the top 10. I'd be
willing to bet a fair sum of money that there's a spike in next week's
ticket sales for both movies.
"Why should I have to watch commercials if I am paying for every
single channel already?"
You're paying the channel, but you aren't completely paying for
the channel. If you want to pay more in exchange for no commercials,
that's certainly a valid choice. Unfortunately, until technology gets
to the point where individualized programming is a reality, I think
you'll continue to lose out to the people who can put up with
commercials and don't want to pay even more.
"Meanwhile, the rest of us with more than two brain cells will find
other things to do."
Yes, because everyone knows that even now, there's no content that
would be of any interest to someone with an IQ over 10. Of course,
I've heard people say the same thing about Slashdot, so I guess we're
stuck being TV buddies.
Futhermore, if you aren't going to watch the hypothetical ad-free,
content-free television, then why care if the government helps
artificially maintain that television industry in a manner that only
affects people who watch TV, anyway? As near as I can tell, it's like
a pedestrian complaining about the toll rates on the turnpike.
"Maybe I'm weird, but I rather watch a GOOD story with lousy
special effects, than a horrible story with good special effects any
day."
There're a number of problems with your statement. First, paying for
good writers is another luxury that will probably get axed in
deference to cheap soap operas. Even when your writers are working
for free, they'll generally have other obligations that take up their
time, in an effort to put food on the table. I'm reminded of MST3K
back when it was on public access cable -- the cast was lucky if they
had time to prescreen the movie they were doing even once.
Another issue is that you're assuming good special effects are
mutually exclusive with good writing. While it's true that certain
people abuse special effects and use them as the final product,
there're plenty of examples of shows that've used them just to
facilitate the story. For example, while golden era X-files may've
had good writing, it would've been much more difficult to suspend
disbelief if they were forced to use rejected B-movie monster costumes
for aliens and such in lieu of higher quality effects.
Finally, production values comprise a lot more than just the special
effects. If you get a chance, catch the Brimstone series (especially
the pilot) on the Sci-Fi channel when they re-run it. The writing's
good stuff that focuses heavily on ethics and morality. It's got a
very human-centric bias. But beyond that, the writing's complemented
by downright amazing visual style. Everything from the camera work to
the set design helps immerse the viewer in the dark, conflicted world
of the main character. It would be a crime if a show like that were
to, instead, be given production values comparable to those of The
Blair Witch Project.
"Imagine a private company setting up a fence around your local
public park and then charging people to enter, without having ever
bought the land."
You mean kind of like what they do with some sports stadiums? You
mean kind of like what they do with the cellular phone spectrum?
Sometimes providing a non-free, commercialized service does serve the
common good. Should the electric company give power away just because
they've received special consideration to use public land? Certainly
not. It does, however, place them under the burden of additional
government regulation. Even so, they're still a private company and
still allowed to make some money.
I believe that in the lack of any other system of funding television,
encrypted broadcasts that require subscription may serve the common
good by providing a desireable option to consumers that would not
necessarily be available by other means.
"We have every right to free television. The airwaves are public
property."
I think we seem to have a conflict of terminology. I was focusing on
television programming while you were referring to the physical
broadcast. Sure there's a right to have a free broadcast, but there's
no right to free, quality material to fill it, hence the rest of my
comments back in the original post where I refer to television turning
into shoe-string budget productions.
And we, the viewers, have no right to free television. If the
business model breaks down, the corporations aren't the only ones who
take a hit. If ad revenue decays, networks will have to cut expenses,
and the first thing to go will be some of the non-mainstream
(including sci-fi and geeky markets) and expensive-to-produce (SFX,
CGI, and quality production values) shows. Instead, you'll see cheap
reality TV crap and other things that can be done on a shoe-string
budget.
"Any way you like it, it's my business and Bob's business, and as
long as we're both using the in game system that they provide and we
pay for to perform the in-game transaction, what's happening out of
game is none of their damn business."
You argue for the in-game versus real world separation, yet the
ability to partake in the entire in-game experience is already
predicated on a widley accepted real world requirement -- specifically
paying money to Mythic every month.
Since there's already one acceptable real world requirement for
playing the game, you can't just reject real world requirements as a
whole. Instead, you need criteria the helps differentiate between
"pay Mythic XX dollars" and "don't auction your goods for real money."
"I doubt it'll be long before there's a work-around."
Yes, but it's worth considering how involved the work-around is. For
example, in the realm of books, the copy-protection work-around
involves the rather tedious task of either manually retyping the
entire book or using a scanner and OCR software. It's doable, but
it's certainly not easy.
Likewise, if the PS2 work-around is inconvenient enough (such as the
traditional mod-chip solution, which requires playing around with
solder and several hundred dollars worth of easily broken Playstation
internal hardware), it's going to reduce the number of people that use
it. Compare this to the Dreamcast, where the copy protection was (as
I understand it) completely defeatable on the software level -- you
just had to download games cracked by other people, and you were set.
The only requirements were having broadband and a CD burner (or a
nearby friend with the same).
Anyway, I suspect one of the reasons behind Sony's goofy intermediate
device driver system is to keep the Linux kit from turning into a
easy, modchip-free copy protection breaker. Without their (admittedly
annoying) protection system in place, I could see the PS2 Linux system
being used as a giant bootloader to get the PS2 to read and execute a
burned game. There would still be other software hurdles to overcome
(such as any in-game copy protection checks and chopping things down
to fit on a CD), but those're the same purely software hurdles that're
already regularly tackled by cracking groups.
In short, even though I don't like the protection mechanisms Sony's
introduced, I can understand why they did it.
"So his computer equipment has been seized and he is
questioned. What is so out of line about that?"
You forgot the part in the Newsbytes article where he claims that all
his files were lost as a result of the raid. Destruction of data is
pretty extreme (and even potentially unconstitutional if we consider
data as a form of property), especially considering he hasn't been
charged yet.
"The issue is not the bomb making instructions but the hacking
charge."
From the Newsbytes article:
"
Sherman Martin Austin, 18, is believed to have
violated federal computer fraud and abuse laws, as well as statutes
prohibiting the distribution of bomb-making information, according to
an FBI affidavit."
Seems to me like both are being made into issues. Just because he's
clearly guilty in the hacking case doesn't negate his potential first
amendment rights in the bomb making case.
"How about using one of the two tried and proven protocols which
are available for the purpose of receiving and retrieving email
instead of relying on web mail?"
...says the person using a web-based message board instead of good ol'
Usenet. Both web-based messaging and web-based email have advantages
that're sometimes missing and sometimes completely unavailable when
using their more traditional counterparts.
It's fairly obvious, for example, that you can't beat the ease with
which I can use hotmail or slashdot in a "foreign" internet-enabled
environment (such as an internet cafe). It's a toss-up whether or not
they'll have a smart email client that can seamlessly integrate with
your account, but you know they'll have a web browser capable of
letting you do what you need to. Given that you can't always predict,
in advance, when you may wish to access your mail in such an
environment, that does make web-based mail a valid alternative for an
everyday account.
Furthermore, I don't see why people insist on whining about web-based
email clients, when said clients don't inherently cause an interface
problem. If a given web-based email client decides to send out
HTML-ized mail, it's a problem that's particular to that client (and
it's a problem particular to non-web clients, as well). If a given
web-based email client has a high incidence of spam comming from it,
it's a problem that's particular to that free email service
(regardless of whether or not the end-user uses the web to view
his/her mail). Ditto for services that append advertising to outgoing
email.
In short, it doesn't matter whether a person has their email displayed
via the web, psychic energy waves, or even an old-school teletype.
Your only concern should be with the protocol and formatting of the
messages they send to and receive from the outside world.
"Any program that you intend to run for more than a day or two you
should checkpoint its intermediate results to disk, even if this adds
100% to the run time."
That seems rather wasteful. The whole point of checkpointing is to
avoid having to waste time recalculating things. Since you're trading
off between two potential wastes of time, it's a more complicated
issue than you make it out to be.
For example, imagine a scenario where you have many, many jobs to run.
Each job takes a week to run. Your goal is to run the most jobs in a
given time period. Checkpointing doubles the run-time, kicking it up
to two weeks. Finally, let's say there's a 1% chance per day that the
system will go down for the day.
That means there's a 93.2% chance that we'll make it through a
non-checkpointed job without failing. Even if we do fail, there's a
93.2% chance that we'll make it through the rerun. If we make it
through either time, our worst case scenario is to tie with the
checkpointed job.
Still, occasionally, a non-checkpointed job will hit multiple failures
and take longer than a checkpointed one. But under the constraints I
provided, it should be clear that checkpointing's going to lose in the
long run.
All that being said, there are certainly scenarios where checkpointing
is the better choice, such as when it's more important to get the jobs
done within a certain deadline or when the failure rate is higher.
But it's absurd to declare checkpointing to always be the optimal
solution.
I don't know about crashing, but UltimateTV did originally have a
software problem where it would "eat" recording time, causing the
capacity of the box to decrease over time.
"You look at the logs for patterns: people who try the same port
several hundred times, people who send suspicious data repeatedly to
the same port, people who hit a large range of ports in a short
time."
You've pretty much described none of the people pounding at the
door to my machines. Someone who's attacking a random machine (as
opposed to something high profile) is generally looking for a single
vulnerability across a wide number of IP addresses. Lately, for
example, I've noticed people hitting the ssh port when before there
was nothing. Not surpisingly, there were an ssh security advisory
recently.
"It's good to see that *someone* on the Internet isn't so willing
to sell out."
Is getting financial benefits, in and of itself, really selling out?
In my mind, selling out comes when you actually start compromising
your art for the sake of cash.
Whether or not it's selling out is something we can't really decide
until we know what AOL's plans are for RedHat. If, for example, it's
part of an effort to displace Microsoft, it's feasible that AOL might
be content to just throw extra money at RedHat to get some of the
classic Linux desktop usability problems solved.
On the other hand, it's possible that AOL might turn RedHat into one
giant AOL ad. Just as they've done with ICQ and Netscape, they could
coat RedHat in an annoying layer of ads designed to increase their
user base.
Overall, though, I don't think it's fair to call it selling out just
yet. It's possible for AOL to benefit from this action without
compromising RedHat.
"It's like saying that he broke into the building even though they
gave him the key."
As I said before, the computer law for "breaking in" is jumbled
together with the computer law for "exceeding authorization". If I
give you a key to a building and tell you that you're only permitted
to use it to enter the building between 8 am and 6 pm (i.e. "regular"
hours), and you instead use it to wander through the building at 4 am,
you're doing so without permission. Due to the difficulty and
absurdity of fine-tuning all physical and digital access controls to
exactly the scope of what the recipient is permitted to do, it makes
sense for a physical access control not to carry with it carte blanche
permission to use it in all cases.
Re:This is but a symptom of our ongoing decline
on
McOwen Case Settled
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
"By giving that person a housekey you have granted them access to
your premesis. By definition they cannot be tresspassing."
You've granted them physical access. You have not, however, granted
them absolute permission -- you've granted them conditional permission
to enter your house to perform their job duties, and you've explicitly
denied permission for them to be in your study at all. By
definition, trespassing has to do with going where you don't have
permission to be, rather than going where you don't have access to --
you can trespass on an empty lot that lacks physical access control
but has signs specifically denying you permission to go there.
"30 years for a benign program on a few machines, (I live near
there, it isn't a large campus) as opposed to 6-10 for MURDER?"
I believe you're comparing his maximum sentence against murder's
average sentence, which is unfair. There's no reason to believe that
he'd receive a sentence that long, after the court fully reviews the
circumstances during trial and takes his (probably lack of) a criminal
record into consideration. This is supported by the relative leniency
(compared to 30 years hard time, at least) of the plea bargain.
It's also possible that the prosecution tacked as many charges as
possible on to the case, so that the court could choose which were
appropriate. If they went exclusively with a hacking prosecution, for
example, and the court decided that McOwen may have broken laws but
not the hacking law, the prosecution fails despite some theoretical
guilt on the part of the defendent. Given that computer crimes are a
relatively under-prosecuted area, it's not unreasonable for the
prosecution to cautiously guard against their (understandable)
inexperience.
"its like calling the police on your house keeper for breaking and
entering even though she has a key and is contracted to do work in
your house"
If said house keeper is rifling through the papers on my desk in the
study which she was explicitly to stay out of, then it wouldn't be
unreasonable for her actions to be considered at least trespassing. A
key isn't a blank check.
Of course, I'm not sure whether or not it would be considered breaking
and entering, but that might not be the best analogy for hacking. If
you remove all security from a computer, it'd still fall under hacking
when someone enters the system, I believe. However, with breaking and
entering, it seems like it would be questionable if someone left their
front door unlocked. I think it boils down to there being more
nuances to cover the physical crime of "being where you ain't supposed
to be" while there's a vaguer notion for the digital equivilants.
"how the heck can you charge a sysadmin with hacking into a system
that they have full privleges to in the first place?"
Having full system access (such as 'root' on a *NIX box) does not
always translate into having full authority (i.e. direct permission
from real humans) to do all actions that are permitted by that level
of access. The anti-hacking law he was charged under most likely has
a clause about using a computer system in excess of the user's
authority.
For example, while a sysadmin may have root access to a system that he
must maintain, he may not necessarily be permitted to use that access
to snoop through the VP's mail spool. Similarly, a McDonald's
employee that has the restaurant keys so he can lock up at night is
still trespassing if he abuses those keys to throw a wild party there
at 4am. Finally, it's still car theft if a chauffer decides to just
drive away with the car that he's got full physical access to.
What it all boils down to is how explicitly defined the sysadmin's
authority was in this matter.
"(White hat hacking violates US law just as black hat does.)"
I don't see how white hat hacking violates the law that you cite. It
seems to revolve around people accessing computer systems to which
they do not have permission to access. If the white hat owns the
machine on which the vulnerability testing is done, he or she hasn't
violated that law (they may potentially violate other laws, but not
the one you cite). It'd be analogous to trying to convict someone for
trespassing because they're climbing over a barbed wire fence on their
own property.
The only thing in the law even vaguely applicable is a clause
prohibiting publishing passwords or similar information with intent
to defraud. I'm fairly sure a case could be made that publically
informing people potentially at risk to a security vulnerability is
not something that has an intent to defraud.
If there's a applicable section in the law that I overlooked (given
the repetitious language and the horrible formatting in lynx), please
point it out.
Re:what about B5, Buffy, Simpsons
on
Star Trek TNG DVDs
·
· Score: 1, Offtopic
"Just get yourself a region free player, and order from here (or
New Zealand)."
I had a friend who did that. It was only after receiving the DVDs
that he found out Australia uses PAL instead of NTSC.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll admit there's a flood of reality TV shows (especially due to the previous threat of a writers' strike), but there're also still a number of decent, normal shows being produced. In an advertising-free model, I see TV either becoming completely pay-per-view or near public access in quality level. The latter would make the current round of cheap reality TV crap look good in comparison.
Still, you make a good argument with the protectionism issue. However, I'm not sure whether or not I'd consider the ReplayTV/network sharing issue specific protectionism or the general protectionism implicit in the entire copyright system. The "pick shows by keyword" issue, on the other hand, is just absurd whatever way you slice it.
Because an Oscar nomination is a hell of a lot of free advertising. "A Beautiful Mind" is currently at 7th for the past weekend's box office figures. "Lord of the Rings" isn't in the top 10. I'd be willing to bet a fair sum of money that there's a spike in next week's ticket sales for both movies.
You're paying the channel, but you aren't completely paying for the channel. If you want to pay more in exchange for no commercials, that's certainly a valid choice. Unfortunately, until technology gets to the point where individualized programming is a reality, I think you'll continue to lose out to the people who can put up with commercials and don't want to pay even more.
Yes, because everyone knows that even now, there's no content that would be of any interest to someone with an IQ over 10. Of course, I've heard people say the same thing about Slashdot, so I guess we're stuck being TV buddies.
Futhermore, if you aren't going to watch the hypothetical ad-free, content-free television, then why care if the government helps artificially maintain that television industry in a manner that only affects people who watch TV, anyway? As near as I can tell, it's like a pedestrian complaining about the toll rates on the turnpike.
There're a number of problems with your statement. First, paying for good writers is another luxury that will probably get axed in deference to cheap soap operas. Even when your writers are working for free, they'll generally have other obligations that take up their time, in an effort to put food on the table. I'm reminded of MST3K back when it was on public access cable -- the cast was lucky if they had time to prescreen the movie they were doing even once.
Another issue is that you're assuming good special effects are mutually exclusive with good writing. While it's true that certain people abuse special effects and use them as the final product, there're plenty of examples of shows that've used them just to facilitate the story. For example, while golden era X-files may've had good writing, it would've been much more difficult to suspend disbelief if they were forced to use rejected B-movie monster costumes for aliens and such in lieu of higher quality effects.
Finally, production values comprise a lot more than just the special effects. If you get a chance, catch the Brimstone series (especially the pilot) on the Sci-Fi channel when they re-run it. The writing's good stuff that focuses heavily on ethics and morality. It's got a very human-centric bias. But beyond that, the writing's complemented by downright amazing visual style. Everything from the camera work to the set design helps immerse the viewer in the dark, conflicted world of the main character. It would be a crime if a show like that were to, instead, be given production values comparable to those of The Blair Witch Project.
You mean kind of like what they do with some sports stadiums? You mean kind of like what they do with the cellular phone spectrum?
Sometimes providing a non-free, commercialized service does serve the common good. Should the electric company give power away just because they've received special consideration to use public land? Certainly not. It does, however, place them under the burden of additional government regulation. Even so, they're still a private company and still allowed to make some money.
I believe that in the lack of any other system of funding television, encrypted broadcasts that require subscription may serve the common good by providing a desireable option to consumers that would not necessarily be available by other means.
I think we seem to have a conflict of terminology. I was focusing on television programming while you were referring to the physical broadcast. Sure there's a right to have a free broadcast, but there's no right to free, quality material to fill it, hence the rest of my comments back in the original post where I refer to television turning into shoe-string budget productions.
And we, the viewers, have no right to free television. If the business model breaks down, the corporations aren't the only ones who take a hit. If ad revenue decays, networks will have to cut expenses, and the first thing to go will be some of the non-mainstream (including sci-fi and geeky markets) and expensive-to-produce (SFX, CGI, and quality production values) shows. Instead, you'll see cheap reality TV crap and other things that can be done on a shoe-string budget.
You argue for the in-game versus real world separation, yet the ability to partake in the entire in-game experience is already predicated on a widley accepted real world requirement -- specifically paying money to Mythic every month.
Since there's already one acceptable real world requirement for playing the game, you can't just reject real world requirements as a whole. Instead, you need criteria the helps differentiate between "pay Mythic XX dollars" and "don't auction your goods for real money."
Yes, but it's worth considering how involved the work-around is. For example, in the realm of books, the copy-protection work-around involves the rather tedious task of either manually retyping the entire book or using a scanner and OCR software. It's doable, but it's certainly not easy.
Likewise, if the PS2 work-around is inconvenient enough (such as the traditional mod-chip solution, which requires playing around with solder and several hundred dollars worth of easily broken Playstation internal hardware), it's going to reduce the number of people that use it. Compare this to the Dreamcast, where the copy protection was (as I understand it) completely defeatable on the software level -- you just had to download games cracked by other people, and you were set. The only requirements were having broadband and a CD burner (or a nearby friend with the same).
Anyway, I suspect one of the reasons behind Sony's goofy intermediate device driver system is to keep the Linux kit from turning into a easy, modchip-free copy protection breaker. Without their (admittedly annoying) protection system in place, I could see the PS2 Linux system being used as a giant bootloader to get the PS2 to read and execute a burned game. There would still be other software hurdles to overcome (such as any in-game copy protection checks and chopping things down to fit on a CD), but those're the same purely software hurdles that're already regularly tackled by cracking groups.
In short, even though I don't like the protection mechanisms Sony's introduced, I can understand why they did it.
You forgot the part in the Newsbytes article where he claims that all his files were lost as a result of the raid. Destruction of data is pretty extreme (and even potentially unconstitutional if we consider data as a form of property), especially considering he hasn't been charged yet.
From the Newsbytes article:
Seems to me like both are being made into issues. Just because he's clearly guilty in the hacking case doesn't negate his potential first amendment rights in the bomb making case.
It's fairly obvious, for example, that you can't beat the ease with which I can use hotmail or slashdot in a "foreign" internet-enabled environment (such as an internet cafe). It's a toss-up whether or not they'll have a smart email client that can seamlessly integrate with your account, but you know they'll have a web browser capable of letting you do what you need to. Given that you can't always predict, in advance, when you may wish to access your mail in such an environment, that does make web-based mail a valid alternative for an everyday account.
Furthermore, I don't see why people insist on whining about web-based email clients, when said clients don't inherently cause an interface problem. If a given web-based email client decides to send out HTML-ized mail, it's a problem that's particular to that client (and it's a problem particular to non-web clients, as well). If a given web-based email client has a high incidence of spam comming from it, it's a problem that's particular to that free email service (regardless of whether or not the end-user uses the web to view his/her mail). Ditto for services that append advertising to outgoing email.
In short, it doesn't matter whether a person has their email displayed via the web, psychic energy waves, or even an old-school teletype. Your only concern should be with the protocol and formatting of the messages they send to and receive from the outside world.
That seems rather wasteful. The whole point of checkpointing is to avoid having to waste time recalculating things. Since you're trading off between two potential wastes of time, it's a more complicated issue than you make it out to be.
For example, imagine a scenario where you have many, many jobs to run. Each job takes a week to run. Your goal is to run the most jobs in a given time period. Checkpointing doubles the run-time, kicking it up to two weeks. Finally, let's say there's a 1% chance per day that the system will go down for the day.
That means there's a 93.2% chance that we'll make it through a non-checkpointed job without failing. Even if we do fail, there's a 93.2% chance that we'll make it through the rerun. If we make it through either time, our worst case scenario is to tie with the checkpointed job.
Still, occasionally, a non-checkpointed job will hit multiple failures and take longer than a checkpointed one. But under the constraints I provided, it should be clear that checkpointing's going to lose in the long run.
All that being said, there are certainly scenarios where checkpointing is the better choice, such as when it's more important to get the jobs done within a certain deadline or when the failure rate is higher. But it's absurd to declare checkpointing to always be the optimal solution.
So lie about your address but still provide them with the free marketing research that supports Linux.
I don't know about crashing, but UltimateTV did originally have a software problem where it would "eat" recording time, causing the capacity of the box to decrease over time.
You've pretty much described none of the people pounding at the door to my machines. Someone who's attacking a random machine (as opposed to something high profile) is generally looking for a single vulnerability across a wide number of IP addresses. Lately, for example, I've noticed people hitting the ssh port when before there was nothing. Not surpisingly, there were an ssh security advisory recently.
Is getting financial benefits, in and of itself, really selling out? In my mind, selling out comes when you actually start compromising your art for the sake of cash.
Whether or not it's selling out is something we can't really decide until we know what AOL's plans are for RedHat. If, for example, it's part of an effort to displace Microsoft, it's feasible that AOL might be content to just throw extra money at RedHat to get some of the classic Linux desktop usability problems solved.
On the other hand, it's possible that AOL might turn RedHat into one giant AOL ad. Just as they've done with ICQ and Netscape, they could coat RedHat in an annoying layer of ads designed to increase their user base.
Overall, though, I don't think it's fair to call it selling out just yet. It's possible for AOL to benefit from this action without compromising RedHat.
As I said before, the computer law for "breaking in" is jumbled together with the computer law for "exceeding authorization". If I give you a key to a building and tell you that you're only permitted to use it to enter the building between 8 am and 6 pm (i.e. "regular" hours), and you instead use it to wander through the building at 4 am, you're doing so without permission. Due to the difficulty and absurdity of fine-tuning all physical and digital access controls to exactly the scope of what the recipient is permitted to do, it makes sense for a physical access control not to carry with it carte blanche permission to use it in all cases.
You've granted them physical access. You have not, however, granted them absolute permission -- you've granted them conditional permission to enter your house to perform their job duties, and you've explicitly denied permission for them to be in your study at all. By definition, trespassing has to do with going where you don't have permission to be, rather than going where you don't have access to -- you can trespass on an empty lot that lacks physical access control but has signs specifically denying you permission to go there.
I believe you're comparing his maximum sentence against murder's average sentence, which is unfair. There's no reason to believe that he'd receive a sentence that long, after the court fully reviews the circumstances during trial and takes his (probably lack of) a criminal record into consideration. This is supported by the relative leniency (compared to 30 years hard time, at least) of the plea bargain.
It's also possible that the prosecution tacked as many charges as possible on to the case, so that the court could choose which were appropriate. If they went exclusively with a hacking prosecution, for example, and the court decided that McOwen may have broken laws but not the hacking law, the prosecution fails despite some theoretical guilt on the part of the defendent. Given that computer crimes are a relatively under-prosecuted area, it's not unreasonable for the prosecution to cautiously guard against their (understandable) inexperience.
If said house keeper is rifling through the papers on my desk in the study which she was explicitly to stay out of, then it wouldn't be unreasonable for her actions to be considered at least trespassing. A key isn't a blank check.
Of course, I'm not sure whether or not it would be considered breaking and entering, but that might not be the best analogy for hacking. If you remove all security from a computer, it'd still fall under hacking when someone enters the system, I believe. However, with breaking and entering, it seems like it would be questionable if someone left their front door unlocked. I think it boils down to there being more nuances to cover the physical crime of "being where you ain't supposed to be" while there's a vaguer notion for the digital equivilants.
Having full system access (such as 'root' on a *NIX box) does not always translate into having full authority (i.e. direct permission from real humans) to do all actions that are permitted by that level of access. The anti-hacking law he was charged under most likely has a clause about using a computer system in excess of the user's authority.
For example, while a sysadmin may have root access to a system that he must maintain, he may not necessarily be permitted to use that access to snoop through the VP's mail spool. Similarly, a McDonald's employee that has the restaurant keys so he can lock up at night is still trespassing if he abuses those keys to throw a wild party there at 4am. Finally, it's still car theft if a chauffer decides to just drive away with the car that he's got full physical access to.
What it all boils down to is how explicitly defined the sysadmin's authority was in this matter.
I don't see how white hat hacking violates the law that you cite. It seems to revolve around people accessing computer systems to which they do not have permission to access. If the white hat owns the machine on which the vulnerability testing is done, he or she hasn't violated that law (they may potentially violate other laws, but not the one you cite). It'd be analogous to trying to convict someone for trespassing because they're climbing over a barbed wire fence on their own property.
The only thing in the law even vaguely applicable is a clause prohibiting publishing passwords or similar information with intent to defraud. I'm fairly sure a case could be made that publically informing people potentially at risk to a security vulnerability is not something that has an intent to defraud.
If there's a applicable section in the law that I overlooked (given the repetitious language and the horrible formatting in lynx), please point it out.
I had a friend who did that. It was only after receiving the DVDs that he found out Australia uses PAL instead of NTSC.