Item — HN Reader

"In 2010, Auernheimer and a compatriot, Daniel Spitler, discovered that visiting an unsecured AT&T Web server and entering a number associated with the customer's wireless account allowed him to obtain that customer's email address.

By altering the number and repeatedly querying the server, Auernheimer and Spitler were able to obtain hundreds of thousands of email addresses, which they then released to Gawker."

===

Amazing that something as simple as that landed him 10 years. This is something even I have done with some servers for telecoms in my country. And trust me, I'm no hacker. I just know basic HTTP GET request parameters, and what asshole doesn't know about those?

The laws in the US are terrible.

1 comments

Testing car door handles in a full parking lot is amazingly simple too. Does that mean it's okay to look through any unlocked cars' glove compartments to collect personal information of the owners?

Auernheimer crossed a line. The punishment seems excessive, but then again I don't know all the details of what he tried to do with the data.

The fact that he obtusely refuses to recognize that he crossed a line doesn't exactly make me feel sorry for him.

"Auernheimer crossed a line"

The problem is where the line is drawn, not whether he crossed it.

If you have a lot full of unlocked cars, perhaps you should bear some of the blame too?

When Sony was hacked and user data was leaked, they received quite a bit of blame. At least they had some semblance of security. AT&T was wide open.

If you have a lot full of unlocked cars, perhaps you should bear some of the blame too?

Yeah, and women wearing sexy dresses walking alone without mace deserve to get raped?

Auernheimer crossed a line. Just because AT&T was stupid doesn't make what he did right.

Customers' and the legal systems' dealing with AT&T's incompetence/negligence is a separate matter.

It's more akin to having a valet service and leaving people's cars unlocked, I think.

"But your honor! SHE WAS ASKING FOR IT! You can see how she dresses."

You've missed my point. If you were in a parking lot and found your car to be unlocked, this might alarm you. You might try someone else's door to see if it's similarly unlocked, and just to be sure it's not a fluke, you might try another.

I'm not even going to try to adapt that to your rape scenario. I feel like there should be an equivalent of Godwin's law that I could appeal to in this context.

You paint far too innocent a picture of what happened. If we're going to use analogy, can't we make an effort to have it be accurate?

Let's roll with your scenario -- Do you systematically go through all the cars in the lot? Do you collect personal information from those cars, like names on the insurance? Do you get busted making on-the-record comments about exploiting the use of that data for your own personal gain?

Seriously, weev was hardly being a good samaritan. He was doing something he shouldn't have been doing, made some stupid/incriminating comments in a public forum, then didn't handle the data properly. Worst of all, he's facing serious jail time and is too obnoxious to even admit that what he did might have been inappropriate.

Personally, I'm all for living in a world where you can leave your car door unlocked and not be blamed when someone opens the door. Call it a Godwin-esque move if you want, but I'm just not into blaming victims.

Ack! You beat me to the "asking for it" analogy.