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Accessing Publicly Available Information on the Internet Is Not a Crime

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Re: Accessing Publicly Available Information on the Internet Is Not a Crime

#161
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, there is precedent for that at least in the EU. You are not legally allowed to take a photo of the Eiffel Tower at night, because the arrangement of bulbs are considered works of art, and thus copyrighted.

You mean, you're not allowed to distributed non-transformed copies of the photo?

I'm not a lawyer, I'm just repeating what I heard on the "Today I Found Out" YouTube Channel.

Re: Accessing Publicly Available Information on the Internet Is Not a Crime

#162
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When a server sends you a response you aren't taking something, you are being given something. If the server thought you shouldn't have it, it wouldn't give it to you. How can you say that hiQ isn't allowed to have this, but everyone else is allowed to take as much as they like? All that will happen is hiQ will create a string of shell companies that accesses LinkedIn as their proxies, and you will be wasting the cou…

> When a server sends you a response you aren't taking something, you are being given something. If the server thought you shouldn't have it, it wouldn't give it to you. That's not even a rational argument, ask some hacker sitting in prison how well that one went over. > How can you say that hiQ isn't allowed to have this, but everyone else is allowed to take as much as they like? Umm, private property? Terms of serv…

"Hacking" involves subverting authentication systems, which is a type of fraud. When there is no authentication system there can be no "hacking", and the CFAA should not be applicable.

The data itself isn't LinkedIn's property (argued elsewhere), so they don't have control over it after it leaves their servers.

This is wandering... please decide whether you want to argue the article, the case, or hypothetical free coffee.

Re: Accessing Publicly Available Information on the Internet Is Not a Crime

#163
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where I live it is 100% legal to shoot them with no questions asked. 100% legal (castle doctrine) to shoot them, think about that for a minute, not generally legal to shoot someone engaging in a legal activity. --edit-- Also legal to shoot them through the door but probably not such a good plan...

No, you just think it is. The intruder must be there to commit a further crime, usually a violent one. An intruder must be making (or have made) an attempt to unlawfully or forcibly enter an occupied residence, business, or vehicle. The intruder must be acting unlawfully (the castle doctrine does not allow a right to use force against officers of the law, acting in the course of their legal duties). The occupant(s) o…

I am aware of a few southern states where the statute assumes the intruder intends to harm you. UncleEntity is likely correct.

Re: Accessing Publicly Available Information on the Internet Is Not a Crime

#164
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The industry is held to no standards at all. You can keep plain-text passwords in your databases, do no tests at all, and be incompetent in a million other ways. I usually get downvotes when I say this, but by now there needs to exist certain regulation on commercial software and software-based services. It should be ensured that certain practices are followed in security and ethics (do you take the basic, well known…

> It should be ensured that certain practices are followed in security Let's not legislate specific practices. Imagine if we had security legislation from 1995 to follow when programming today. Imagine trying to explain to senators why last year's XSS protection rules need updating. Imagine Oracle lobbying to get their database enshrined as the "security-compliant" one. The law should focus on outcomes: if a site get…

"Security compliance" is about how you use a given database, not which one you happen to use. You can securely (but inefficiently) store credentials in a plain text file.

WRT some defences becoming outdated by time, well, it probably would not be two-decades behind, but a couple years or so at most. Even then, ensuring that is better then nothing.

People need tools to judge if they can safely use some product, and that's why standards exist. Otherwise companies are going to continue to screw us until they drop the balls.

Re: Accessing Publicly Available Information on the Internet Is Not a Crime

#165
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I leave my front door to my personal residence unlocked, and someone comes to the front door, opens it, and walks inside without permission --- is that illegal? I'm actually not sure.

Yes, it is. If you don't have a legal right to be on a piece of property, in a given structure, or in a vehicle, you're trespassing. If you used force to gain access to the property, vehicle or structure, it will often be considered breaking and entering. Typically, these laws use a very loose definition of "force" which includes opening an unlocked door. If you leave your door ajar, it's just trespassing. If you had…

What about walking up to someone's door and knocking to see whos home? What if there is a picket fence around the yard with a latched gate that you have to open to get to the front door?

Re: Accessing Publicly Available Information on the Internet Is Not a Crime

#166
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you expand on the last part? I don't view a publicly accessible webpage as a protected private space, just as I do not view an ad posted in a (private) window as a protected public space.

Of course. My statement was predicated on the need for active network requests to obtain information. If the bot had passively listened to network traffic from LI, then I would argue for sameness with passively looking through a window.

What if it's dark and I shine a light on your ad in the window? (The issue at hand isn't DOS or resource-based, but permission.)

Re: Accessing Publicly Available Information on the Internet Is Not a Crime

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope https://petapixel.com/2017/10/14/photos-eiffel-tower-night-i...

Nope. The linked Snopes article that they use for this viewpoint is badly worded. Although the headline claim is 'It is illegal to take photographs of the Eiffel Tower at night without explicit permission', nowhere in the text does it describe the act of taking a photograph as being illegal. It is all about publishing your photos and sharing them with others. https://www.snopes.com/photographs-of-eiffel-tower-at-nigh…

Awesome I'm going to stick a couple of LEDs on my T-shirt and then hang out in France. It'll be illegal to stick my photo on FB

Re: Accessing Publicly Available Information on the Internet Is Not a Crime

#168
post #60

Access that does not require authentication should never be a crime. If LinkedIn wants the courts to intervene, they must require authentication for their data. If they also want Google to scrape their site, they must require Googlebot to authenticate itself.

> Access that does not require authentication should never be a crime.

Careful, this could legitimize things like accidental denial of service. Depending on circumstances, even basic scraping could cause problems.

(I need to be vague to avoid violating an NDA.) A major internet site had a URL that went something like somedomain/group?id=xxxxx. It turns out that a simple scraper, that called id=1, id=2, id=3, ect, ect, caused a major problem! This was because rendering these pages required significant resources; so most active pages were kept in RAM. Of course, the scraper tried to read everything.

Of course, no one thought the scraper was malicious in any way!

Re: Accessing Publicly Available Information on the Internet Is Not a Crime

#169
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I leave my front door to my personal residence unlocked, and someone comes to the front door, opens it, and walks inside without permission --- is that illegal? I'm actually not sure.

Yes, it is. If you don't have a legal right to be on a piece of property, in a given structure, or in a vehicle, you're trespassing. If you used force to gain access to the property, vehicle or structure, it will often be considered breaking and entering. Typically, these laws use a very loose definition of "force" which includes opening an unlocked door. If you leave your door ajar, it's just trespassing. If you had…

Isn't it only trespassing if you ask the person to leave? E.g. by putting up signs?

If the door is unlocked and nobody says you can't enter, why can't you enter?

Re: Accessing Publicly Available Information on the Internet Is Not a Crime

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree, as a CTO I would be terrified if a data breach could hold me personally liable. It'd be like a Director of Security at a bank being liable for their bank being robbed with a tank. But at the same time there is a line. I would be for holding companies liable if, for instance, the data gets out there and you find it is entirely unencrypted and the passwords are MD5 hashed or plain text. There has to be a…

The Director of Security at a bank should at least be fired if their bank is robbed by a guy brandishing a banana. I'd speculate that that's the nature of most data breaches: amateur attackers taking advantage of grossly incompetent security.

Well I think bank tellers where I live are instructed to comply with robber's demands for money even if they are not visibly brandishing any weapon
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