311–320 of 502 posts
Remember Aaron.
The kid in this story just incremented sequential IDs on what was supposed to be public information.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
in this context i don't think your metaphor applies. your house isn't a freely accessible entity that has been declared as such which has certain areas of it that are off limits but never clearly defined as just that.
So what you are saying is that what matters is the intent of the property owner and the general understanding of the population about what is typically public vs private property?
in the context of the article and the problem at hand, the teenager downloaded a bunch of things that were supposed to be public access, but also accidentally downloaded some things that were confidential though not clearly marked as such (im assuming based on available information) and so the only real way he would have known they were confidential was if he actually perused the contents of them. that would be like having a room that is private property and off-limits, and it is marked as such, but the marking is inside the room and can only be seen by entering it and as such violating the private nature of said room. but really these are all just my thoughts on it and i certainly don't think i'm right or anything. it's just fun to talk ya know
The teenager was downloading publicly available records on a Freedom-Of-Information portal. Why law enforcement is involved, or why this is even remotely a criminal act, completely baffles me.
Sometimes you get Freedom of Information Act information because you got an individual's consent to release information that would otherwise not be released (e.g. something about your spouse/family member that consented to the information not being redacted).
Perhaps the same portal handled Privacy Act requests where people requested their own information that the government holds.
Since this is publicly accessible, what would be the chance that search engines indexed the files? In this case, would Google bot be charged? Or if this were, say, Equifax or Facebook. I mean, in those situations, the companies were blamed for "the leak". It seems rather convenient to cherry pick the law to apply on this poor teenager.
I think I read that Google had, in fact, indexed all of these pages.
> "The website had a number at the end, and I was able to change the last digit of the number to a different number and was able to see a certificate for someone else's animal that they adopted," he said. "I thought that was interesting."
He's like, 20 years ahead of his classmates.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So what you are saying is that what matters is the intent of the property owner and the general understanding of the population about what is typically public vs private property?
i would say that those things are certainly relevant, but it would be perhaps very myopic to say they are the only relevant concepts. one should also keep in mind the intent of the individual attempting to access the property, and the perception of what they're doing when they do within their mind as an expression of that intent, for instance. if i have been to led to believe that your property is public through a me…
This is why the law tends to fall back on what a hypothetical "reasonable person" would think.
I'm not as much of a hardliner as rayiner on this particular case as I think there are some facts in favor of thinking of these documents as public:
- it was a government website
- it was specifically set up for the purpose of sharing foia requests
- the data in the documents was not easily identifiable as private
But when it comes to the general principle where some HNers seem to think "If the webserver responds with a 200 then it's perfectly fine." I have to disagree.
Imagine a different scenario in which we were talking about tax returns instead of foia requests. You're looking at yours at http://www.canadataxes.com/return?id=1234 and you realize that if you inc the ID you get the tax return of some other random Canadian citizen. In that case it would be immediately obvious that someone had made a mistake and you were accessing information you shouldn't. A "reasonable person" would understand that a mistake had been made. It would then be clearly illegal to write a script to scrape down the docs for every ID.
Isn't the Google logo an image? Smells a bit fishy to me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there a Canadian version of the EFF, or does the EFF have an Canadian branch?
It really needs one. Cory Doctorow went to work for the EFF despite being Canadian probably because the Canadian analogues are pretty weak and disorganized by comparison.
The BCCLA is top notch if you actually need to win a court case. When they take on a case they don't fuck around, and they have high powered lawyers working pro-bono for them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The guy who found the problem or abused it is not accountable. This is clearly wrong. If I forget to lock my door when leaving my house one morning it's still trespassing if you enter the house without my permission.
You're right, it is. If you keep forgetting to lock your door then the situation changes.
We're not yet to the point where its the victim's fault when victimized by a criminal. It may seem that way when there are so many active criminals. But some places its still possible to trust your neighbors. I live in one.