361–370 of 502 posts
I've contacted the reporter to see if we can setup a legal fund for this guy. It sounds like he's being bullied. This could also get a very bad precedent in Canada as this is totally absurd.
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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…
I hear what you are saying about the intent of the actor, but that's tricky. What if the actor doesn't believe in private property? What if the actor accidentally misreads "private" as "public."? These things aren't really mitigating. 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 som…
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A link is not someone giving you permission, it's merely telling you where something else is. I can't think of how you even came to this conclusion. It's like you have this incredibly restricted view of the internet, limited to people clicking on a browser, and think that's enough for protecting files. It's not. You don't seem to realize how bad of an idea this is. You're talking about making criminals of people. You…
I have a view of the Internet where “protecting files” has nothing to do with whether access to files is authorized or not. I shouldn’t have to lock my door, and I shouldn’t have to lock down my web server. (It may be prudent to do those things, but a trespasser shouldn’t escape penalty just because I didn’t do those things.)
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These analogies are not helping. Here's what actually happened: the accused allegedly sent requests to a web server asking "may I please look at the document with id X?" for various values of X. Each time the web server had the option to say "no, you may not", or even "no, that document doesn't exist." Instead, it responded each time by sending the requested document. That's all that happened: someone used HTTP in th…
The computer is not a person and what it does only matters insofar as you may infer that the owner of the property programmed it to do what the owner intended. As you admit, the property owners did not intend those documents to be accessible. So the only relevant question is: would a reasonable person infer that documents which could only be accessed by editing a URL (by "tricking the HTTP server," if you insist on a…
Except there's no way to know whether that's the only way to access those documents. That's what access control is for. They could be linked from elsewhere for all you know, and it's perfectly reasonable to assume that if you can access the document by punching in a URL, then it is so accessible.
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Please keep us informed on the outcome. I have written a letter to my MP and MLA as well as the MP for Halifax.
He got back to me and said there is no legal fund at this time. These people need to hire a lawyer ASAP. Their sons life is over because he wrote a for loop with wget. for i in `seq 1 7000`; do wget http://foi.example-gov-domain.gc.ca/foi-download.cgi?id=$i; done Boom, you are not going to federal prison for 10 years! What a complete joke!
Really worried about what the authorities might find in his 30TB of 4chan backups. Hoping for the best outcome for them.
It doesn't actually matter, unless he's KNOWS he's downloaded something illegal and KNOWS how to find it on his computer, or has opened it already and not deleted it. Basically all possession laws (really all laws in general) require some sort of knowledge and intent. Just like you can't be convicted for possession of drugs if they were stuck to the bottom of your shoe when you came out of a club (don't actually try…
Clearly not all laws in general: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=188420...
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On a differnt note, is this level of backup a common thing? 30TB is a stupid amount of anything for any one person -- I've always used wayback if I wanted to see an old page
Here's an entire forum of them on reddit, it's called /r/datahorder.
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Sounds like you might be thinking of an anchor element. People ask for the "link" when they mean the URI all the time.
Wikipedia disagrees: > In computing, a hyperlink, or simply a link, is a reference to data that the reader can directly follow either by clicking, tapping, or hovering. A hyperlink points to a whole document or to a specific element within a document. Hypertext is text with hyperlinks. The text that is linked from is called anchor text. A software system that is used for viewing and creating hypertext is a hypertext…
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No OP has a point, we shouldn't talk in metaphors so much... It's not necessary. The web is in many ways a huge collection of resources that reference each other. Some of these references are explicit in links, others in text, and some are available for programmatic access. In fact many resources can be discovered by programmatic access, and there is no inherent reason to think this is wrong. Just because an API isn'…
> In fact many resources can be discovered by programmatic access, and there is no inherent reason to think this is wrong. Agreed. There is no inherent or intrinsic reason to expect that any given document or any given URL ought to be restricted. However, a look at the documents could have provided some extrinsic reason to stop looking. For example, if I find a filing cabinet full of classified documents, I will not…
Per the articles: nothing was "classified", it was an archive of public documents that the government published periodically. The issue is that a small subset weren't redacted properly - but there's no apparent reason the teen would have known that.
It appears that someone simply archived a bunch of documents they reasonably believed to be public information.