I can give a very anecdotal example, where I live all the doors on the flat look the same, the just have small numbers over the door. Because the exit door is the same just without a number and it is next to the door of my flatmate. Because I was in a hurry I accidentally entered my flatmate room when I intended to get out of the flat. This is more or less the same.
Teenager facing prison for downloading unsecured files from government website
391–400 of 502 posts
Re: Teenager facing prison for downloading unsecured files from government website
#392I agree with many of the comments here, along the lines of "intent?" and "bad law", etc... How can I provide material assistance to either this kid and/or to the problem at large? I'm looking for something other than "donate to the EFF [or equiv.]" ideally though; I'd prefer to donate directly to his legal fund, or even do some legwork myself that will help, etc. And ideally in a way that not only helps him, but that…
I'm not an expert in Canadian law, but are there any elected officials in the chain of the decision to conduct a raid? If so this ought to be severely career limiting. If it was an elected judge who approved the warrant, for example.
FYI - Judges aren't elected in Canada. Good point though. The real question is who continues this process now that it has clearly been exposed.
Re: Teenager facing prison for downloading unsecured files from government website
#393I agree with many of the comments here, along the lines of "intent?" and "bad law", etc... How can I provide material assistance to either this kid and/or to the problem at large? I'm looking for something other than "donate to the EFF [or equiv.]" ideally though; I'd prefer to donate directly to his legal fund, or even do some legwork myself that will help, etc. And ideally in a way that not only helps him, but that…
I'm not an expert in Canadian law, but are there any elected officials in the chain of the decision to conduct a raid? If so this ought to be severely career limiting. If it was an elected judge who approved the warrant, for example.
The provincial government or federal government appoints judges. [0]
But if it is anything like here in Australia (we are both Westminster systems) then this does not mean the government is held accountable. Judge appointments are assumed to be fairly neutral and it hardly ever comes up at election time.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_appointments_in_Canad...
Re: Teenager facing prison for downloading unsecured files from government website
#394Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It did, however, damage the privacy of various Canadian citizens. Did it? I understand that the stupid contractor who put this data on the website did (potentially--but note that nobody is saying that anyone has actually suffered harm because of that data being accessible). But did the teenager who got this bomb dropped on him damage anyone's privacy? As I understand it, he downloaded the data, put it on his hard d…
Can you please send me a copy of your last 3 tax returns? My email address is in my HN profile. I don't know you have don't particularly care about your financial situation, so I'm not gonna read them or share them with anyone else. I'll just keep them on my hard drive.
That's not a correct counter argument, the information he got was understood to be public and there was no reason to expect or think there was any private information on there.
If the site had said "This site provides tax returns" then there would be reason to expect the files would contain private information.
The site in question gave no indication there would be private information in those files.
Also, technical nitpick, there are some countries where tax information is public so probably not the best thing to go with.
Re: Teenager facing prison for downloading unsecured files from government website
#395Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except this data was obviously not intended to be publicly accessible, or else it would have been reachable from some public-facing portion of the site.
You’ve never heard of an API then? This is silly. Your door analogies have no place at all. A great many websites work this way. Unless you’re injecting metacharacters into URLs, or requesting AAAAAAAA * 65535 followed by shellcode, changing paramter values is using HTTP exactly as designed, and a well-formed request has many possible error codes for the exact purpose of letting you know what you are allowed to acces…
I agree, even if we assume what he did is illegal, its sort of like impounding someone's car and arresting them for dangerous driving because they went 1 mph over the speed limit. We don't do that even though it is technically illegal because that would not be a good use of the legal resources we have, which are finite. Same thing if we arrested and imprisoned everyone who fiddled with url parameter, it would be a waste of finite resources. Probably a phone call saying 'Hey can you please stop doing that would suffice in most cases.
Re: Teenager facing prison for downloading unsecured files from government website
#396Earlier quoted context omitted.
Obscurity does not mean security. Just because the link wasn't referenced does not imply it is sensitive information. Should you not have the freedom to type what you want into the address bar of a browser?
"Security" is irrelevant--there is no obligation to "secure" private property. Obscurity, on the other hand, implies that the property owner did not intend for people to access certain property. That is what matters.
Since when is "intention" legally enforceable?
Re: Teenager facing prison for downloading unsecured files from government website
#397Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It did, however, damage the privacy of various Canadian citizens. Did it? I understand that the stupid contractor who put this data on the website did (potentially--but note that nobody is saying that anyone has actually suffered harm because of that data being accessible). But did the teenager who got this bomb dropped on him damage anyone's privacy? As I understand it, he downloaded the data, put it on his hard d…
Can you please send me a copy of your last 3 tax returns? My email address is in my HN profile. I don't know you have don't particularly care about your financial situation, so I'm not gonna read them or share them with anyone else. I'll just keep them on my hard drive.
> Can you please send me a copy of your last 3 tax returns?
Options:
A) Sure, here you go. Oh wait! I didn't mean to send you those. You tricked me and stole my information. I'm going to send 15 police officers round to arrest you and then you're going to prison for years.
B) No, that's confidential.
^^ Which option do you think is more reasonable?
Re: Teenager facing prison for downloading unsecured files from government website
#398Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> I think most people would assume that documents that can only be accessed by editing an ID were not meant to be accessed. And that really is the end of the analysis.
You do realize HN provides an API that allows you to request any item by using an ID? [1]
Stories, comments, jobs, Ask HNs and even polls are just items.
They're identified by their ids, which are unique integers, and
live under /v0/item/.
For example: here is the link to the first story posted on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1
1. I don't think you can access that story by starting from the front page, because scrolling for more stories only gets you to page 25. Does that mean the intention is the story is private?
2. You can now access it by using the DOM element generated for my comment. Does that mean it's public?
Re: Teenager facing prison for downloading unsecured files from government website
#399Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Federal Government ministers all have their phone bill summaries released as part of public record with private information removed Why?
Because they want a phone line that they can talk to their spouse and children without having to field thousands of calls from well-meaning people who want to wish them a good day?
> who want to wish them a good day
I see what you did there.
Re: Teenager facing prison for downloading unsecured files from government website
#400Earlier quoted context omitted.
And the cries by old geezers in charge, yet clueless of what it is they’re “in-charge of”, that he stole it are eye rolling It’s ageism but at this point I’m pretty convinced old people should be term limited from office The problems we seem to be facing are almost entirely due to their inability to move on Youth shouldn’t spend their lives kowtowing to geezers that quit thinking and are simply peddling what’s become…
You should've stopped yourself at "it's ageism." Surely you wouldn't have had the audacity to be like "It's racism but at this point I think black people should be kept out of office." The problems here are the usual problems within governments: venality, vanity, laziness, posturing and a certain bureaucratic indifference to human life. Which are traits well established among young and old alike. Age isn't what's kee…
> The problems here are the usual problems within governments:
The problems is with humans, you have those problems in courts, companies, charities, churches, clubs and small gatherings of people. The only protection we have against it is to recognize that this will always happen and strive to correct it before and when it has happend. I feel this is a closely related to Meetoo, you need to able to ask for forgiveness, but often the people accused never really get what they have done wrong and belittle their actions.