Really worried about what the authorities might find in his 30TB of 4chan backups. Hoping for the best outcome for them.
Teenager facing prison for downloading unsecured files from government website
471–480 of 502 posts
Re: Teenager facing prison for downloading unsecured files from government website
#472Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.)
Re: Teenager facing prison for downloading unsecured files from government website
#473The only thing about this article that didn't irritate me.
Re: Teenager facing prison for downloading unsecured files from government website
#474The only part of this article that didn't irritate me.
Re: Teenager facing prison for downloading unsecured files from government website
#475Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Making a mistake doesn't revoke someone's property rights. This is a non-sequitur, nobody is saying anything about anyone's property rights being revoked. The teen asked for access, and the content owners, via the permissions they had configured, granted it. Sure they can later decide that this was a mistake, but that doesn't make it theft for the teen to have asked for access.
Making a mistake doesn't revoke someone's property rights. They made a mistake when configuring their web server. It's obvious that this was a mistake because some of the documents contained private information from Canadian citizens.
Per the tech article, it was an open archive of public documents that the government published periodically. The reasonable assumption is that the files were all public, and there's no reason to suspect the teenager in this case thought otherwise. The fact that ~3% of the files weren't properly redacted (whatever that means) is hardly "obvious".
> Making a mistake doesn't revoke someone's property rights.
Let's keep things constructive please.
Re: Teenager facing prison for downloading unsecured files from government website
#476Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
A) is not comparable to the current situation because you are the one initiating the action. I can't stop you from sending me an email so it can't be a crime on my part if you do so.
Re: Teenager facing prison for downloading unsecured files from government website
#477Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except this teenager was explicitly authorized to access all those files. He literally asked the web server "can I have these files" and it responded with "yes, you are authorized, here you go". If he wasn't authorized, the server should have responded with a 403 Forbidden! Web servers are built around authentication and access rights! It is not the teen's fault that the government doesn't know how to configure them…
Failure to properly secure one's private property does not make it legal for someone else to access it.
Edit: after few days you realize that the trash on your curb shouldn't have been there. Then you raid the trash company because your brother is a cop.
Re: Teenager facing prison for downloading unsecured files from government website
#478And this is why I'm going to route all my kids traffic through an offshore VPN by default and whitelist low latency stuff.
I'm starting a proxy project that can be used in countries where VPN is illegal. I'm looking for collaborators. https://github.com/UncleGrape/UncleGrape
Re: Teenager facing prison for downloading unsecured files from government website
#479Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.)
The Internet should be treated the same. Anything put on the Internet should be presumed to be public unless there is some indication to the contrary.
In this case, most of the information he accessed was clearly intended to be public, so there was no reasonable way for him to know that there was some private information improperly co-mingled with the public information, so he can't be faulted for not realizing that he shouldn't have accessed some of the information.
Re: Teenager facing prison for downloading unsecured files from government website
#480Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
A very good friend of mine used to obsessively back up and catalog music and books. He had all the local bands and artists well organized and preserved for posterity. Once he had a computer he started to do similar things digitally. Some people are just into it.
I had a lot of things saved through Instapaper right from its inception, but I stopped using it regularly and one day when I went back I didn't appear to have anything saved anymore.
Since then, I've been much quicker to download things I might want in the future. Storage is cheap, archaeological effort is not.