Obviously what they did is wrong but the kid is 17. To me this is a prime example of where a short sentence or community service should be used. Don't ruin his life - he could be a useful employee for a tech company.
It doesn't matter what skills he has if he is morally bankrupt.
Sure, it's a crime and he knew that. That being said, let's not pretend like this is a fully developed adult human who has committed murder. This is a child (legally) who committed fraud. The brain of a 17 year old is still physically developing; the prefrontal cortex isn't fully formed. I can't fathom how you would expect them to have the capacity to fully grasp the consequences of their actions with an issue as complex as this one.
Obviously what they did is wrong but the kid is 17. To me this is a prime example of where a short sentence or community service should be used. Don't ruin his life - he could be a useful employee for a tech company.
It drives me a little nuts when people say stuff like this (they said it about Reiser, too) --- because you can say the same thing about tens of thousands of young offenders imprisoned for crimes we don't have a rooting interest in. We need to reduce sentences across the board, for both violent and nonviolent crimes, because our sentencing ranges are bonkers. But it's immoral to single out crimes committed by people…
> But it's immoral to single out crimes committed by people we identify with personally as particularly worthy of leniency.
You don't just disagree, but actually believe people asking for leniency are outright behaving immorally. You can disagree without calling someone immoral.
Sending a 17 year old to prison for a non violent crime for 2-4x as long as a murderer would get in my country seems criminal in itself (but I don't think you are immoral for advocating for it).
Reiser was a murderer. An equivalent to this crime would be a 17 Yr old who managed to pick the lock of Fort Knox with a toothpick and walk out with a 1kg gold bar.
Then you need processes in place to make sure a single person being careless cant do this much damage. There are low tech solutions that would greatly improve security[1], however the overhead this introduces is hard to justify in a world in which these breaches aren't that damaging to a company. We need to change incentives for companies by either mandating these security practices or implementing harmful repercussi…
I agree that better security practices are advisable, but you're victim-blaming. Twitter wasn't 'asking for it', and neither were the individuals who lost bitcoins; the 'hackers' intentionally perpetrated deceptions, misrepresentations, and fraud against both Twitter and the general public. If you compare what these three did to a white-collar crime, the dollar amount was small, but the behavior was egregious.
Twitter controls a platform that they profit from. They have a clear responsibility to make their platform harder to abuse. We can't simplify the "victim" as simply Twitter itself, we must (as you did) consider the other victims: the owners of the accounts that were hacked, the narrow user base of twitter that was conned, or the general user base that have lost trust in the platform. These users could have great security discipline on their own accounts, but they couldn't do anything about holes in Twitter's backend. Other comments have mentioned front door locks for the metaphor of reasonable responsibility, but in the perspective of the Twitter users themselves, the broken lock was one they didn't control. Twitter must do better in the future, and whether or not legislation is passed to pass culpability, the general public will respond to future lapses in security.
Florida has some of the most permissive laws about mugshots and criminal info. The reason for the "Florida Man" meme is not that people in Florida are more weird than anywhere else, just that it's easier to find the mugshots online.
If anyone's interested in an in depth dive into the "Florida Man" meme, the podcast Citations Needed did a great (imo) episode on it: https://soundcloud.com/citationsneeded/episode-75-florida-ma...
The _Florida Man_ documentary is also equally fascinating and depressing.
An acquaintance of mine worked at the NSA and they also deal with this. He said during his first week he made the mistake of putting a CD-ROM with some official training materials into his work system. Within 10 minute two people showed up to stop him and investigate what was going on with his computer. It was fine in the end but he was seriously reprimanded by his boss. When you can’t trust users, the answer isn’t j…
This seems silly. Network admins can determine he inserted a CD and respond immediately in person - but nonetheless issue PCs with CD-ROMs and the ability to interact with removable media?
If it’s anything like the DoD does, the reason USB ports and CD drives aren’t physically disabled is because sometimes using authorized devices and media is required to perform your official duties.
It would be nice if SEC were this dogged in its pursuit of actual insider trading.
It is. Insider trading is one of the few things it is really good at prosecuting - mostly because it's dead-easy to identify, easy to prove, often performed by idiots, and has a lot of incredibly-well established law surrounding it that makes turning piles of evidence into jail time easy. None of these reasons hold for other financial crimes, which is why there are so few bankers and executives going to jail for ever…
Providing lots of examples of prosecutions does nothing to prove they catch even the majority of insider trades because there is no ground truth to work with here.
Maybe the SEC is just good at catching people who don’t think through the paper trail.
See it's all a matter of opinion. I personally don't really care about online privacy and GDPR just gets in my way. I know that's not a very popular opinion on this site but it's the way I feel.
"Those who don’t care much about privacy might say that they have nothing to hide. Those who do worry about it might say that keeping their personal data safe protects them from being harmed by hackers or unscrupulous companies. Both positions assume that caring about and protecting one’s privacy is a personal matter. This is a common misunderstanding." https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/privacy/2019/10/pr...
"We have to put an accept button on every new website you visit or democracy will end"
I have an unrealistic idea (more of a thought experiment) that companies should face equal culpability to criminal hackers in attacks. After all, technically the way the hackers use systems /is/ authorized in a sense, even if the method of obtaining authorization is unconventional. Maybe this would get companies to pay more attention to securing their systems. From a certain perspective, Twitter is an accomplice to f…
I disagree, no system created by humans is going it be without flaws. I think it should be possible to sue a company if a victim can show that the company was negligent in its actions. Damages should be apportioned between the scammers and the company on the basis of their contributions to the act.
The sentences should run concurrently. 4 years for setting a car on fire is not unreasonable, although maybe a little harsh depending on priors. It's a dangerous thing to do. But setting five cars on fire is not particularly worse than setting one car on fire.
Setting five police cars on fire is an act of domestic terrorism. That's not in any way a normal protest action.. That's what the prosecutor will argue.
Setting five police cars on fire is punk rock, not "domestic terrorism"
Setting cars on fire is not an act of spreading terror. It is an act of defiance