Aaron Swartz hit with 9 more felony charges in MIT hacking case • Hacker News Board

Re: Aaron Swartz hit with 9 more felony charges in MIT hacking case

#51

Post by danielweber » Wed, Sep 19, 2012, 7:19 PM UTC

biot wrote: post #41

salimmadjd wrote: post #2

This could be very troubling for scrapers, as they frequently breach the terms of service. If successfully prosecuted it would encourage and empower sites with content that get scraped to push for criminal charges and win given this precedence.

Are you suggesting that mere scraping alone would demonstrate sufficient intent to warrant prosecution? Can you elaborate? Various courts have had mixed interpretations on the enforceability of sites' terms of service. How would this impact the body of case law that has been building around automated scrapers such as the many "... vs Google" cases? Also, "precedence" is ranking something in priority; "precedent" is t…

There was a case where a company successfully got an injunction against a scraper that got pricing data, arguing that the scraper violated the federal unauthorized access statute. http://itlaw.wikia.com/wiki/EF_Cultural_Travel_v._Explorica

This is an area of law that is evolving rapidly so there may be other cases that supersede that one.

Re: Aaron Swartz hit with 9 more felony charges in MIT hacking case

#52

Post by bensw » Wed, Sep 19, 2012, 7:20 PM UTC

danielweber wrote: post #50

bensw wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>He allegedly broke into an MIT network closet to install his own hardware, so as to avoid IP-based restrictions on the content. Maybe you should read the original indictment instead of throwing around conclusions not found in evidence.

Huh? All those statements are in the original indictment. "Swartz contrived to ... break into a restricted computer wiring closet at MIT;" "Swartz connected the Acer computer to MIT's computer network" "JSTOR blocked the computer's access to its network by refusing communications from the computer's assigned IP address. ... Swartz obtained for his computer a new IP address on the MIT network ... and began again to do…

Was referring to "Install...to avoid IP based restrictions"

Re: Aaron Swartz hit with 9 more felony charges in MIT hacking case

#53

Post by aggronn » Wed, Sep 19, 2012, 7:20 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #43

SeanDav wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact seems to remain that any private individual can create a website and have the force of federal government apply to a third party as long as said party has knowingly broken the ToS and gained materially somehow from that.

Don't knowingly break the terms of service of websites for profit or to harm others. Sounds straightforward to me.

If a restaurant had a 'terms of service' that said no reselling of food that they make, should you be open to federal prosecution if you stopped by to pick up food for yourself and some co-workers? Especially if someone gave you a few dollars for the trouble of running the errand? And even more, if the restaurant has their own delivery service?

Am I missing an important distinction here? Should private companies be able to make binding rules that open people up to criminal prosecution for something that doesn't violate any laws per se? A person breaking a specific law AND breaking a ToS makes sense. A person breaking a law BY breaking a ToS doesn't make sense.

Re: Aaron Swartz hit with 9 more felony charges in MIT hacking case

#54

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Sep 19, 2012, 7:24 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #40

sp332 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a janitorial closet, not a server room. And connecting to a network is not illegal.

No, but scraping all the articles off JSTOR using MIT's negotiated access in order to put them onto BitTorrent sure is.

[deleted]

Re: Aaron Swartz hit with 9 more felony charges in MIT hacking case

#55

Post by udpheaders » Wed, Sep 19, 2012, 7:25 PM UTC

ek wrote: post #33

danielweber wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

organizations that have not contributed financially to the research charge the researchers to have their submission reviewed and published, As you point out, they are providing a valuable service. The research is peer-reviewed and published. You can argue that they aren't needed in the modern peer-to-peer wikiresearch napster world, where anyone can just publish their research wherever they want. If the researchers d…

Unfortunately, this is something that has to occur as a systematic change. Individual researchers are not to blame, necessarily. When you are told by your university that you must publish or face not getting tenure, what they mean is that you must publish in a peer-reviewed journal (or conference, since most of what we talk about here is CS and CS is still a conference field mostly). We could realign the review proce…

So true. It's not like publishing your paper on your lab's website will satsify the "publish" requirement for obtaining tenure. Why can't we separate the process of peer review from the process of letting a journal handle distribution of the paper?

My pet peeve when downloading articles from journals is that it is a chain of needless HTTP redirects and elaborate cookies. If you are accessing the network from an approved IP address, is all that really necessary? Why can't it be a simple direct download? Answer: Because they've commercialized the process of reading publicly-funded research results. And with that comes the usual mindless hoop-jumping for even the simplest things.

Many investigators will just post a copy on their lab's website anyway. And that's the link that they will often give to students who need a copy of the paper. So the whole scheme of commercializing the publishing of noncommercial research just looks silly.

Don't question it, just follow along.

Re: Aaron Swartz hit with 9 more felony charges in MIT hacking case

#56

Post by mukaiji » Wed, Sep 19, 2012, 7:26 PM UTC

cube13 wrote: post #35

drcube wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As you point out, they are providing a valuable service. The research is peer-reviewed and published. How is that a valuable service? Millions of people do that for free on the web every day. Hell, I'm doing it right now.

For cutting edge theoretical research, there are only a handful of people in the world with the knowledge to review the research. And having millions of people that really don't have a clue about it doesn't produce anything worthwhile. So it is a valuable service to provide.

Yes, but those who carry out the peer-review, are the researchers themselves: at times, at little to no cost to the publisher, simply because the reviewing scientist (and the postdoc she/he usually assigns to do the grunt work) get the "prestige" of being a reviewer/editor for a given publication.

Re: Aaron Swartz hit with 9 more felony charges in MIT hacking case

#57

Post by gavinlynch » Wed, Sep 19, 2012, 7:26 PM UTC

__del__ wrote: post #46

I'm not sure I want to live in a society where reading too many academic papers too fast is a multi-felony. "Swartz’s program was so powerful…"

Straw man.

Re: Aaron Swartz hit with 9 more felony charges in MIT hacking case

#58

Post by danielweber » Wed, Sep 19, 2012, 7:29 PM UTC

bensw wrote: post #52

danielweber wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? All those statements are in the original indictment. "Swartz contrived to ... break into a restricted computer wiring closet at MIT;" "Swartz connected the Acer computer to MIT's computer network" "JSTOR blocked the computer's access to its network by refusing communications from the computer's assigned IP address. ... Swartz obtained for his computer a new IP address on the MIT network ... and began again to do…

Was referring to "Install...to avoid IP based restrictions"

According to the original indictment, he actively worked around IP-based restrictions. See section 18.

When that didn't work, MIT put in MAC-level blocking, and he worked to evade that, too. See section 21, among others.

He later brought in another computer. See section 22.

He later brought the laptops when he connected inside the wiring closet and assigned himself IP addresses. See section 26.

I don't see any error on ef4's part, much less one that warrants a "maybe you should read"-level response.

Re: Aaron Swartz hit with 9 more felony charges in MIT hacking case

#59

Post by tptacek » Wed, Sep 19, 2012, 7:29 PM UTC

SeanDav wrote: post #49

tptacek wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't knowingly break the terms of service of websites for profit or to harm others. Sounds straightforward to me.

Yet stealing a bar of chocolate from your corner shop is not a federal crime. Additionally if you hack a site and copy all their data but don't do anything with it, is that now not a federal crime because you have not benefited materially from it?

Stealing a bar of chocolate from a website is also not a federal crime.

Re: Aaron Swartz hit with 9 more felony charges in MIT hacking case

#60

Post by rjurney » Wed, Sep 19, 2012, 7:29 PM UTC

Remember the FREE KEVIN bumper stickers?

FREE AARON.

Just to elaborate... what it seems we have here is a brilliant engineer and idealist leftie that lost his grip on what is reasonable. He seriously fucked up, and then he seriously fucked up by getting caught. He isn't a hardened criminal, he wasn't stealing to make money and he can almost certainly be reformed with a light sentence, community service and probation.

Only the oppositional system doesn't see things that way.