71–80 of 104 posts
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.…
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It was a janitorial closet, not a server room. And connecting to a network is not illegal.
You're asserting that it's legal for you to plug your computer into a piece of networking infrastructure that's clearly not intended for general public use, without the permission of that network's owner? I'm going to have to slap a [citation needed] on that.
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You're asserting that it's legal for you to plug your computer into a piece of networking infrastructure that's clearly not intended for general public use, without the permission of that network's owner? I'm going to have to slap a [citation needed] on that.
It's the same network that's available elsewhere on campus, so it's not like he was connecting without authorization. Aside from possibly trespassing, what kind of crime would it be?
There's no giant sign hanging over the breaker box in my building's elevator room saying "AUTHORIZED USE ONLY", but I'm pretty sure I'd get in trouble if I went in there and started flipping switches.
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…"
As if Python was the most powerful language, heh. :) Maybe he was going for a world record of most citations in a single paper. Who's to say he wasn't just doing research? How many downloads is too many? I would be willing to bet that the JSTOR TOS do not give a specific number. e.g. "You may not download more than n papers in 24 hours." And if they don't state a maximum in the TOS, then why shouldn't they, for clari…
People who deal with the law don't have much patience for this.
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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…
I likely shouldn't discuss this topic any more
RANT: Anyone here interested in the underlying issue of academic publishing? To me, the very notion that publicly (or privately for that matter) funded academic research gets locked behind paywalls of organizations that have not contributed financially to the research endeavor published, seems like irony to me. In short, they pay not a single dime to produce the content, charge the researchers to have their submissio…
The same is true for LexisNexus.
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.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's the same network that's available elsewhere on campus, so it's not like he was connecting without authorization. Aside from possibly trespassing, what kind of crime would it be?
Are you suggesting that there's a kind of network equipment that you have to trespass to access for which people have a reasonable expectation that they are authorized to use it? There's no giant sign hanging over the breaker box in my building's elevator room saying "AUTHORIZED USE ONLY", but I'm pretty sure I'd get in trouble if I went in there and started flipping switches.
Edit: doesn't have to be wifi.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you suggesting that there's a kind of network equipment that you have to trespass to access for which people have a reasonable expectation that they are authorized to use it? There's no giant sign hanging over the breaker box in my building's elevator room saying "AUTHORIZED USE ONLY", but I'm pretty sure I'd get in trouble if I went in there and started flipping switches.
If I'm a student, and there's a switch in the teachers' lounge that connects to the same network that I am allowed to access in the rest of the school, then I can illicitly enter the teachers' lounge and plug in to that network with the same authorization that I would have outside. Edit: doesn't have to be wifi.
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No, merely violating a ToS, by itself, is not criminal. Lori Drew isn't binding on the whole country, but it is precedent.
You don't even need Lori Drew to arrive at this conclusion. The CFAA doesn't create strict liability crimes. You have to know you're violating the ToS, and, more than that, you have to benefit (or materially harm someone).