Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Andrew 'Weev' Auernheimer Faces Jail

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 71 posts

Re: Andrew 'Weev' Auernheimer Faces Jail

#41

Post by alexjeffrey »

davidw wrote: post #36
lukifer wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds to me like you're manufacturing normalcy. Reality is too complex to fit into a narrative. Our system manages to be both corrupt and democratic at the same time, with money, fame and influence all helping to distort outcomes, both on behalf of private interests and We The People.

There is corruption in pretty much any system without a complete and total police state. Most western democracies are highly imperfect. But they're a lot better than pretty much anything else that has been tried, and if people work hard , they can continue to improve them. Hard work means "getting out of the building" though.

In the words of Churchill: it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried.

Re: Andrew 'Weev' Auernheimer Faces Jail

#43

Post by osamas_mama »

i love weev and i had a blast trolling with him back in the day but he's nothing like swartz. the biggest split being that swartz had good intentions whereas weev was having fun.

i don't think he should be imprisoned for exploring at&t's god awful security but i also don't think he should be worshipped.

Re: Andrew 'Weev' Auernheimer Faces Jail

#44

Post by crusso »

sergiotapia wrote: post #39

"In 2010, Auernheimer and a compatriot, Daniel Spitler, discovered that visiting an unsecured AT&T Web server and entering a number associated with the customer's wireless account allowed him to obtain that customer's email address. By altering the number and repeatedly querying the server, Auernheimer and Spitler were able to obtain hundreds of thousands of email addresses, which they then released to Gawker." === A…

Testing car door handles in a full parking lot is amazingly simple too. Does that mean it's okay to look through any unlocked cars' glove compartments to collect personal information of the owners?

Auernheimer crossed a line. The punishment seems excessive, but then again I don't know all the details of what he tried to do with the data.

The fact that he obtusely refuses to recognize that he crossed a line doesn't exactly make me feel sorry for him.

Re: Andrew 'Weev' Auernheimer Faces Jail

#45

Post by jdkx »

rwmj wrote: post #33
rytis wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just out of curiosity, where do you live?

The UK, but my answer would equally well apply to the US or the majority of democratic nations. There's not a Big Conspiracy. There's just lots of people, often stupid and ill-informed, but nevertheless people voting for what we want.

It's not a conspiracy but the effect is just the same. Selective enforcement of laws that make everyone a criminal allows people in positions of power to target anyone they wish. This is made worse in countries where penalties are very severe, like the US.

Re: Andrew 'Weev' Auernheimer Faces Jail

#46

Post by betterunix »

rwmj wrote: post #21
maeon3 wrote: post #13

When everyone is a criminal all the time, with selective enforcement, it makes it easier to tax and control. When political winds shift, you can eliminate anybody you want, because you just make an excel spreadsheet of political enemies and then forward it by email to law enforcement for increased survallence, and whamo, felony convictions, how much you want? 1 year? 5 years? 10 years? The government is just trying t…

I guess you must live in China. Here where I live, the government is made up of ordinary people who are also subject to the law, and we can vote to change the law whenever and however we want.

Where I live, the people are too apathetic and uninformed to care, and they just keep voting for the same right-wing politicians in election after election. I live in a country with an order of magnitude more prisoners than any other, where there are so many laws on the books that the government itself cannot even keep track of them all.

Re: Andrew 'Weev' Auernheimer Faces Jail

#47

Post by rcfox »

crusso wrote: post #44
sergiotapia wrote: post #39

"In 2010, Auernheimer and a compatriot, Daniel Spitler, discovered that visiting an unsecured AT&T Web server and entering a number associated with the customer's wireless account allowed him to obtain that customer's email address. By altering the number and repeatedly querying the server, Auernheimer and Spitler were able to obtain hundreds of thousands of email addresses, which they then released to Gawker." === A…

Testing car door handles in a full parking lot is amazingly simple too. Does that mean it's okay to look through any unlocked cars' glove compartments to collect personal information of the owners? Auernheimer crossed a line. The punishment seems excessive, but then again I don't know all the details of what he tried to do with the data. The fact that he obtusely refuses to recognize that he crossed a line doesn't ex…

If you have a lot full of unlocked cars, perhaps you should bear some of the blame too?

When Sony was hacked and user data was leaked, they received quite a bit of blame. At least they had some semblance of security. AT&T was wide open.

Re: Andrew 'Weev' Auernheimer Faces Jail

#48

Post by betterunix »

rwmj wrote: post #33
rytis wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just out of curiosity, where do you live?

The UK, but my answer would equally well apply to the US or the majority of democratic nations. There's not a Big Conspiracy. There's just lots of people, often stupid and ill-informed, but nevertheless people voting for what we want.

"There's just lots of people, often stupid and ill-informed, but nevertheless people voting for what we want."

How exactly do you think uninformed people are voting for what they want? The USA is a country where people are surprised by what is illegal.

Re: Andrew 'Weev' Auernheimer Faces Jail

#49

Post by crusso »

arbuge wrote: post #34

It seems to that the real villain is AT&T, for making this private data entrusted to its care freely available to the public. What criminal and civil liabilities will it face?

That's disingenuous. "Freely available" implies that AT&T desired to give this data away or advertised it knowingly. Clearly they didn't.

What Auernheimer did, with intent, was to bypass AT&T's intended use of the system.

What AT&T did was incompetent or perhaps even negligent by a reasonable notion of corporate coding standards. You'd need to dig a bit more to learn how systemic the incompetence/negligence was before attempting to sign appropriate blame, though. Maybe some contractor got into the system and made the change that made that exploit possible the day before and deployed it without following AT&T release guidelines. I dunno. Knowing that kind of info matters, though.

Let's not twist the facts of what happened in order to justify different outcomes.

Re: Andrew 'Weev' Auernheimer Faces Jail

#50

Post by Nrsolis »

rcfox wrote: post #47
crusso wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Testing car door handles in a full parking lot is amazingly simple too. Does that mean it's okay to look through any unlocked cars' glove compartments to collect personal information of the owners? Auernheimer crossed a line. The punishment seems excessive, but then again I don't know all the details of what he tried to do with the data. The fact that he obtusely refuses to recognize that he crossed a line doesn't ex…

If you have a lot full of unlocked cars, perhaps you should bear some of the blame too? When Sony was hacked and user data was leaked, they received quite a bit of blame. At least they had some semblance of security. AT&T was wide open.

"But your honor! SHE WAS ASKING FOR IT! You can see how she dresses."
Post reply on HN