The logic behind his motive is flawed. Just because there's an active homosexual/meth community on craigslist doesn't mean that members of the homosexual/meth community (or its superset, the homosexual community) are necessarily doing the flagging.
How to cause moral outrage from the entire Internet in ten lines of code
31–40 of 113 posts
Re: How to cause moral outrage from the entire Internet in ten lines of code
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
weev interview: http://www.corrupt.org/act/interviews/weev What a whackjob. Quotes: "I contend that trolling is the chief moral arbiter of the Internet. I see little difference between the methods performed by trolls on the Internet when they ruin the lives of furries and pedophiles and the methods used by Moses when he ordered the idol worshippers killed. Martin Luther contended in his tract "On the Jews and Their L…
keep in mind, he probably doesn't believe a third of that. if he'd do what he seems to have done to amazon for attention, then you know he's willing to make up inflammatory lies for an interviewer.
Trollers are sadists, period. Just because you are capable of the problem solving and coding required to pull stunts like this off doesn't justify deceiving others and causing them anguish. I have no idea if they believe the ideologies they spin to justify what they do as a perverse form of heroism. All of the worst assholes in history had ideology aplenty to justify their destructive behavior.
Re: How to cause moral outrage from the entire Internet in ten lines of code
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
> he didn't actually do anything that I think should be illegal. Registering multiple false user names? Giving false feedback? Restraint of trade? I'm not a fan of government prosecuting someone for registering on Facebook with the user name "Joe Schmoe" in order to blog anonymously about their crappy job at Microsoft. ...but I have no problem at all with the government enforcing laws against using aliases to log int…
All he did was enable Amazon to be sent some data. Amazon shouldn't just blindly accept data and trust it is legitimate. Same with creating false accounts. You can't really compare it with breaking and entering a house.
Actually, it compares very well. Your typical consumer door lock might as well just not be there to a skilled lock picker.
Re: How to cause moral outrage from the entire Internet in ten lines of code
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
He could also be seen as a free security consultant. What he did basically amounted to a victimless crime, but could have possibly been used for something worse. If Amazon has one CSRF vulnerability via an improper use of GET, there may well be more. This incident may help them tighten their systems against more malicious attacks.
How is it a victimless crime? The authors and publishers of all the books that lost sales rank were directly harmed by it. By not showing up in searches or bestseller lists, their sales were affected.
I see your point, but also that of the parent post. Is losing salesrank of a novel over the weekend (a holiday weekend no less), really a boom-or-bust kind of thing? If he'd been more malicious with this then this would be a crime with actual victims, but in this case I just can't reason through it enough to believe that.
Re: How to cause moral outrage from the entire Internet in ten lines of code
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
All he did was enable Amazon to be sent some data. Amazon shouldn't just blindly accept data and trust it is legitimate. Same with creating false accounts. You can't really compare it with breaking and entering a house.
Actually, it compares very well. Your typical consumer door lock might as well just not be there to a skilled lock picker.
I don't know... maybe this could fall into the category of 'spam' - using up resources of a remote computer without permission etc, but the fact is he wasn't the one using the resources. It was the users visiting the websites containing the iframe.
At the end of the day, IMHO this shouldn't be illegal, and no action should be taken. Amazon was extremely silly to accept user flagging from a GET request in an iframe.
Re: How to cause moral outrage from the entire Internet in ten lines of code
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is it a victimless crime? The authors and publishers of all the books that lost sales rank were directly harmed by it. By not showing up in searches or bestseller lists, their sales were affected.
I see your point, but also that of the parent post. Is losing salesrank of a novel over the weekend (a holiday weekend no less), really a boom-or-bust kind of thing? If he'd been more malicious with this then this would be a crime with actual victims, but in this case I just can't reason through it enough to believe that.
If you walk into a bookstore and steal a bunch of books, even on a slow business day and it causes the store/publisher/author to lose sales, but not that much, is it a victimless crime?
Re: How to cause moral outrage from the entire Internet in ten lines of code
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is it a victimless crime? The authors and publishers of all the books that lost sales rank were directly harmed by it. By not showing up in searches or bestseller lists, their sales were affected.
I see your point, but also that of the parent post. Is losing salesrank of a novel over the weekend (a holiday weekend no less), really a boom-or-bust kind of thing? If he'd been more malicious with this then this would be a crime with actual victims, but in this case I just can't reason through it enough to believe that.
How many customers did Amazon lose this weekend that will likely never hear that this was a hack? He directly and irreparably harmed the reputation of a company, how is this victimless at all?
Re: How to cause moral outrage from the entire Internet in ten lines of code
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
I should certainly hope not. While he's certainly mischievous and possibly malicious, he didn't actually do anything that I think should be illegal. He merely used Amazon's flawed system against them, at considerably personal expense. He hacked them, in other words. I can't agree with his aims in this case but you've got to hand it to him really - you don't have to like trolling in general to admit that was an amazin…
Laws exist to deter people from doing things that are possible, so the fact that their system allowed him to do it is irrelevant. The quality of the troll is also irrelevant. The fact that you commit a crime really well doesn't make it any less illegal. That said, I'm not certain what he did should have been illegal. But I can't think of a single reason he shouldn't be sued. There's no way he didn't forsee loss of re…
Posting a message that you got food poising from a local restaurant will cause them to lose money without you breaking the law. Would you say it's reasonable for them to sue you if you where telling the truth?
Re: How to cause moral outrage from the entire Internet in ten lines of code
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
I should certainly hope not. While he's certainly mischievous and possibly malicious, he didn't actually do anything that I think should be illegal. He merely used Amazon's flawed system against them, at considerably personal expense. He hacked them, in other words. I can't agree with his aims in this case but you've got to hand it to him really - you don't have to like trolling in general to admit that was an amazin…
Laws exist to deter people from doing things that are possible, so the fact that their system allowed him to do it is irrelevant. The quality of the troll is also irrelevant. The fact that you commit a crime really well doesn't make it any less illegal. That said, I'm not certain what he did should have been illegal. But I can't think of a single reason he shouldn't be sued. There's no way he didn't forsee loss of re…
How do you equate doing harm to another person with reducing revenue for a collection of entities (Amazon and its sellers)?
Consider the small startup eating an established business's lunch; surely the startup isn't liable for the losses of the larger company.
Re: How to cause moral outrage from the entire Internet in ten lines of code
#40I'm mainly wondering if he can get his face sued off over this. I've got NO doubt that this is going to have a noticable negative impact on Amazon's profits. Not world shaking, but more than enough to make the lawyers angry. As another commenter mentioned, he's been in a NYT article, with his face and full name displayed. Amazon won't have any trouble finding him.
I should certainly hope not. While he's certainly mischievous and possibly malicious, he didn't actually do anything that I think should be illegal. He merely used Amazon's flawed system against them, at considerably personal expense. He hacked them, in other words. I can't agree with his aims in this case but you've got to hand it to him really - you don't have to like trolling in general to admit that was an amazin…
"counter-intuitive" is your code word for "I can't justify it but I like it anyway?"
If his hack involved writing an innocuous demo script and presenting it to Amazon or at a conference, this would be one thing, and society is better off for the freedom to make such discoveries and talk and write about them. Society is certainly better off when it accords freedom of speech. But academic freedom ends where you start to impact other's freedom of speech. (Like effective censorship of Amazon listings.)
All my life, I've had this background occurrence of strangers have coming out of nowhere to try and haze me with some racial epithet. Almost all of these idiots carry this air of striking some sort of blow for truth and beauty, as if they're defending motherhood and the American way through their yelling and insults. To me, Weev and his ilk have the exact same sort of misguided self-righteousness.
I'm sure the one who hazed that young girl into committing suicide on MySpace felt just as clever and justified.
(Many of those Weev targets may have the same self-righteous chip on their shoulder as well, and may be just as bad in their way. It's just not a productive way to expend mental energy.)