51–60 of 76 posts
This sets a dangerous precedent. Soon there will be laws written that you cannot criticize the policies of the federal government on a website. And so on. I would gladly defend this guy, even if he is a scumbag.
That said, I'm usually skeptical of CFAA charges when the accused has done something objectionable but not necessarily illegal (see: weev).
Should it be illegal to operate a website that hosts user-generated content, some of which is illegal, if you take reasonable steps to remove the illegal content when informed of its existence? The answer is pretty clearly "no." But this position becomes more difficult to defend when the entire premise of the website is based on illegal content. Something like e.g. if YouTube was originally named ShareMusicIllegally.…
Well, let's be clear here. He didn't build a business that operated around hosting arbitrary images, that happened to be adopted by bad people for bad purposes. He was a bad person himself, who built a bad website, to assist other bad people. These are two very different things.
I mean, I understand how you could imagine some other website, a neutral website, that was unintentionally adopted by bad people for bad purposes, and that other website could do the same sort of damage, unintentionally, that this website did to its victims, intentionally, and that hypothetical situation is sort of similar to this one if you look upsidedown and squint.
But in the moral code of most people (for example, mine) and for that matter the US legal system, it's important not just that you have bad effects, but that you have a bad intent. This is why, for example, murder is different than manslaughter. In both cases somebody is dead because of your actions, but in only one case did you form a specific intent to kill another person. (And manslaughter is, for the record, not "no intent", but it is a lesser kind of intent, like firing a gun into a building without regard for whether or not it is occupied. It's a bad intent, just not bad enough to be murder.)
I think where hackers get hung up is in some sort of weird Net Neutrality-ish argument where any packet is as good as any other packet, and so a packet that carries revenge porn is just as legitimate as a packet that carries cat videos. Packets are neither good or bad but just are and all packets have the same legitimate claim on arriving to their destination as any other. And if you are designing a router, that sounds like a very sound principle to me.
But in the courtroom, we are not prosecuting packets, but prosecuting people. And people are more than just a function of the packets they send. They have motives, they have intents. They construct a conscious plan to do good or to do evil. And that is how they are judged.
Should it be illegal to operate a website that hosts user-generated content, some of which is illegal, if you take reasonable steps to remove the illegal content when informed of its existence? The answer is pretty clearly "no." But this position becomes more difficult to defend when the entire premise of the website is based on illegal content. Something like e.g. if YouTube was originally named ShareMusicIllegally.…
> Mr Moore is said to have paid Mr Evens to hack into hundreds of victims' email accounts to obtain more nude photos to post on the website. I think this is what they are charging him for - not for hosting genuine UGC.
This is hacked personal data, not 'revenge porn'.
'revenge porn' is the new 'rainbow parties'
Should it be illegal to operate a website that hosts user-generated content, some of which is illegal, if you take reasonable steps to remove the illegal content when informed of its existence? The answer is pretty clearly "no." But this position becomes more difficult to defend when the entire premise of the website is based on illegal content. Something like e.g. if YouTube was originally named ShareMusicIllegally.…
Isn't this basically GrooveShark's business model?
Should it be illegal to operate a website that hosts user-generated content, some of which is illegal, if you take reasonable steps to remove the illegal content when informed of its existence? The answer is pretty clearly "no." But this position becomes more difficult to defend when the entire premise of the website is based on illegal content. Something like e.g. if YouTube was originally named ShareMusicIllegally.…
> But this position becomes more difficult to defend when the entire premise of the website is based on illegal content. Something like e.g. if YouTube was originally named ShareMusicIllegally.com. Isn't this basically GrooveShark's business model?
Should it be illegal to operate a website that hosts user-generated content, some of which is illegal, if you take reasonable steps to remove the illegal content when informed of its existence? The answer is pretty clearly "no." But this position becomes more difficult to defend when the entire premise of the website is based on illegal content. Something like e.g. if YouTube was originally named ShareMusicIllegally.…
This is but a handful of data points, but a lot of the rumblings I've heard about this whole trend have been coming from lawyers who take a specific interest in protecting free speech. This includes Marc Randazza, who was mentioned in the article. This also includes Ken White at Popehat, who has an entire tag devoted to IsAnybodyDown (a knockoff of Moore's site that added more crimes into the bargain). There's defini…
[1] http://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?filena...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That may be true, but remember that if you have the right to host whatever legal content you wish, then the first step toward losing that right is to not defend it. Sometimes that requires defending scoundrels. Making a UGC revenge porn site doesn't need to be defended by anyone. I feel like your comment is a troll. I shouldn't be arguing with a troll and I expect HN to not have them. I'll stop at that.
FWIW, I think you're being unduly harsh. I wonder whether you misunderstood a valid point made by sillysaurus2, specifically that there is an ends-vs-means issue here. I doubt anyone reading this comment would condone the operation of such a nasty site or have much sympathy for someone who ran one. Nevertheless, it is important to be clear about why we feel such behaviour is morally wrong and should be penalised. Wha…
When it's editorially uploaded, as it is here? Sure should.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there a large chasm between "upload content" and "submit [content]"? Is the difference in the latter case just that someone clicks "ok, post this"? I don't think that a quality-review (or lesser, a mechanism to queue and release content to the site slowly over time) turns user-generated-content into site-generated-content. If Youtube did a quality review, it would still be UGC. If Youtube did a post-facto quality…
Not a lawyer, but it seems like posting the content yourself could ruin a Section 230 defense: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicatio... Also, I'm not sure why a quality-review process would lessen culpability if all the illegal stuff gets through anyway.
This article seems pretty concluded. For one, it doesn't seem like they are charging anyone for the revenge porn site, rather they are charging him as an accomplice in "hacking" peoples emails. Worse yet, they then bring in the $250,000 fine imposed by the court for defamation and that has nothing (or seemingly) nothing to do with the current case at all. In other words... what the hell is this article about?
The rest of the article is background explaining who Hunter Moore is, to clarify why his arrest is newsworthy.