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

Weev Needs To Walk

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 66 posts

Re: Weev Needs To Walk

#41

Post by meritt »

josephlord wrote: post #22
meritt wrote: post #19

Weev needs to be in prison for attempting to blackmail and extort a company over private consumer information. Unfortunately, they put Weev into prison for hacking under CFAA, which on those charges, I agree - He needs to walk because they're utterly bogus.

> Weev needs to be in prison for attempting to blackmail and extort a company over private consumer information. Can you back that up? I thought that Weev joked with friends about doing that but never took it anywhere or did anything that I would regard even as "attempting" to blackmail or extort instead just told Gawker. Would be interested if there is something but in the absence of further information my view is t…

No, I can't back it up offhand (nor do I care to go to the trouble). I'm more pointing out that I wish the case would have been of that nature (because it was definitely discussed to some degree, threatening, releasing to gawker, etc) and not on the trumped up "hacking" charges.

Re: Weev Needs To Walk

#42

Post by at-fates-hands »

RealGeek wrote: post #38

This is ridiculous. We have a legal system where murderers like George Zimmerman get away for ridiculous defense like "following someone with a gun is not illegal", "shooting is not illegal" etc. But downloading iOS is illegal? We are hounding people like Aaron Swartz & Weev and threatening them with 30 yrs in jail time for downloading a few files with wget. I guess hackers should shoot a computer with a gun after ha…

>>>I guess hackers should shoot a computer with a gun after hacking and use affluenza in their defense to get away.

While I realize this is sarcastic, there's a huge reason I stopped hacking into systems. I know its a felony, I know the government has a hard-on for making examples out of people they catch breaking into systems or doing anything they deem mildly illegal. To me, it's not worth it to test the government and try to show them the error of their ways. He was playing with fire and he knew it.

On the bright side, he's still getting what he wants. He's getting plenty of people coming to his defense. His security company is getting a lot of exposure, and people are clamoring for a review of the law his was prosecuted under. His cost is going to be spending three years in jail and having to put that he's been convicted of a felony on every job application until he retires.

If you asked him if it was worth it now, what do you think he would say?

Re: Weev Needs To Walk

#43

Post by Consultant32452 »

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #15
metatalk wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn't agree more. Weev is in no way, shape, or form a good guy. He's a horrific asshole, and the world is better with him locked up. Sadly he's locked up for the wrong reason. But he really is a stain on humanity.

As abhorrent as his personality may be, there is no reason to lock him up. Prison is not a place to just put in everyone you find disagreeable, although most governments would likely insist against that.

Actually, prison is exactly the type of place we invented for the sole purpose of putting people we find disagreeable. We create laws to attempt to define disagreeable behavior and intentionally keep them vague enough that if someone gets out of line we can lock them up.

Re: Weev Needs To Walk

#44

Post by josephlord »

meritt wrote: post #41
josephlord wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Weev needs to be in prison for attempting to blackmail and extort a company over private consumer information. Can you back that up? I thought that Weev joked with friends about doing that but never took it anywhere or did anything that I would regard even as "attempting" to blackmail or extort instead just told Gawker. Would be interested if there is something but in the absence of further information my view is t…

No, I can't back it up offhand (nor do I care to go to the trouble). I'm more pointing out that I wish the case would have been of that nature (because it was definitely discussed to some degree, threatening, releasing to gawker, etc) and not on the trumped up "hacking" charges.

No problem, I am genuinely interested if there is more to the blackmail allegation than the snippet of IRC logs discussing it. Obviously it was released to Gawker but I hadn't seen anything indicating a threat of any kind was actually made and the release to Gawker appears to me specifically NOT making a blackmail attempt (assuming no such threat was actually made).

Re: Weev Needs To Walk

#45

Post by ternaryoperator »

This article and others about Weev seem convinced that his sentence is attributable to his unpleasant personality and his previous malice on the net.

In the absence of evidence that this was part of the judge's sentence, this seems like speculation. Which leaves the one real question: whether the sentence is fair independent of Weev's character.

The sentence strikes me as certainly on the heavy end of the spectrum, but not so outside the bounds of what's just that I feel some grave injustice has been visited upon him.

Re: Weev Needs To Walk

#46

Post by lawnchair_larry »

skolor wrote: post #26
eCa wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t even understand what they are. Should a prosecutor be allowed to prosecute a case if he doesn't understand the actions taken by the prosecuted? How can he be sure that a crime has been commited? > He had to download the entire iOS system I guess the prosecutor has downloaded the entire iOS system to his Iphone. I guess he doesn't know that he has done that.

> Should a prosecutor be allowed to prosecute a case if he doesn't understand the actions taken by the prosecuted? Yes. There's no reason a prosecutor needs to understand the details of exploit development in order to prosecute a case related to it. A hyperbolic comparison would be to claim a prosecutor needs to be able to build a nuke if they were to prosecute someone who built one in their garage. A more apt compar…

Nothing about this case has anything to do with exploit development.

Re: Weev Needs To Walk

#47

Post by metatalk »

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #15
metatalk wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn't agree more. Weev is in no way, shape, or form a good guy. He's a horrific asshole, and the world is better with him locked up. Sadly he's locked up for the wrong reason. But he really is a stain on humanity.

As abhorrent as his personality may be, there is no reason to lock him up. Prison is not a place to just put in everyone you find disagreeable, although most governments would likely insist against that.

He does his best to ruin people's lives and to destroy their spirits for fun.

he's not just disagreeable, he's a shitty human being who is exactly where he belongs.

He's just there for the wrong reasons.

I hope he grows up and changes, but all currently available evidence is that he'll never grow up. So fuck him. And fuck people like you who mischaracterize his malicious campaigns as merely being 'disagreeable'.

I hope that he targets the people you love next time he gets out. Then maybe you'll realize what an utterly worthless sack of shit you're supporting.

Re: Weev Needs To Walk

#48

Post by lawnchair_larry »

rayiner wrote: post #28

The article conveniently leaves out that he was convicted on one count of identify fraud in addition to the CFAA count: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/11/att-hacker-found-gu... , by a jury. If it had just been the CFAA count, he would've gotten just a misdemeanor.

You conveniently leave out that "identity fraud" was setting his browser User Agent string to say "iPad". Which Safari does, via the "Develop" menu, right out of the box. This distinction is meaningless and laughable.

Re: Weev Needs To Walk

#49

Post by lawnchair_larry »

meritt wrote: post #19

Weev needs to be in prison for attempting to blackmail and extort a company over private consumer information. Unfortunately, they put Weev into prison for hacking under CFAA, which on those charges, I agree - He needs to walk because they're utterly bogus.

Why does he need to be in prison for something that he didn't do at all, exactly?

Re: Weev Needs To Walk

#50

Post by tod222 »

gamblor956 wrote: post #33
angersock wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, when the state can't even articulate the act, much less why it is wrong, it is really hard to respect their jurisprudence. EDIT: And before anyone counters with "Whether you respect it or not, it's the law (and they have the power to enforce it).", do consider that such an argument is basically saying that the rule of law boils down to men with guns. I don't think that that is either noble or desirable--for a c…

In this country, the citizens have guns too. This is actually a pretty big reason for why the police are so heavily militarized here as compared to gun-prohibitionist nations like France or Germany. But the law does not boil down to men with guns--it boils down to our voluntary consent to live by the laws by choosing to live here (immigrants) or to remain here (everyone else) as opposed to somewhere else, like the wo…

> as opposed to somewhere else, like the wonderfully law-free nation of Somalia.

Ahh yes, the false dichotomy. Structure your argument to exclude all but two options, one of which is chosen to be extremely unpalatable.

Thanks for a textbook example.

Post reply on HN