The guy who found the problem or abused it is not accountable. This is clearly wrong. If I forget to lock my door when leaving my house one morning it's still trespassing if you enter the house without my permission.
You're right, it is. If you keep forgetting to lock your door then the situation changes.
That's not true at all.
I grew up in a relatively small town. Literal years went by where my parents didn't lock the back door. It would have been illegal for someone to enter the house without their permission for that entire time period.
Really worried about what the authorities might find in his 30TB of 4chan backups. Hoping for the best outcome for them.
On a differnt note, is this level of backup a common thing? 30TB is a stupid amount of anything for any one person -- I've always used wayback if I wanted to see an old page
A very good friend of mine used to obsessively back up and catalog music and books. He had all the local bands and artists well organized and preserved for posterity. Once he had a computer he started to do similar things digitally. Some people are just into it.
> I already play with urls that have possible id's in them out of habit Do you jiggle door handles out of habit to see if they're unlocked? It's antisocial behavior. If you were supposed to have access to that document, it would be accessible from a link or search box on the main site.
Door handles should be actively jiggled on the regs. If anything it's social behavior. Maybe you'll walk in on an orgy and get to join in!
That's what I'm going to tell the next inhabitant I meet while jiggling knobs!
The guy who found the problem or abused it is not accountable. This is clearly wrong. If I forget to lock my door when leaving my house one morning it's still trespassing if you enter the house without my permission.
in this context i don't think your metaphor applies. your house isn't a freely accessible entity that has been declared as such which has certain areas of it that are off limits but never clearly defined as just that.
So what you are saying is that what matters is the intent of the property owner and the general understanding of the population about what is typically public vs private property?
No OP has a point, we shouldn't talk in metaphors so much... It's not necessary. The web is in many ways a huge collection of resources that reference each other. Some of these references are explicit in links, others in text, and some are available for programmatic access. In fact many resources can be discovered by programmatic access, and there is no inherent reason to think this is wrong. Just because an API isn'…
> In fact many resources can be discovered by programmatic access, and there is no inherent reason to think this is wrong. Agreed. There is no inherent or intrinsic reason to expect that any given document or any given URL ought to be restricted. However, a look at the documents could have provided some extrinsic reason to stop looking. For example, if I find a filing cabinet full of classified documents, I will not…
If his archive was automated it's basically guaranteed he's saved a fair bit of loli content. Not sure of the legality in Canada, but this is seems like a case where they'd railroad you for something they normally don't enforce, e.g., Chris Handley in the states. CP would not be unlikely even if he just archived "safe" boards like /a/, /tv/, and /g/.
If he's scraping the softcore or hardcore boards (because nobody's archiving 4chan for its intellectual discussions), he's absolutely going to have more than a few under-18 subjects in there doing sexually explicit things. If the state can verify the age and identity of any of them, he's toast.
>nobody's scraping 4chan for its intellectual discussions
You'd be surprised. There's quite a few archives out there just for keeping up board history and discussions.
If someone told you that you could get a specific file from a filing cabinet, it would be antisocial of you to start flipping through the other files to see what was in there.
A link is not someone giving you permission, it's merely telling you where something else is. I can't think of how you even came to this conclusion. It's like you have this incredibly restricted view of the internet, limited to people clicking on a browser, and think that's enough for protecting files. It's not. You don't seem to realize how bad of an idea this is. You're talking about making criminals of people. You…
I mean you are making a request using a uniform resource locator, and the web server is responding to that request.
Best analogy I can think up is an automated free vending machine, with a row covered up by a piece of cardboard. If you don't want someone drinking the cokes on the hidden bottom row, why did you put them in the machine in the first place?
Except this data was obviously not intended to be publicly accessible, or else it would have been reachable from some public-facing portion of the site.
You’ve never heard of an API then? This is silly. Your door analogies have no place at all. A great many websites work this way. Unless you’re injecting metacharacters into URLs, or requesting AAAAAAAA * 65535 followed by shellcode, changing paramter values is using HTTP exactly as designed, and a well-formed request has many possible error codes for the exact purpose of letting you know what you are allowed to acces…
Supporting your examples, in previous GIS work I have iterated through a series of public URLs with file ID integers in them (Corresponding with individual document IDs) to batch-mirror whole public GIS datasets from government websites. This was on a public server, no http authentication or username/password, just something that was presented with a terrible javascript user interface only designed to retrieve one file at a time, slowly. Exactly the sort of thing that got this guy arrested.
Government documents and web servers are private property. (The information within might be public, but it's illegal to access private property in an unauthorized way to get public information). Ordinary law-abiding people do the things that property owners expect them to do (or what they reasonably infer the property owners intend them to do). If there are signs (literal or figurative) that the property owner doesn'…
Except this teenager was explicitly authorized to access all those files. He literally asked the web server "can I have these files" and it responded with "yes, you are authorized, here you go". If he wasn't authorized, the server should have responded with a 403 Forbidden! Web servers are built around authentication and access rights! It is not the teen's fault that the government doesn't know how to configure them…
Failure to properly secure one's private property does not make it legal for someone else to access it.
This reads like the beginning of The Hacker Crackdown.. As a Canadian, reading this article made me angry. If the information is not supposed to be public, it should not be reachable without authorization or authentication. Never mind a curious 19-year-old, there are tons of crawlers and indexers out there that attempt to enumerate URLs where they think there might be other content. Shame on them for building a poorl…
This seems more like a failure to develop proper social norms with regard to Internet information. > If the information is not supposed to be public, it should not be reachable without authorization or authentication. I don't lock my car, and often not my house either. I don't think that means you should be able to snoop around and see what interests you. Websites are private property. It is obvious what parts you're…
I never locked my car, back when I was driving a shitty old Cavalier. That seems to say something about how government views its citizens' data.