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How is that any different than walking up to a store entrance with automatic doors and a sign that says "Welcome" on it?

• mrguyorama 9y ago
  Those doors get turned off at night, just like a server can ignore an HTTP request
  • yorwba 9y ago
    The store owner could have told you that are not welcome at any time of day. I don't think a generic "Welcome" sign or automatic door would override that.
  • rblatz 9y ago
    They can turn the servers off at night too. Some places still choose to do that. But that is unrelated to the point, if you are told that you are no longer welcome at a business, you can’t come in without it being considered trespassing. The doors automatically opening for you (200 Ok) doesn’t matter. If you wear a disguise (change ip) doesn’t matter. You can’t go in. Also I would agree that absent a specific order to stop accessing publiclly available server resources, there is an explicit permission to do so. So I’m the case of Weev I think he did nothing wrong, AT&T were the ones in the wrong.
• cmiles74 9y ago
  Well, for one it's not a physical store nor a physical entrance and there is no sign that says "Welcome". I don't think the analogy is helping to make anything more clear... It's possible it's making things more confusing. In my opinion, the bottom line is that if LinkedIn doesn't want to serve data to this company, then they should immediately cease doing so using the many well established means available to them. For LinkedIn to claim that following a URL and downloading the data is somehow "hacking their website" is entirely ludicrous. I understand they had a lawyer tell this company that they didn't want them to visit the URL, but I don't see how that somehow turns lawful web browsing into illegal hacking.