19 ms·

i can see how the older generation is thinking though, they see it like leaving a window unlocked doesn’t mean you can the laws are interpreted and applied by

• mcgarnagle 8y ago
  Yeah except it's a public space – So more like the library doors were unlocked.
• eboyjr 8y ago
  Since it helps the older generation to think about digital content in metaphors, I'd argue that the kid was entering through an open window of a public building. Although a bit strange, no one would give this hypothetical person a third look.
  • cookingrobot 8y ago
    How about looking into the display window of a shop? If they wanted to keep something secret, it should have been out of sight.
  • losteric 8y ago
    I think the most precise metaphor is: a kid walked through the front door of a public library, borrowed a couple freely available books, then the government realized those books mistakenly included sensitive information. In order to address that error, 15 police officers raided the kid's house.
    • rayiner 8y ago
      That would be an accurate analogy if these documents were linked to from a publicly-accessible portion of the site. They were not. This is more like someone walking into an unlocked back room and grabbing books that hadn't been shelved.
      • gowld 8y ago
        ...which is not a felony, because that would be insane.
      • deGravity 8y ago
        I think that's a bit harsh. The documents at that URL were understood to be freely available to the public. As I physical analogy, I'd think about it more as one of those restaurant straw dispensers. He got tired of pressing the button each time for a new straw, and instead opened the lid and grabbed a bunch out.
        • harryh 8y ago
          Going to a restaurant and taking every single straw out of the top of the straw dispenser is clearly anti-social and is probably theft.
          • bwbw223 8y ago
            But there’s a near infinite supply of straws and it didn’t damage the dispenser.
            • harryh 8y ago
              It did, however, damage the privacy of various Canadian citizens.
              • pdonis 8y ago
                > It did, however, damage the privacy of various Canadian citizens. Did it? I understand that the stupid contractor who put this data on the website did (potentially--but note that nobody is saying that anyone has actually suffered harm because of that data being accessible). But did the teenager who got this bomb dropped on him damage anyone's privacy? As I understand it, he downloaded the data, put it on his hard drive, and left it there; it never went anywhere else.
  • haser_au 8y ago
    It's more like the restricted section of the public library, and they left the door open. He just walked in, and started reading the books on the shelves, and photocopied all of the books. If there were books in this section that shouldn't have been in there, that's not his fault. That's the librarian's fault.
  • UncleEntity 8y ago
    More like finding a classified FBI interrogation manual in the Library of Congress... Ok, not actually a metaphor -- https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/12/fbi-copyrighted-interrogation-manual-unredacted-secrets/ https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/12/fbi-copyrighted...
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • belltaco 8y ago
    >the kid Is a 19 year old a kid?
    • brailsafe 8y ago
      yes
  • jessaustin 8y ago
    No, it's much more like calling the government on the phone and asking a series of questions. Or like sending them a series of letters. Or entering a government office during business hours and conducting business there. We don't need a metaphor, there are already laws in place governing how we speak to our public servants and how they respond.
    • rayiner 8y ago
      Computers are dumb machines. They have no free will, and cannot serve as agents whose actions bind humans.
      • jessaustin 8y ago
        If your car runs me over, I'm going to sue you.
        • rayiner 8y ago
          If my car runs you over, and you sue me, what does the court do? It tries to figure out my intent. Did I intentionally run you over? If yes, I'm guilty of vehicular assault (not my car). Or did the brakes fail and I had no intent to hurt you? If yes, I'm not guilty of anything. Likewise, what the computer does is irrelevant, except insofar is it tells you about the owner's intent. So the question is not "did the computer let you access the file." But "what does how the computer let you access the file tell you about what the computer owner intended?"
          • jessaustin 8y ago
            The car is still a dumb object that you own that hurt me, and as a result someone is still paying my hospital bills. You might blame your mechanic, if he did a poor job of brake maintenance. When he attempts to defend himself, how is this "intent" mishmash going to fly? "Your honor, please ignore that there are several RFCs defining how one installs calipers, none of which I followed! It was clearly my intent for the brakes to work!" Also, I'm not sure your analogy works at all. In the first paragraph, you seem to analogize the car to the accused "hacker", while in the second you're talking about the supposedly "hacked" host. To be clear, the point of the car example is that a machine's intelligence has no bearing on how its actions affect the duties of its operators.
  • dgudkov 8y ago
    >I'd argue that the kid was entering through an open window of a public building. Given that he tried to sequentially download all possible documents by sequentially incrementing document ID in URL it's more like trying to open every window in the public building and see what happens.
  • tremon 8y ago
    The open window metaphor implies that the rest of the building's facade was a wall. I don't think that is an accurate description of a website. If we have to resort to metaphors, then let's describe this section of the site as a ring binder, and each FOIPOP publication as a single page in the ring binder. What the kid did, then, is to take out the entire stack of pages and feed it to an automatic copier, put back the originals in the binder and left with the copied stack. There is no indication that the "perpetrator" even looked at any page in that stack. And since the binder was clearly labeled as "free public repository of FOIPOP responses that have been approved for publication", the act of copying the entire stack is no reason to assume foul play.
• tytytytytytytyt 8y ago
  It's more like having a 'Please take these unwanted items' bin and sending people to prison when they take something that you mistakenly put in the bin.
  • brandon272 8y ago
    A HTTP server may as well equate to a public building with a sign outside saying "Come in and take whatever you want from any room at any time, unless the room's door is locked!" (locked = authentication) The Nova Scotia govt forgot to lock one of those doors and are now furiously trying to shift blame. I haven't seen them apologize or address their own internal incompetence in any of the news articles I am seeing about this.
    • tytytytytytytyt 8y ago
      "These dang kids these days just don't have a sense of responsibility!"
• ljm 8y ago
  It feels like the reduction of a nuanced problem into a simple one with a single victim and a single perpetrator, and only one acceptable narrative. "It's not my fault I left my window open and you took advantage of it. I shouldn't have to keep my windows locked." "If you see an unlocked window it's not an opportunity for you to take advantage of." That's admittedly fairly obtuse, but you can see elements of this play out even in this thread, where it becomes a debate about the accuracy of the metaphor and not a discussion of the actual problem. It is so much easier to attack the language than it is to dig out the real concerns and talk about those, so you get a pro and anti situation or semantic nitpicking. If you agree that the older generation can only think in the metaphorical sense and are practically stuck in the 50s with how they describe it, you also have to accept that it is so far out of whack with reality that it causes continual debate about what actually does reflect the situation and completely detracts from the problem at hand. It is beyond idiotic and it's symbolic of an unhealthy resistance to change. As an aside, this happens in places like HN and Reddit all the time. A metaphor is introduced into a discussion and it totally derails it, and you're not talking about the source material any more, you're talking about the metaphor and how it can be more accurate. It's like the metaphor is more important than the problem itself sometimes and it's intensely sociopathic, because the linguistics take priority over the humanity.
  • Declanomous 8y ago
    It's not necessarily a problem that the older generation can only think about technology in a metaphorical sense, the problem is that the metaphors they are using are idiotic. I think, by and large, people are constrained to thinking about things they can describe. To that extent, being able to accurately describe something is meaningful, and is therefore a linguistic issue. Semantics are very important when you are dealing with minutiae, and the law hinges on comparisons and extremely complex semantic arguments. To that extent, it makes sense that we argue about the metaphors.
    • ljm 8y ago
      On reflection I think the metaphor itself is a red herring; we're always using them because they serve a great purpose. Tell an aspiring developer they can use goroutines to build a decently concurrent app, without much fuss, and they'll be delighted because the language provides a metaphor for it (way beyond a simple abstraction); tell them they have to understand mutexes, locks, processes, forks, and you've lost them. What I see is a tendency towards the metaphor because that abstraction itself poses a challenge on top of the original one and the original problem itself is less interesting than the linguistic magic layered on top of it. You can talk at length about how bad the dog > animal OOP example is but you won't have much to say about OOP without that. It's basically bike-shedding.
• ddingus 8y ago
  It is not quite like that though. More like, All items on this table are free. So far, so good. Then someone included a couple that aren't free. Writing a line of code to fetch a batch of info is ordinary to a literate user. Putting some burden on him to understand that has happened is a very hard sell to me.
• rayiner 8y ago
  The "older generation" does not use metaphors because they are limited in their thinking. They do it to illustrate the principles underlying law. A basic principle of private property is that you don't have to secure it. The burden is on the would-be trespasser to figure out what rights she has with respect to the property and act accordingly. Snooping around private property out of "curiosity" is illegal, whether or not there are locks preventing you from doing so. (This is an idea teenagers have had trouble with long before the Internet, but we manage to beat it out of them every generation). Those principles apply equally well to the Internet. Ordinary law-abiding people don't go fiddling with URLs, just like law-abiding people don't jiggle door handles or peak into windows to satisfy their curiosity.
  • newfoundglory 8y ago
    > Ordinary law-abiding people don't go fiddling with URLs I’m an ordinary law-abiding person, and I fiddle with URLs. I know lots of people in that group.
    • rayiner 8y ago
      You're not. Ordinary people don't even know that you can do that.
      • newfoundglory 8y ago
        Whether it is common knowledge or not has no bearing on whether it’s criminal, so I wasn’t using ordinary to mean “of normal computer literacy”. If you want to use some specific definitions that turn your claim into something trivially obvious, please define them ahead of time.
        • rayiner 8y ago
          But lots of things are legal or not based on what typical people would do or think. "Battery" is contact a normal person would find offensive. So touching someone's shoulder to get their attention is not battery, but poking someone in the rib might be. More relevantly, implied licenses to access property are defined by reference to what a normal person would consider implied. So an invitation to enter a store implies a license to access the parts a normal person would assume they can access, and not parts a normal person would assume they are not supposed to access. It's not a technical shell game. If you asked your mom, "hey, do you think they meant to have people be able to access those documents, where you can only get to them by editing numbers in the URL," she would say "no." That's what defines what is legal or not in this context.
• CalRobert 8y ago
  It's more like leaving a bunch of manhole covers open on a public street and suing someone for falling in. FFS if I go to https://www.booking.com/city/ie/cork.html https://www.booking.com/city/ie/cork.html it loads fine. Apparently I'm breaking the law if I use my criminal-mastermind hacking skills to ALSO go to https://www.booking.com/city/ie/dublin.html https://www.booking.com/city/ie/dublin.html It's just ridiculous.
• openmosix 8y ago
  When somebody uses the "leave the window unlocked" comparison, I try to rephrase it as "imagine you have your satellite TV with thousands of channels. You browse through channels and realize that, on channel #12985 if you press the A button on your remote, the channel will broadcast you videos that were supposed to be private". This is probably a closer analogy as you are not physically trespassing, you are "committing the crime" from your couch, you are not "stealing private property" (as, the docs are still on the owner's servers) and it's mostly on the broadcaster side to transmit sensitive information on a channel that is for everyone to see.