5 ms·

When Google and Bing start sending 'human bots' out to Universities to facilitate the downloading of data, I'm pretty sure a lot of people will be going to jail

• tptacek 15y ago
  Didn't Google recently get in a bunch of trouble recently for capturing raw data from public wifi networks?
  • gavinlynch 15y ago
    To me, there is no comparison. Inadvertantly capturing a few random packets from open, public Wifi signals while driving down the road? They changed wifi channels about 5 times a second. All investigations that I have read concluded that no meaningful data was retrieved. And to compare that to specifically circumventing physical and virtual restrictions after warning the user against a set of actions? Where the target data was not worthless, as in Google's case, but worth over $1 million dollars? I don't see the comparison.
    • ajays 15y ago
      It wasn't inadvertent. It was by design. Lets get that straight. If, for example, you're running tcpdump(1) with a packet capture size of 1500 (I don't know if G was doing that, but I'm giving an example), then you can't claim that you captured the packets' contents inadvertently. Many years ago, when writing web crawlers was the cool thing to do, I wrote one (like an idiot, I wanted to see how deep the web was). Unfortunately, I didn't have a good synchronization scheme, so it ended up beating on a poor website for too long. The operator of that site sent a stern email to our DNS contacts, complaining. And we shut the crawler down. Today, I fear I'd be indicted for "wire fraud"!