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To know is something is legal or not we have to know why it would be _illegal_. What laws are they breaking by port scanning? (I guess the default would be the
by tephra 5y ago
To know is something is legal or not we have to know why it would be _illegal_. What laws are they breaking by port scanning? (I guess the default would be the CFAA but I doubt even that hammer could be used for simple portscanning?).
- rocqua 5y agoIf you are talking HTTP to an endpoint that you have no idea whether you are authorized to, and it happens that they have some ToS document stating "do not use unless", then it could be construed as 'unauthorized access'. This unauthorized access could be argued as being illegal under the CFAA. The argument is iffy, hinging on the difference between just talking a little bit to a random IP on the one hand; and talking HTTP to a specific site whose ToS you could have been aware off. That second case was recently relevant when some company (I think linkedIn?) managed to stop people crawling them because, even though the IP endpoint is public, the ToS of the site did not authorize crawlers. All this said, I could see the argument that it is illegal. As a bad analogy, suppose you just checked every door in the city for being locked, and if it wasn't locked, peeked in to record the door shape. That feels like trespassing.