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This is absolutely crazy. A common 'prank' in my high school was going around the computer labs changing all of the desktop background or renaming folders/chan

This is absolutely crazy. A common 'prank' in my high school was going around the computer labs changing all of the desktop background or renaming folders/changing their icons to mess with people. Immature: very. Criminal: obviously not. I guess it's the password part that constitutes the hacking here but if the password was widely known and therefore he didn't 'brute force' it via guessing (it's unclear from the article) is it still hacking? I guess it depends how he came into 'possession' of the password. If someone gives you a key to their house and you use it I wouldn't classify it as breaking in, but if they key it left outside the door and you use it to enter without permission that would be. Either way these are just technicalities and the fact that a school even got law enforcement involved in this is utterly ridiculous.

pbhjpbhj 12y ago
>Criminal: obviously not. // vs. >but if they [left a key] outside the door and you use it to enter without permission that would be [breaking in]. // Why is trespass itself not harm in the first case but is harmful in the second? [Incidentally if you use a key you don't 'break in']. As the law stands in UK I gather the first is a tort (unless you add in damage or intimidation or something else) and the second is a crime (under the Computer Misuse Act 1990). They are similar. On discovering both there is a real cost involved, change password/lock and in the first case pay for the time needed to sanitise, revert any changes.