Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

The question is, how would you better define hacking? To make the letter of the law match the spirit? "Exceeding authorised access" is an early attempt that predates modern internet usage. You can't just say "anything the computer lets you do, is legal" because code exploits are just a computer following the (poorly-written) instructions in its code.


I'm not a lawyer, but it should a start with a clearly demonstrated attempt at prohibiting access to content. The words, "don't use this" are not enough. There needs to be active, ongoing safeguards to protect the data, i.e., authorization tokens, credentials, encryption keys, etc.

In the 80s, it was reasonable to assume that connecting to some port on a remote machine owned by another person or company could constitute unauthorized access. But today, billions of people connect to ports on remote machines thousands of times a day for completely legitimate reasons, so it's reasonable to assume that data that can be accessed by just asking nicely over the internet is considered intended for public consumption.

It seems permissive, but I think that's a crucial component. If some company makes accidentally makes their S3 buckets public, it's completely unfair to say that accessing that information is illegal, especially when they are serving up other information in public S3 buckets which they want people to access.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: