[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: Major hack attack on the U.S. Senate

Christian Vogel wrote:


i think "technical" people often think of the law-system as something
as C-code, as it's written there is only one way for a standard
compliant compiler to interpret it. I think the judges are more flexible
than gcc in this regard, they can also assume that one perfectly knows
that one is supposed to read http://www.cnn.com but not to read
http://qz25srv.competitor.com/internal/memos/strategy.doc (made up
example) even if -- from a technical standpoint -- there is no
difference.

What concerns me most is that not one objection I received addressed the point I made. I spoke of the _legal_ definition of "hacking", and all people came up with was disagreement based on their own personal feelings on the matter.

Excuse me, but personal feelings in this matter is irrelevant. People objected to the press applying the term "hacking" to what happened, and I pointed out that their usage was correct according to the law, assuming their portrayal of the events was accurate.

And every single person who objected did so on the grounds that they don't like this definition. Sheesh. Who cares? This is bugtraq, not slashdot. Prove me wrong by quoting legislation, point out that the facts of the case do not lead to this conclusion, but, please, more signal, less noise.

On a side not, I'm a technical person myself, and I much dislike this fuzzyness in the law. This case seems pretty clear, but I can conjure up dozens of real life scenarios where it's ambiguous or the actual ruling would be "just wrong", IMHO. And that's all that this is: mho.