Hacker News Reader

As to your first example, there seems to be this pervasive idea in tech culture that something shouldn't be a serious crime or tort because it is so easy to do. I see the argument very often in cases of unauthorized access and copyright infringement.

Murder is also rather easy, and we execute people for it.

View on HN

That's not what he's saying. He's saying that independent of how easy it is to do, it's also something that professional security people do routinely. And he's right. But that's not the basis of the charge against Aurenheimer.

>That's not what he's saying. He's saying that independent of how easy it is to do, it's also something that professional security people do routinely. And he's right. But that's not the basis of the charge against Aurenheimer.

It's certainly part of what he said:

>but it also wasn’t exactly hardcore hacking; IIRC he just changed a URL parameter.

The difficulty of carrying out an action is completely irrelevant to its legality.

I agree with you that the "hardcoreness" of what Aurenheimer did is a red herring.

Even if he did attempt to sell the data, is it illegal to sell data that is freely available on the internet (honest question, I couldnt find a solid answer via googling)? It might be against TOS.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com