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Comment by friendly_chap | Hacker News Reader

Hungarian here (Magyar means Hungarian in our language).

The guy was not sentenced yet, likely won't be, but given how incompetent everyone involved one can not be sure.

Telekom does not want to press charges as far as I know, so despite their gross technical incompetence, at least their they have that going for them.

Hungary recently had a bunch of ethical hackers getting into trouble, but fortunately the people are so outraged at the powers that be trying to jail them that they don't get harmed.

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> The guy was not sentenced yet, likely won't be, but given how incompetent everyone involved one can not be sure.

Does the public prosecutor in Hungary have a poor conviction rate? I know nothing about your country, but if I were facing a similar charge in the US I would be very concerned.

I don't know about that, but I think we don't have such a culture of prosecutors having conviction rates (might be wrong on this one I admit).

But Hungary is a very tense country, it only needs a spark to blow up (last time internet tax triggered a massive massive protest), so I don't think the political elite wants to risk protests and outrage.

The public prosecutor actually has a unusually high conviction rate (can't cite a source right now for this), but there was a very similar scandal last year where a similarly young security enthusiast figured out he could buy public transport tickets for any price in the then recently launched web interface of the Budapest public transport company (BKK). He did this simply by editing the form post URL on the order page.

BKK then tried to prosecute him but quickly dropped the case since there was a huge public outrage. The website and the related services has been down ever since the incident.

So this is why people suspect they will drop the case soon again, but as an other commenter already said, they are incompetent and corrupt to the bones, so who knows?

> Does the public prosecutor in Hungary have a poor conviction rate?

Not if you are a politician. In the last two terms of Fidesz 1 low figure guy was convicted. I find that ridiculous since we are the poster child of corruption in the EU.

It is because the Chief Prosecutor[1] is a good old friend of Orban.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%A9ter_Polt

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