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Comment by hluska | Hacker News Reader

This is theft. Stealing is illegal. Giving a blueprint for how you stole is the icing on the prosecutorial cake because you can’t claim lack of knowledge if you create a conspiracy to enable the theft.

This may be the dumbest write up I have ever read.

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Theft comes with the connotation of taking someone away from someone and depriving them of their possession.

Using their internet connection without paying is unlicensed usage/illicit access, but nobody is being deprived of it. Mega corps tried, and failed, to get people to think watching a free movie on YouTube was theft. Same logic, very few people agree with the claim.

This is Hacker News. Hacking has a long history of being, well, not exactly respectful of legalities, especially when dealing with "profiteering gluttons". Phreaking was kinda what the early hacker scene was famous for, for example.

The nature of the non-transaction was such that they were given access to a service that was constrained in certain ways. They used the service, and the constraints that AC technically applied still applied. They used what was available to them under the constraints and weren't required to pay for any other service but the removal of the constraints. I don't see how any theft occurred.

Likewise illegality is just a boring and simple way to dismiss someone on moral grounds, but laws are only as effective as the level of agreement people have with them. Drinking in the park is technically illegal, but I don't care, the police don't care, nobody cares, unless someone needs to care, and I'm going to do it anyway, because the law does not make drinking in the park inherently wrong, it just provides a framework for telling you to stop if you're interfering with others in a way that relates to alcohol consumption.

Courts don't tend to be impressed by arguments like this. It was made very clear what was being offered and what wasn't, and technical barriers were even put in place. The fact that the barriers weren't foolproof doesn't give carte blanche to bypass them.

I agree more with your second argument, though that tends to be strained when the exploit is published.

> Courts don't tend to be impressed by arguments like this.

This is a court of casual opinions, but incidentally when all Air Canada employees recently went on strike—grounding and/or rescheduling all flights, including my own, and causing plenty of inconvenience—and were quickly ordered back to work by the federal government, basically everyone supported them continuing to refuse to work even though technically it was illegal because the government just decided it was. The government's move ended up backfiring and turned into a negative mark on their record after the employees basically won and everything went back to normal with more equitable pay. The CEO outright said they hadn't planned for the situation in which the employees just said no to the order.

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