Hacker News Reader

goldie_wilsonon Chained PHP2Shell exploit roots 25 servers, including US Government servers

The title is misleading as the article says "including systems in a US government-affiliated environment" which reads more like a 3rd party the government is contracted with versus actual government systems.

goldie_wilsonon I turned my security cameras into an automatic bird identification system

Finally a good use for Flock cameras. They're even named appropriately.

goldie_wilsonon Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence

Definitely not a bot. I'm just tired of seeing this community becoming another reddit echo chamber for ideology that is disassociated from reality. The actions here are two completely different cases. You want to talk about whether or not 35 years was appropriate for Aaron's crime, great, that's a valid discussion. If you want to argue whether AI training sets violate fair use, awesome, another completely valid civil law discussion. But thinking that what Aaron did is comparable to Meta scraping is a completely hollow narrative. It relies on total ignorance of what crimes Aaron committed even if he and others believed they were committed for an altruistic reason. Society would collapse if we just ignored crime because the criminal was doing what they thought was a good thing.

Furthermore this whole post is using Aaron as a strawman to further the argument that big corporations = bad. While its true that the very nature of a big corporation is to minmax (gaming term if you are unfamiliar) with the max being profit and min being everything else, they are not inherently evil and the argument is an over simplification of a much larger more complex situation. Anyone who simply believes they inherently bad shouldn't be posting online because all of the hardware and services required to do so demonstrates their complacency in contributing to these large corporations and makes them a hypocrite.

goldie_wilsonon Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence

Maybe I'm missing something, but didn't Aaron break into an MIT network closet and then spoof and use exploits to secure data vs Meta who is just scraping everything that can be found on the public web. I despise just about everything Meta does, but it seems like people are quick to compare two situations that are not identical so they can further their "big corp and America = bad" agendas.