| ▲ | sillysaurusx 5 hours ago |
| He wasn’t prosecuted for scraping. He trespassed into a room with a router, plugged his laptop into it, downloaded papers as quickly as possible, and then rotated his MAC address to dodge the bans that the admin was trying to place on him. That’s very different from downloading a webpage on the open internet. I’m not saying he should or shouldn’t have been prosecuted, but there’s some kind of rose tinted glasses filter around what happened with Aaron, like he just was browsing the web and was suddenly prosecuted. He repeatedly broke in to a physical room and kept changing his MAC address to dodge bans. At least report it with its full context. |
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| ▲ | greyface- 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > trespassed into a room A room with an unlocked and unmarked door, off of a hallway that was open to the general public. An INCREDIBLY tame act compared to other unprosecuted trespasses normalized and celebrated at https://hacks.mit.edu/. > rotated his MAC address Not a crime; in fact now a widespread and default practice for consumer Wi-Fi/Bluetooth devices. |
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| ▲ | sillysaurusx 31 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | I'm not sure if this is meant as some kind of "gotcha," but the legal system doesn't work that way. He wasn't rotating his MAC address as a default practice. He changed the last byte of his MAC only when he noticed he was banned from the network. Intent matters. Plugging your laptop into a router you normally don't have access to, with intent to download a large number of private articles, means something. And it means more than "I downloaded a lot of public files off the public internet," which is what Meta did. All of this is in the indictment, which is worth reading: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/217117-united-states... Personally I think it's a shame that digital crimes can result in prison time at all, except for e.g. crypto theft. But under US law, Aaron committed a crime back then, and it would still classify as a crime today. | | |
| ▲ | thomasjeff1 19 minutes ago | parent [-] | | From your sourced link. > JSTOR,founded in 1995, was and continued to be a United States-based, not-for-profit organization that provides an online system for archiving and providing access to academic journal. If it was online, could any one have access to it? So why him downloading them was breaking the law? |
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| ▲ | FireBeyond 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Were those hackers MIT students? Was Aaron? | | |
| ▲ | greyface- 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Both Aaron and "those hackers" were MIT community members. | | |
| ▲ | FireBeyond 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | That's an interesting spin that means precisely nothing. I'm not authorized to enter facilities or building maintenance spaces in buildings in my town because I'm a "community member". | | |
| ▲ | greyface- 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | The general public was authorized to enter the facilities 24/7. The exterior doors were unlocked and it was considered an "open campus". The access controls you see today have only existed since COVID. Whether he was a student at the time also means "precisely nothing". |
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| ▲ | josh_p 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Yes, he did that. He also settled the problem with jstor, returned the files as part of a civil settlement. This was overzealous prosecution after the affected party got their remedy. |
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| ▲ | 9x39 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | MIT was another affected party, who reached out to the government for help. |
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| ▲ | voakbasda 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Wasn’t Meta found to be scraping from addresses that were not immediately traceable back to them? |
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| ▲ | 9x39 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Maybe, but the prosecution that most people would say lead to his decision to end his life was from abuse of the MIT network over months until they had him on video. The rate of JSTOR content retrieved from MIT was a separate contract issue. |
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| ▲ | ComplexSystems 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| So what crime was he guilty of that Meta isn't? "Scraping too unsophisticatedly?" |
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| ▲ | 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | smt88 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Physical trespassing (as far as we know), but they’ve certainly done all of the rest millions of times. |
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| ▲ | Cabal 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Thank you. It's absurd that we are comparing breaking into MIT and (physically) breaking into a network with scraping the web and scanning physical books. |
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| ▲ | nextaccountic 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| So what's the maximum penalty for trespassing? The prosecution was looking for a disproportionate sentence About technical countermeasures to evade blocking.. you realize that everybody that does scraping at a large scale employs those, right? Including Meta Specially nowadays where large swaths of the web is behind captchas |
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| ▲ | qingcharles 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | If it was charged as trespassing, not something higher like burglary, then the level of his trespass was probably the lowest misdemeanor. Usually trespass is a sliding scale starting with a warning not to return. Being that it was on a campus, they can sometimes use that as an aggravating factor. I remember one case where a homeless person had a key for a vending machine and took out $30 in quarters, but since the land the vending machine was on was owned by a university he was sentenced to 12 years in prison. One of the few cases that got reversed for a constitutionally exceptional sentence. | | |
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| ▲ | colordrops 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Why is that fundamentally different? |
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| ▲ | 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| [deleted] |
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| ▲ | 627467 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > repeatedly broke in to a room > rotated his MAC address Do you really think these details drastically change how people should judge his actions vs those of a corporation? |
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| ▲ | 9x39 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Yeah, intent matters. Evading security matters. It's a big point that his actions were intentional and not passive or accidental - not that IP infringement by corporations isn't its own discussion. | | |
| ▲ | LostMyLogin 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | How is Meta using BitTorrent to download over 80 terabytes of copyrighted books while avoiding using corporate IP addresses not evading security? | | |
| ▲ | 9x39 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Torrents are openly accessible, even if .gov might enable infringement claims by the rights-holder. They're not hacking into networks. Changing your IP isn't a crime, even if it has the effect of making attribution to Meta more difficult. The thing with Aaron was that it went on for months to the point JSTOR's complaints had activated MIT's organizational antibodies, let's say, and the IS department was turned loose to investigate repeatedly. They went to the trouble of upgrading their load balancers and traffic analysis to narrow it down and installed a camera. At that point, the hook was firmly set and with digital and video evidence, the Secret Service had him red-handed abusing MIT. Keep in mind the thing that spiraled out of control was how Aaron (mis)used MIT resources persistently and with overwhelming evidence - in the end, the civil part with JSTOR was largely irrelevant. MIT called in the big guns with the FBI and Secret Service, and they ate it up. I'm not arguing in favor of it, I'm just familiar with the zeal they bring once they get on a trail. | | |
| ▲ | LostMyLogin 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Changing your IP isn't a crime, even if it has the effect of making attribution to Meta more difficult. To borrow your words, intent matters. Also why are we acting as if Meta wasn’t doing this for over half a decade and that companies don’t actively take steps to try and prevent piracy? |
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| ▲ | 63stack 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Sure intent matters but I still don't see how this warrants the government going after him. | | |
| ▲ | 9x39 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | MIT called up the government and said there's this guy. Whether they should have is debatable, but they did. |
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| ▲ | bigstrat2003 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | No, but they do drastically change how people should judge his actions vs someone who simply downloaded some documents that were served on an open web server. OP didn't say "it's ok if a corporation does that", he said that Aaron's actions were more serious than people commonly make them out to be. |
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| ▲ | PenguinCoder 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Information should be free. |
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| ▲ | hk1337 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Agreed, to an extent, but that doesn't mean you can breach any barrier someone has in place preventing access, take it, and make it publicly available. | | |
| ▲ | zymhan 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Surely it depends on the specific information in question? | |
| ▲ | pdonis 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The information Swartz was downloading was scientific papers that we, the public, have already paid for with our tax dollars. The crime here is that the government allows JSTOR and other private companies to still hold those papers behind paywalls instead of releasing them into the public domain as they should have been. | | |
| ▲ | s1artibartfast 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Doesn't matter if the public funded it. The public didn't mandate or pay for the publication rights or access. The public might donate food to the poor. That doesn't give them the right to go into their house and rummage through their fridge. Maybe there is a missed opportunity to require open access as a condition of public grant funding. That doesn't change the fact that it is not a stipulated condition. | | |
| ▲ | silver_sun 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | >The public might donate food to the poor. That doesn't give them the right to go into their house and rummage through their fridge. I think a better analogy for this situation is: The public donates food, then the recipient, after being fed, sells access to (infinite cheaply replicable copies of) said food for a profit. The public in this case just wants to have said food. | |
| ▲ | pdonis 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Doesn't matter if the public funded it. The public didn't mandate or pay for the publication rights or access. So when your tax dollars pay for a scientist to do research, you don't think the papers that document that research should be public property? If scientists want to keep their research private, they should find private funding. Note that, as in my previous post, I said "should". If you mean there isn't explicit language to that effect in the grants, see further comments below. > The public might donate food to the poor. That doesn't give them the right to go into their house and rummage through their fridge. Invalid comparison. The scientific papers in question are not the personal property of the scientists. > Maybe there is a missed opportunity to require open access as a condition of public grant funding. IMO this should be the case, and it's an outrage that it's not, since it should be an obvious requirement for any research that our tax dollars pay for. > That doesn't change the fact that it is not a stipulated condition. Maybe that wasn't written into the grants explicitly, but that just means our government is (once again) failing to act in our best interests. | | |
| ▲ | s1artibartfast 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | It seems like you are jumping between the reality you would like and the reality that exists. It is fine to want for something to be different, but that doesn't change the facts of how they are. It's fine to advocate future papers be made public. I think it is antisocial and delusional to say past papers belong to the public just because that's what you would have wanted. The word for this is expostfacto recontracting, and undermines just about any system of law where is used. Last, there are lots of reasons to pay for research even if it is not made public. Free public access is often the least of those concerns. Especially so when 99% of researchers whom might make meaningful use of the publication already have access through a journal system. To understand this better, consider private drug patents coming from Public Funding. The government might rightly calculate that it is in the public interest too help a for-profit company develop a cancer cure with grants, then have no cure at all. | | |
| ▲ | pdonis 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | > It seems like you are jumping between the reality you would like and the reality that exists. No, you did that, by responding to my post where I said "should" as though I were trying to describe how things are instead of how they ought to be. > I think it is antisocial and delusional to say past papers belong to the public just because that's what you would have wanted. I didn't say that. You need to work on your reading comprehension. > The word for this is expostfacto recontracting No, the word for what you're doing is putting words in my mouth and attacking a straw man. > there are lots of reasons to pay for research even if it is not made public. Can you give some? > Especially so when 99% of researchers whom might make meaningful use of the publication already have access through a journal system. Which they then have to pay fees to, using more of our tax dollars, because of the sweetheart deals the government has given the journals. Not only that, but researchers nowadays share copies of papers over the Internet routinely (for example, using sites like arxiv.org), so they don't even need journals to know what other researchers are doing. So even that rationale for paying the journals is now out of date. > consider private drug patents coming from Public Funding A patent requires revealing the information that the invention is based on, in exchange for the exclusive right to produce the item for some period of time. So I don't see how this is an argument for keeping publicly funded research behind a paywall. |
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| ▲ | aeve890 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | What's the point of statements so broad and ambiguous that they seem to disregard any kind of context or nuance? Do you really believe that _Information_ should be free? Which one? All of it? | |
| ▲ | MattDamonSpace 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | “People who generate valuable information should be uncompensated” | | |
| ▲ | msftgreed 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You say this like it's related to the parent quote. We could absolutely compensate people and not charge for information. It's not that hard to imagine that we could feed, house, care for, and provide a small stipend to authors, artists, etc. and also make their work output free to everyone who wants it. Does that require changing some other things? Absolutely. Would it be hard to convince people to try? Probably (I'm guessing HN crowd won't like this comment, considering it unreasonable.) Has it been a suggested way to organize society for almost 200 years with a long and well argued set of principles behind it? Sure enough! | |
| ▲ | pdonis 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The scientists who wrote the papers that Swartz downloaded were compensated, with the public's tax dollars. That should mean that we the public should now have free access to what we paid for. Unfortunately the government prefers to let private companies keep those papers behind paywalls. |
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| ▲ | maximinus_thrax 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > and then rotated his MAC address to dodge the bans that the admin was trying to place on him And corporate scrapers never ever use proxy pools to rotate IPs to evade throttling and blacklisting. Meta is also scraping illegal content, such as pirated books. So I'm not sure what your argument is. |
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