It would be nice if BoingBoing actually linked to this book:
"Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent" The average professional in this country wakes up in the morning, goes to work, comes home, eats dinner, and then goes to sleep, unaware that he or she has likely committed several federal crimes that day. Why? The answer lies in the very nature of modern federal criminal laws, which have exploded in number but also become impossibly broad and vague.
Remember the guys who found that AT&T was publicly showing iPad user email addresses (in the clear, without any authentication) on its website? One of them wrote a script to visit a series of URLs on that site, incrementing a number at the end of the url each time, and collecting those email addresses. Then he used the emails to publicize AT&T's info leak.
The script just visited publicly visible web pages and collected some information from them. The guy who wrote the script was convicted under the CFAA (the same law used to prosecute Aaron Swartz) of conspiracy to access AT&T’s computers without authorization.
So, what's authorization? If visiting a publicly accessible web page can constitute unauthorized access, then your hypothetical is indeed the case, e.g.:
I mean, if I send a GET request to a URL on the internet it can be assumed that by making the URL public you consent to that.
However if that GET request is including fragments of SQL then and you manage to dump contents of the database using that then that would be a more clear cut case of abuse even though you are just sending GETs to a public URL.
Worthless satire without concrete examples. Don't say "and failed to follow its Terms and Services", show actual terms that are likely to have been broken.
I regularly bypass NYTimes paywalls by opening an incognito window. Is that against T&S? Is that a federal crime? The T&S and federal law being broken must be explicitly stated for this comic to have any useful impact.
I flagged it for not being detailed or funny enough, and essentially just being an image submission when such things should be relegated to links in the comments...
"Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent" The average professional in this country wakes up in the morning, goes to work, comes home, eats dinner, and then goes to sleep, unaware that he or she has likely committed several federal crimes that day. Why? The answer lies in the very nature of modern federal criminal laws, which have exploded in number but also become impossibly broad and vague.
http://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp/...