
Visiting website without permission is now a US federal crime - asmithmd1
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/07/visiting_a_webs.html
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krapp
The article[0] linked to in the above blog post appears to offer a more in-
depth legal analysis. Also here[1] is the actual decision.

Current Hacker News threads linking to the Washington Post article:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12087407](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12087407)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12089068](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12089068)

[0][https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-
conspiracy/wp/201...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-
conspiracy/wp/2016/07/12/9th-circuit-its-a-federal-crime-to-visit-a-website-
after-being-told-not-to-visit-it/)

[1][https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2016/07/12/1...](https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2016/07/12/13-17102.pdf)

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hNewsLover99
This decision implies that a website owner can, on a landing page, and/or via
postal or email message, notify Google, and other search engines, social media
and data brokers that the owner does not grant, and indeed revokes, any
authority to crawl, catalog, archive, link to or otherwise view or use the
content on the site's other pages.

(Yes I know most sites want to be crawled and cataloged, but some might prefer
otherwise, or to negotiate deals with search engines, or otherwise monetize or
leverage their content.)

For a search vendor to proceed in the face of such a restriction would be an
unauthorized and therefore criminal use of the site owner's server, content
and traffic/throughput allotment.

Maybe this would be a good way to defeat Mozilla's upcoming Context Graph,
which promises its own set of obnoxious side-effects.

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0xmohit
Very soon a judge shall also rule that looking at a building without
permission while walking on the street is a crime.

Such litigations show how busy a life these guys have.

