A website isn't a trash can though.
If I accidentally leave a diamond ring (or personal files) in public somewhere and you take them that is absolutely theft.
As such, your analogies to situations (locked houses, unattended jewelry) with the opposite expectation just disprove your point. Assuming a file is private even though it's publicly accessible on a web server is as nonsensical as assuming an object is free for the taking even though it's an unattended diamond ring.
- Hey, can I GET this drink?
- 200 OK, here it is pal.
- 204 Uh, the bottle appears to be empty
- 206 I have only half the ingredients for the mix
- 300 Stirred or shaken?
- 301 That drink is now called this, but here it is!
- 400 I can't understand what you say buddy, are you drunk?
- 403 I'm sorry, but I must refuse to serve you that drink
- 404 Oops, I can't seem to find the bottle
- 411 How much do you want?
- 413 That's too much drink!
- 418 I'm actually a teapot
- 503 Too busy right now!False.
There are lots of things on webservers that aren't public. Try to access:
https://github.com/harryh/my-private-repo
You can't, because github hasn't made a mistake and accidentally made all private repos public.
If github screwed up one day and all private repos were temporarily made public it would be illegal for you to run a script that tried to scrape them all down to your personal hard drive.
Files don't "accidentally" become publicly accessible via HTTP. i.e. you don't return to your computer one day to find everything is public.
Someone specifically took the steps to make this data public. The fact they didn't realize what they were doing isn't the fault of people that then view the data.
Hmm? It's certainly possible to configure a web server incorrectly by accident.
But as the person knows they are configuring a web server, I would say this is more carelessness / incompetence rather than an "accident" in the same way as losing a Diamond Ring would be.
If you insist on analogies involving lost rings, this situation is more like taking a picture of a ring someone lost in the street than it is like taking the ring.
If his carelessness meant communicating that you could take the ring without stealing it (say placing it in the donation basket instead of his wallet), that would absolve you of your crime.
I don’t think that’s a sensible rule and at the end of the day, it’s not the one that’s going to prevail. The Internet will be sanitized and made safe for all the people who forget their passwords and write them in their monitors. The Internet is for ordinary people now, not curious teenager hackers. And ordinary people will make the rules to suit themselves.
And how, exactly, is this "sanitization" going to occur? Are you saying that having 15 police officers raid a home and confiscate multiple computers (all but one of which had nothing to do with the incident in question), arresting a completely uninvolved person on his way to school, and taking no action at all against the stupid contractor who set up the website, is an acceptable form of "sanitization"?
> The Internet is for ordinary people now, not curious teenager hackers.
That's not what the police action described in the article is saying. It's saying the Internet is for government and corporations, and God help the ordinary people who get in their way. (Btw, I include "curious teenager hackers" in "ordinary people". Perhaps the fact that you don't is part of the problem.)
The only solution is site owners taking responsibility for securing their sites, in accordance with the sensitivity of the information on them. The sooner "ordinary" people realize that, the better.
Since you didn't respond when I raised it elsewhere in-thread, I would highlight again the fundamental imbalance between the rules you would impose on Facebook etc. and those you would impose on users. Firms that spend billions of dollars developing their systems only have to be as smart as the most ignorant person we can imagine. Their users, in contrast, must be geniuses to keep up with their many changes to TOS, interfaces, and functionality, while simultaneously those genius users aren't allowed to notice that numbers follow each other in sequence. This is nonsense on its face, but then again authoritarian maneuvers are their own justification, aren't they?
If we're at the topic of wishful thinking, I wished ordinary people would understand basic things about the internet. The purpose of humanity as a whole shouldn't be to dumb things down for "ordinary people". It should be to better teach and educate new generations, so we won't be able to assume ordinary people are dumb.
Computers always do what you _tell_ them to do, not what you want them to do.
The onus for keeping computerized material private is on the owner, and the owner screwed up royally by wrongly allowing sensitive material to be placed unprotected on a _public_ web site. Whether or not it was indexed is irrelevant - it was on a publicly accessible site, permissions set to publicly accessible, and the entire site was meant to be publicly accessible. One can close the analysis until the cows come home, it will not change this fact.
Accessing that material is as illegal as finding a diamond ring (or personal files) while dumpster diving. Dumpster diving may be seen as tasteless or low-class, but as far as I know, it’s not illegal.
Do we prosecute reporters for ferreting out publicly available, yet embarrassing, information?