My reading: he purchased authorization to use the system from a phone. He instead used the system from a computer, without authorization for doing that.

Whether or not Gogo should price discriminate like that, it seems clear that they want more money in exchange for authorizing use from a laptop.

Again, this branch was to the specific question referenced by tptacek:

(i) Did the defendant knowingly access a system used by the federal government, a financial institution, or a system used in interstate commerce without authorization?

My beef is with GoGo's price difference in the first place.

I'm not seeing why you think the answer is "no," then.

(a) Knowingly? The blog post (and the changing and then changing-back of the UA) makes this clear. (Though if he had happened to inadvertently had his UA set to mobile before hand, maybe to test something the day before, and never even saw the other screen... but once he saw it, and consciously decided to get around the higher price, it hits the "knowingly" requirement.)

(b) "Access a system used by the federal government, a financial institution, or a system used in interstate commerce"? The Gogo system seems pretty clearly an interstate commerce system to me, what with the whole used-across-the-country thing and the charging-for-access part.

(c) Without authorization? He specifically notes that he saw they charged different prices for different devices and purchased the option for a device that was not the type he was using. So he did not purchase authorization to use it from a laptop.

No contest to (a) and (b) - I agree there.

As to (c) I was reading "system" as the two signup pages, not the overall wifi system. Still, unless there's a difference between the mobile and laptop services, they're the same product regardless of type of device used to access the system, and you're paying for the service.

It would be like an all you can eat restaurant charging extra if you were over certain weight/height thresholds.

well... most buffets I've been to have a reduced price for children since they are typically going to eat less. But it is hard to make good analogies between physical/virtual things.

True those analogies are very hard to make, as evidenced by the media piracy debate and "you wouldn't download a car, would you?"

I think the majority of my vitriol comes because it's an asinine way to split up service based on what we're assuming is bandwidth concerns. If they want a tiered service, then put in a tiered rate structure. The "laptop" rate gets you 300kbps, the "mobile" gets you 100kbps. Simple.

Agreed. It is totally asinine.

You're confusing Gogo's website with Gogo's WiFi network. It's not too hard to argue that he had authorization to access Gogo's WiFi network from a phone, but not from a laptop.

I disagree that's a "resounding no".

What is your reasoning there? Remember, we're not talking about the overall fraud case, just the answer to this question.

I believe that any reasonable person viewing those offerings would understand that the cheaper price was for phone Internet, and the more expensive price was for computer Internet. I also believe that the author of this post made it completely clear that they were getting one over on the ISP, which does not at all help their case.

That's about as far as I'd like to go with this particular branch of the discussion, if that's OK with you.

That's fine with me. You've shifted the argument back to the overall case and refused to address my specific concern about the answer to question (i), so I'm just going to declare myself the winner of this branch, if that's OK with you.