Re: Re: Oregon Supreme Court declines to hear my case

As I mentioned in the chatterbox... it's a lesson to others in the community who might not realise that the neat things they are doing with computers can be treated as seriously as mugging little old ladies. In fact, the penalties can be much higher.

As such, they story is relevant to most people here (regardless of your geographical local). We should be telling people about this very vocally - the same way we have many posts about using CGI or dot-star. Stories like merlyn's and Mitnick's should be required knowledge for any wanna-be coder.

If this sounds overdone, try sending Kevin Mitnick an email and get his opinion on the issue. Oh wait... you can't. We should be taking this as seriously as the rest of the world does, and they take it very seriously.

____________________
Jeremy
I didn't believe in evil until I dated it.

Comment on Re: Re: Oregon Supreme Court declines to hear my case

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Re: Oregon Supreme Court declines to hear my case by /dev/trash (Curate) on Dec 28, 2001 at 07:12 UTC
Merlyns's case I think is a bit different than Mitnick. Mitnick stole and had in his possession credit card numbers. Perhaps you'd like everyone to have that info but I wouldn't.	[reply]
Re: Re: Oregon Supreme Court declines to hear my case by jepri (Parson) on Dec 28, 2001 at 21:21 UTC
I was keeping away from expressing my opinions on the cases. The point I was trying to make was how much trouble we can get ourselves into with just a few keystrokes. When I think crime I think things like assault, armed robbery, murder. Very physical things. They clearly deprive people of something - your money or your life, in the case of robbery and murder. In our business however, it seems that it is possible to be fined literally thousands of dollars for an act that does no damage, causes no downtime, hurts noone. I'm referring to things like copying a password file here. The idea that a court can come up with some ludicrously high figure for possesion of a copied document( or a password ) file scares me. I'm secretly praying for the day a judge turns around and says "a million for a lousy 10kb file? You're kidding. Divide that by a million". It's not going to happen, I suspect. But I honestly feel that the punishment no longer fits the crime. Banning a computer enthusiast from ever using a computer is cruel. I can't even think of the right words for some of the other judgements that have gone by in the last decade. Not to mention the fact that it now seems to be impossible to do anything without breaking a law somewhere. On a completely unrelated note: most schools thesedays offer basic computer training. Why don't they offer basic law training as well? ____________________ Jeremy I didn't believe in evil until I dated it.	[reply]