This reminds me of another article from a bit back about a guy who "hacked" a government website by accident to download what was supposed to be private files, by simply incrementing a query string integer in the URL.
It scares me a how seriously this was taken. This wasn't a mistake or miscommunication, they actually are going to take this person to court where he could be given 10 years of prison time.
The police claimed "There’s no question, this was not someone just playing around" while the convicted of course said what the rest of us are already thinking "I didn't do anything to try to hide myself. I didn't think any of this would be wrong if it's all public information. Since it was public, I thought it was free to just download, to save". There was no warning or sign that any of this publicly accessible information was not meant to be publicly accessed.
The fact that you can "hack" anything by complete accident, without malicious intent, because of someone else's shit software is mind boggling to me. In the the OP article it's mobile browsers being shit not bothering to deal with popups properly, and in the article I linked it's the Canadian government's website security being shit.
Ultimately I believe we need to make laws regarding hacking much more clear, or else any person using a computer is more or less at risk. I'm almost certain if someone was looking over my shoulder all the time and was identifying any "illegal hack" I accidentally did, I would be facing jail time by now, at least by the extremely low standards presented in these articles.
When I was a kid I used to do this to the computers at Costco, writing a similar script in Batch and inserting it into demo computers' autoexec.bat. It was like four lines and I'd live-code it right in the store. (Mondo bonus points if I was able to do it on the machine with the cloned screens). It was fun to see which adults knew the CTRL+BREAK trick... very few did :P
Also, Mac OS has had text-to-speech since forever... it would even cuss for you. So why not open TextEdit and unleash a string of obscenities after about a paragraph of commas and periods? Don't forget to turn the volume all the way up!
Never got me arrested... did get me banned from the school computer network on multiple occasions though...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16853203
It scares me a how seriously this was taken. This wasn't a mistake or miscommunication, they actually are going to take this person to court where he could be given 10 years of prison time.
The police claimed "There’s no question, this was not someone just playing around" while the convicted of course said what the rest of us are already thinking "I didn't do anything to try to hide myself. I didn't think any of this would be wrong if it's all public information. Since it was public, I thought it was free to just download, to save". There was no warning or sign that any of this publicly accessible information was not meant to be publicly accessed.
The fact that you can "hack" anything by complete accident, without malicious intent, because of someone else's shit software is mind boggling to me. In the the OP article it's mobile browsers being shit not bothering to deal with popups properly, and in the article I linked it's the Canadian government's website security being shit.
Ultimately I believe we need to make laws regarding hacking much more clear, or else any person using a computer is more or less at risk. I'm almost certain if someone was looking over my shoulder all the time and was identifying any "illegal hack" I accidentally did, I would be facing jail time by now, at least by the extremely low standards presented in these articles.