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Comment by pc86 | Hacker News Reader

I'm not arguing that an IP address is an identity. I'm arguing that Facebook made it explicitly clear, both via a cease & desist letter as well as technical changes, that it did not want Power accessing its servers or its data, whether on their own or on behalf of Power users.

> The only "clear message" it sends is, "don't use that IP."

Are you saying with a straight face that anyone at Power thought it was a coincidence that suddenly they couldn't access Facebook from very specific IP addresses?

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> I'm arguing that Facebook made it explicitly clear, both via a cease & desist letter as well as technical changes, that it did not want Power accessing its servers or its data, whether on their own or on behalf of Power users.

Then it should stop authorizing Power to do so. Why would it let the credentials work for Power unless those credentials authorized Power access? That's the problem. The simple solution is 2-factor authentication.

This is a solved problem. If you have "open access" of your web services and and access is non-disruptive, I don't know why this should be a criminal violation. It shouldn't be criminal just because it doesn't fit with your business model.

If I tell you not to enter my house, and take no further steps to prevent you from entering my house, such as closing the door, it's still illegal for you to enter my house. If I tell you not to enter my business, and take no further steps for prevent you from doing so, it's illegal for you to enter (unless I have banned you for being a protected class). If I tell you not to ssh into a computer I own, and take no further steps to prevent you from doing so, it's still illegal. I think a lot of software engineers get so wrapped up in the technical side of security and dealing with anonymous and untraceable threats that they don't realize that for the most part, the law doesn't care about technical access control. It cares about social access control.

Thank you for coming up with a much better example than I could.

> If I tell you not to ssh into a computer I own, and take no further steps to prevent you from doing so, it's still illegal.

What if you tell me to stop doing it, but my friend is allowed and he types all of the commands that i tell him to type and then he sends me the data? That's why it doesn't quite make sense.

It doesn't make as much sense for a publicly accessible website and user tokens. It makes sense from a tort point of view, but not from a criminal point of view. The next step away would be for users to install an app that logs into facebook and forwards the data to the centralized server.

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