By making that tweet he's impersonating a government agency and passing it off as an official document. If he hadn't posted that tweet I'm sure he wouldn't have anything to fear.
EDIT: I looked up the relevant law: False Impersonation of Federal Officer or Employee [0]. It doesn't seem he got anything of value, so it's unlikely he could be charged. Although I'd be surprised if he didn't at least receive a stern conversation from a government official.
The original incident in the article seems more like the latter to me. If I were on the jury, I certainly wouldn't convict.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_Overboard_(Yes,_Prime_Mini...
Yeah, it's obviously substantially below FDR interning 100,000 Japanese people [1] based on their ethnicity. Or spraying black neighborhoods with toxic chemicals to test on them in the 1950s. [2] Or J Edgar Hoover's decades-long parade of power abuses and rights violations of the American People. Or Lyndon Johnson inserting us - hundreds of thousands of drafted young men - into a civil war in Vietnam, in which we helped to directly kill vast numbers of people with no clear plan or explanation for why we were there. Or the testing of hundreds of nuclear weapons on US soil, with little concern for how it would harm citizens. Or Sherman burning down Atlanta. Or Nixon's parade of abuses. Or the CIA's countless, terrifying programs in the 1970s. Or how the FBI tried to get MLK to kill himself. Or prohibition and the terrible results that imposed upon the people (eg rampant organized crime). Or the 50 year war on drugs and the horrific toll that has taken on the people.
We used to treat our people with the utmost dignity and respect.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...
[2] http://www.businessinsider.com/army-sprayed-st-louis-with-to...
By law they need to share what you post publicly, including files. This 'vulnerability' has been around for decades.
"Digital Government: Building a 21st Century Platform to Better Serve the American People". United States Federal CIO Council. May 23, 2012.
This is a bad idea, though, as it makes it easy and legal for non-authorized entities to impersonate the authorized ones: freecreditreport.com
Websites have been using this pattern for 25+ years, so it's pretty universal by now.
The `~` or `~username` is expanded by your shell (but not necessarily all shells) and has nothing to do with the operating system. If you pass a filename like `~myusername/test.txt` to any unix's open() syscall, it's going to either fail or open a file in a directory literally called `~myusername`. This means anywhere you're passing a filename into a program that isn't your shell does not generally support that syntax.
A narrowly defined, poorly recognized convention is not a great thing to rely on for security purposes.
Also, that ® at the end of posix is part of the URL, you will unfortunately get a 404 if you don't copy-paste it right. You might be better to search for "site:opengroup.org posix"
Good luck, man
It was a way to easily allow unprivileged users to share content from their ~/public_html/ directory.
Nevertheless, it's clearly associated with UGC content, and as far as I know there have never been any major sites that have hosted non-UGC content using this scheme. (E.g. there is no history of use for things like Amazon product pages or whatever.)
And in school we were always taught that content coming from user pages on university systems shouldn't be cited as if it were academic content being published or endorsed by the university. I'm sure others were taught the same.
- Browsers might want to treat it differently for malware scanning purposes.
- Content owners might want to treat it differently when filing automated DMCA complaints.
- Search engines might want to treat it differently for ranking purposes.
The benefit of the tilde is that, at least as far as I know, it has never been used for anything other than signaling that something is UGC content. (Even if that was a technological accident and not its original intent.)
Do you think the assumption that the content was created by the organization who owns the domain should be default? Wouldn't it be better for the organization to provide a signature for the content it did create?
Sure, and I think that is the current assumption. What's missing is a way to specify UGC content that wasn't created by the organization.
> Wouldn't it be better for the organization to provide a signature for the content it did create?
I don't think this would be viable for two reasons:
- It would require people to do the work to opt in, without any obvious incentive for doing so.
- No obvious way to different UGC content from javascript dependencies, fonts, ad trackers, etc.
Whereas there are good use cases for allowing folks to mark content as being UGC. For example, let's say the game Draw Something wanted to let users upload their creations. So no security issues, since images are created through their own app, but they don't necessarily want everyone thinking that they're spending all day creating and uploading millions of dick drawings either.
I suggested just adding a ~ to the domain name, because when you see a domain name like this:
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~allen/
It's universally recognized that the content on that page was not created by columbia.edu or cs.columbia.edu in an official capacity.
Other people said we can't do this because it's not an official standard, so I said let's just make it a standard. Which I think is good because it keeps an important piece of Internet culture alive by codifying it, which would let people rely on it when designing new systems. And ultimately it should work because there is no history of this URL pattern being used for non-UGC content.
it appears your only goal is to be right.
[1]: https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/DOC-578d579d1f000000-A.pdf
Was he? This was obviously satirical. Impersonation involves a genuine attempt at deception, not merely having a few trappings of something official. Otherwise, what's the difference between this and somebody dressing-up as a cop for Halloween?
the student's mistake (well, beyond not contacting them to report the issue) was using the FCC's official letterhead to create an embarrassing document and uploading it to their official website and posting it on social media.
That's pretty much a "fuck you" and not a great way to start a conversation.