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arkadiyt

"Hacked" = people left their printers open to the internet.

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Indeed - according to that definition I was basically the real world zero cool as a kid.

Identical actions of another can result in my car being stolen whether I leave it locked or unlocked.

> The same action of another can result in my car being stolen whether I leave it locked or unlocked.

Taking advantage of a car being unlocked involves completely different actions than with a locked car, so no, not at all. (And as far as stealing the car goes, a non-hack involves leaving the keys in it too.)

If you walked through an open door to steal something, it won't be "breaking and entering" either.

It would be burgulary instead of breaking and entering. You still get charged, just like accessing a computer unlawfully doesn't have to involve clever tricks to be illegal.

That’s criminal trespass. Accessing something not yours, when the owner has some expectation of you not accessing it, even if easy to do, is often illegal.

Owners not locking goods down does not give another the right to access.

Yep! And nobody should accuse you of picking the lock!

Sure, but that doesn't mean that it was "hacked", either.

This is lots closer to calling unlisted telephones.

I don't think it is a big deal and hope no one gets charged. But you are using up resources, both ink and the time it takes to stop the printer from printing 100 pages of garbage, which could be non-trivial and disrupt important business functions. So I think it's a bit more malicious than calling unlisted telephones.

Oddly, I think calling unlisted telephones is more morally opposable than printing on random printers. So there are clearly two different ideals in my brain dueling for relevancy...

True. And this was auto-dialing 50K of them, and leaving a ~commercial message. But on the other hand, it wasn't printing solid black pages until the paper ran out. Which is what some jerk did to my fax machine, some decades ago ;)

Printing one sheet costs around $0.15. The 50,000 he printed likely cost his targets a total of $7500. That’s second degree felony grand theft territory. Good luck.

That's still ~orthogonal to "hacked". Even if, in fact, it's illegal to print to a misconfigured printer.

Can prosecutors aggregate the value of damage across thousands of unrelated victims for the purpose of charging grand theft? My gut says this is probably not the way it works, but I’m curious if others know more.

As a side note, I don’t think what he did can be charged as theft, technically speaking, because theft laws generally require the perpetrator to take property from the victim.

This case would be destruction of property or vandalism, if my memory of law school serves. And I don’t think there are grand versions of those crimes, at any rate.

If I stole a penny from millions of people do you think I'd be charged for stealing a penny?

Yes, this is how it would be charged.

>because theft laws generally require the perpetrator to take property from the victim.

If I sent a penny from millions of people to another person, would I be innocent of crime?

If I burned up money in another person's safe, would I be innocent?

The law will look at the damage to the victim(s), in aggregate. That the person causing the losses only hurts each a little or doesn't end up with goods is irrelevant.

Besides the normal value of goods laws, there are even tougher computer fraud and abuse type laws. Those could really cost him if some prosecutor decided to pursue those. I suspect there are Feds right now looking at this case and how to proceed.

Personally I don't want to see this person get prison for a felony, but perhaps charging him with it will make him or others think twice about such behavior next time. Community service or such would be a good outcome.

Is more like having an autodialler deliver unsolicited marketing calls on mass and somehow managing to reverse the charges on each call.

arkadiyt may be objecting to the dramatic use of "hack".

If Wells Fargo left an unsecured and sensitive DB exposed over the web, I would also object to a narrative of how people "hacked into Wells Fargo".

That was my point too, for what it's worth.

Yes and while it would be correct to say your car has been stolen if you left it unlocked, you would have had been negligent.

But you wouldn't say that I picked your lock if you had left it unlocked.

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