Hacker News Reader

Programs like https://www.hacksplaining.com/ exist purely as educational programs that teach you to exploit known flaws in web security and have no issue with the law.

View on HN

Right, but possession of those items do not constitute a violation of law. Whereas, the possession of child exploitation material does. No matter the reasoning.

I would tread lightly crawling the dark web. There are cases where the FBI has admitted to running services on TOR, to collect IP addresses:

https://www.wired.com/2013/09/freedom-hosting-fbi/

> Right, but possession of those items do not constitute a violation of law. Whereas, the possession of child exploitation material does. No matter the reasoning.

What about when the FBI/CIA does it? Genuine question.

No one watches the watchmen.

There is a legal exception for legitimate law enforcement activities.

But it is totally possible to host your own server with flawed security that you are able to legally hack. It might be rare for that to be the actual use case, but it is totally a possibility. With the illegal material being discussed here, there is no such equivalent no matter how out of the box a justification one is willing to aim for.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com