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Comment by dak1 | Hacker News Reader

Just to play devil's advocate: If an armored Brinks truck gets in an accident and cash spills all over, it's not legal to take just because it's no longer protected and on public land.

Intent has to matter a lot in these cases, though.

If a bill blows a mile away and somebody happens to find it with no knowledge of the crash, that's qualitatively different than witnessing the accident and then rushing to grab the money you watched spill out.

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Just to be practical: the internet is not a magical place just one where anonymity is so practical that one can not justify a figurative brink truck failing. Moreover, it's absolutely unacceptable for institutions like Equifax to fail given the importance of identity security and the apparent lack of (or unwillingness to consider) alternatives to the social security number such as PKI; PGP for example. If you've ever seen a bitcoin paper wallet with QR codes printed on it you'll know what I'm talking about. I don't care if it's Apache Struts or PHP + mySQL they should have tested to the point of impossibility of intrusion. I think it's also reasonable to assume that the government is full of shit, and the most likely scenario is that these people in China admitted this to the government because they wanted us to know that they did it. If anything they're doing us a favor, but I still think the real solution to the problem is to stop relying so heavily on pseudo-secret identities like the social security number and to at least offer people an alternative means that uses cryptography at least for the people who care about doing things right and taking responsibility for their own security since the government can only make fraudulent guarantees that we're ever going to be safe.

Maybe I'm wrong about this, but I'm pretty damn sure if you use tor the right way they're not ever going to find you unless you give yourself away some other way.

Just because the proverbial armored car company and/or driver was negligent, doesn't mean the thief is innocent.

no for sure, stealing is a dick thing to do. But I like to keep my expectations reasonable. Can I reasonably expect to carelessly leave my phone at a table in a place where crime is known to happen when I know better?

> it's not legal to take

How about to copy?

I think that a better comparison would be with an armoured truck having left open its doors and spilling top secret documents all over the road.

printing money as a non-government entity is always illegal. when, where or how doesn't matter.

I did not say printing though. Copying could as well be taking a picture of them.

If you want to print them though, I am pretty sure that it is legal as long as you include a clear disclaimer that they are fake.

> Copying could as well be taking a picture of them.

These are very different things and regulated in different ways. This is some weird version of strawman.

I do not see how, given that this is about the equifax events. Is it really different if you copy a "top secret" text file or if you take photographs of your screen displaying it?

Nobody will care if you take a photo of money. Copying the money, as in making a physical copy is a problem.

This is different from information which is inherently not physical, so any copy of representation is a copy. The grey area of course is a lossy copy... redistributed low-res copies of art, etc.

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