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Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

>>Do you think hotels aren't protected, to some extent

How are they protected against that, exactly? You can literally walk up to any fire emergency button on any wall on any floor, press a button and evacuate the entire hotel, why bother with this UDP streaming nonsense?

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> How are they protected against that, exactly? You can literally walk up to any fire emergency button on any wall

Cameras near fire alarms and it's a crime in the U.S. to give a false alarm.

Right, that protects the hotel from liability, but it does nothing to protect the hotel from such false alarm happening in the first place.

The threat to the perpetrator -- of 90 days prison time and a permanent criminal record of being a mischief-maker -- prevents people from pulling the alarm.

Same way sheepdogs herd sheep.

Sure, and to circle all the way back to the original point several posts up - why is this a deterrent to someone pulling a fire alarm but not for someone sending a fake UDP broadcast? The penalty will be exactly the same.

Harder to track down the person. Unless the hotel is logging every packet on its network and paying to archive the TBs of encrypted video streaming data that goes through every day. And it's a purely local network, so not like the NSA can help out.

Edit:

"Unauthorized" computer access is a serious federal crime under the CFAA, and that you did it as a joke is not a legal defense. Famous examples:

(1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

(2) the Florida man who social engineered Twitter (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Ivan_Clark)

(3) the Mirai botnet guys (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirai_(malware)), etc.

So the penalty will actually be much worse if you get caught.

If a hotel could spend a few hours and definitively prevent misuse of the fire emergency button, they would do that.

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