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Comment by smsm42 | Hacker News Reader

While it is indeed despicable to imagine that there's a different law for big and small companies, it is long known that the size of actual and potential harm is considered when crime and punishment is being discussed. One would probably get different punishment for stealing $10 and stealing $100K (though if you manage to steal $100M you may actually get away with it, but that's another story). If his lawyer would argue (and a good lawyer probably should) that "he did no harm to anyone, of course it's illegal but he didn't mean to hurt anything and he did not, so let's not throw the book at him" - it could influence the outcome. In this case, the judge didn't buy it.

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You can't compare this to $10 vs. $100000K because the actual damage done here versus him doing the same thing to the servers of a small company is not x10000 the size, if that makes sense. The harm caused in both cases is negligible.

I suppose you could count the large amount of time facebook probably had to spend going through their systems to make sure they were clean. Surely the money for their security team was already spent though?

Also, isn't messing around with the records of a small business somewhere that probably doesn't even have proper backups actually more potentially damaging than poking at part of a globally distributed, multiply redundant decentralised system like facebook?

It was really the way the judge chose to phrase that whole bit that annoyed me to be honest.

Surely the money for their security team was already spent though?

I doubt Facebook's security team is just sitting idly waiting for an attacker to give them something to do. Each hour devoted to this is an hour they can't use for other tasks, besides the possibility of having to pay overtime.

True but it seems this intrusion gave the team an excellent problem to focus on. The system is better for having solved it.

If considered in relation to scale, what per cent of its wealth did Facebook have to spend on this? Not much.

You do realize there are people in jail in California for life for stealing very small amounts, due to the "3 strikes law", where as the people responsible for sucking billions out of the US economy... well, none of them have gone to jail. (I did read about someone that did go to jail, but he was a low-level actor... it was clear it was a sacrificial lamb).

I know and do realize. I know there are people in jail in California for not stealing anything at all but enjoying in their privacy some activities that the government does not condone and considers bad for them, so it puts them in jail, which is obviously much better for them. I realize all the sad state of it. I'm just noting one small point that the size of the harm does matter and always had and will matter in the court, whatever we may be thinking about it.

Even sacrificing lambs is useful - with time, the bigger fish will find very hard to get enough sacrificial lambs and the lambs themselves may start demanding larger rewards for their sacrifice.

Wondering if lamb fat is good to fry large fish.

No, it's very gamey; a very little bit goes a long way, even in lamb dishes.

:-)

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