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Comment by weird-eye-issue | Hacker News Reader

If I open your laptop and guess your password then that counts as hacking you in both legal and security terms

You don't need to do some sophisticated thing for it to be considered hacking

I’m not an attorney or anything, but the relevant federal statute is explicitly about unauthorized access of computer systems (18 USC 1030).

Opening someone else’s laptop and guessing the password would absolutely fall under that definition, but I think it’s very much questionable if poking around a document that you have legitimately obtained would do so.

If someone sends me a document with text in it that they meant to remove but didn't and then I read that text, I haven't hacked anything they're just incompetent.

Hacking is unauthorised use of a system. Reading a document that was not adequately redacted can hardly be considered hacking.

Or in case some folks find the addition of a computer confusing here, if someone sends you a physical letter and they've used correction tape or a black marker to obscure some parts of the letter, and you scratch away the correction tape or hold the letter up to a light source to read what's underneath, have you committed a crime?

I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know what the law has to say about this. But I do have at least a small handful of brain cells to rub together, so I know what the law _should_ say about this.

Precisely. If someone wants me to sign a contract on acceptable use of resources (like an agreement not to reverse engineer their software) they send me then that's another thing.

Absent that excluding other default protections like copyright, what I do with it should fall under the assumption of "basically anything".

If this were prior to 2021, I would say the CFAA could be violated so long as the property owner's _intentions_ were for that information to only be accessible to certain users. But I think the CFAA has been sufficiently reduced in scope after Van Buren v United States [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Buren_v._United_States

Hacking is not just authorised use of a system. Hacking and hacking techniques can apply to systems you fully own or systems which you are authorised to hack. Hacking is using something in a way that the designer didn’t anticipate or intend on.

Adobe designed pdf to behave this way. Placing layers over text doesn’t remove the text from the file. They have a specific redaction feature for that purpose.

you telling me when I stick my pen up my nose I’m hacking it?

I would call that a hack, not a good one though.

If you were blind would a screen reader read the documents? Thats not a hack.

If your intent was to circumvent the redactions it would be

Placing a black box on the text isn’t a redaction any more than placing a sticky note would be. No reasonable person can expect a sticky note to permanently prevent readers from seeing text and no reasonable person can expect a black overlay box in pdf to prevent reading text because this is literally a fundamental feature of pdfs as a layer format file

But copying and pasting text of publicly released documents is not illegal. Accessing someone’s computer is illegal. While maybe it could fall under the umbrella of hacking in some general way, articles, and especially titles, should be more precise.

That actually is illegal in some circumstances, for example if the document is protected by copyright.

You guessing my password is not the same as a know and expected behavior of a program. Adobe has a specific feature to redact. PDF is a format known to have layers. Lawyers are trained on day one not to make this mistake. (I am a recovering lawyer). This is either incompetence or deliberate disclosure.

I guess but if you write something down real small and I squint at it is that still hacking?

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