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Comment by nthitz | Hacker News Reader

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/magazine/03trolls-t.html

Weev has some curious quotes in this article

    “I want everyone off the Internet. Bloggers are filth. They need to be destroyed. Blogging gives the illusion of participation to a bunch of retards. . . . We need to put these people in the oven!”

and

    “The question we have to answer is: How do we kill four of the world’s six billion people in the most just way possible?”

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Ya that person needs a permanent stay in a rubber padded room. If they're not there already.

He's basically the least-sympathetic test case possible, but... the tech community is trying to set him free. For our own good. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6093468

You do realize what's his 'profession' right?

Weev is currently in prison, so yeah pretty much, minus the padding.

That said, the reasons for him being in prison are more disturbing than shit he's done over the years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weev#AT.26T_data_breach

I see he has a cozy little room just up the road from my house. Allenwood low is an easy ride for a Federal Prison stay.

So why is his reasons for incarceration more disturbing than the stuff he has done over the years? What I see is an intelligent guy, who could really do a lot of good if he could actually be civilly disobedient. But instead he chooses to go the antisocial way with some "moral highground". He played with fire, and he got burned. There are better, more respectful ways to be an activist and be an agent for change that would produce far more fruitful results.

It's disturbing because it's innocuous and downright common. AT&T published customer's personal information where they shouldn't have. Weev downloaded it, and he's the one in trouble? If you look at my link just below, you can see a lot of security researchers who are worried that this court decision just made their jobs illegal.

Weev didn't just download the data, he released it without first telling AT&T about the flaw. If he had simply told AT&T the data was available, without deliberately violating the privacy of hundreds of thousands of people, he wouldn't be in a minimum security federal penitentiary right now.

Weev is not one of the good guys. He acted deliberately, and that makes all the difference.

Weev made the info easier to get, and I'm not saying he should have done it, but the info was already available publicly on the internet. This should have been a civil case where AT&T could get damages or something. Instead they outlawed "using a script to download data that someone accidentally posted to the web", which is insane.

Nope, he didn't release it. He showed it to a journalist to substantiate his claim, and then deleted it.

If the information was already public-facing, was it not already 'released'?

Not in the general usage of that word, no.

I'm not clear on what you mean. General usage of the word "release" necessitates prior confinement. Dumping a bunch of data on an open web server is not confining said data, it is making it public. Even if the data was previously confined -- by, say, company policy or copyright or whatever -- as soon as it is uploaded to the public-facing web server without protections it is released from confinement.

This article is unreal.

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