said by elios :

its more like he left all his stuff out in the front yard and thought it was safe there

said by elios :

its more like he left all his stuff out in the front yard and thought it was safe there

said by elios :

yes but its your own fault you left it there

if you leave some thing out in the open like long enough some one is going to take it

said by elios :

It is no more legal to steal something off my front yard than it is to go in my open back window and steal something.

said by bear73 :

true, but possession is 9/10ths of the law. if you leave it in the open, and someone walks off with it, you have no recourse.

said by Noah Vail :

If MobiTV would rather people not availed themselves of a free link to their content, they should stop publishing a free link to their content.

said by MyDogHsFleas :

What you say is completely true. It would be stupid for me to leave something out in my front yard that I didn't want to be taken.

However, that does NOT make it legal for someone to take it. If I catch the guy who took it and press charges, his defense of "it's your fault because you left it in your front yard" is not going to work.

said by MyDogHsFleas :

On another news story (the one about WikiLeaks) I started a thread titled "Web sites are not magic" or something like that.

The point is, just because it's a Web site, doesn't grant it magical invulnerability from the real world of business and law.

What you say is true from a practical point of view. They've depended on security through obscurity (deep link URL to a text file with more deep links to the content) and now they've been burned. They should not have done that.

My whole point here is, don't leap to the conclusion that therefore it's perfectly OK to use those deep links, that bypass their authentication and authorization system, just because they are now revealed. Or, worse, that they are only getting what they deserve.

mobiTV, whether you like it or not, has a valid case. Howard Forums will lose the DMCA appeal if they make one.

said by Karl Bode :

quote:

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Your entire argument is flawed, even using your own analogy. As posted above, this isn't like Howard Forums took the stuff from the unlocked house. They simply let a user posted comment that "so and so left all of their stuff in the front yard" stand. Howard Forums has provided nothing but information, about a completely non-secured PUBLIC website. It's no different than me telling a friend that I observed a guy in a green shirt walking down the street.

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We have a winner.

said by MyDogHsFleas :

Maybe on Planet Karl. On Earth, you're ignoring the fact that the steps involve:

1) figuring out a deep URL to a file
2) downloading and looking at that file (which is not obviously a text file)
3) pulling more deep URLs out of that file
4) firing those URLs at the web site

To say this is like you just happened to notice something on the Internet (like you just happened to notice someone walking in a green shirt) is deeply disingenuous. Someone deliberately walked down this path to find something that was non-obvious before they found it. And that someone knew, for sure, that they were bypassing (admittedly poorly secured) authentication/authorization steps that the website owners had in place.

Once it was found, it is now obvious, to those that are even moderately skilled at computers and the Internet. It's also obvious that their security is just a tad less than bulletproof. That doesn't change the fact that you can't blame the victim because they didn't resist the attack very well.