> The onus for keeping computerized material private is on the owner
I don’t think that’s a sensible rule and at the end of the day, it’s not the one that’s going to prevail. The Internet will be sanitized and made safe for all the people who forget their passwords and write them in their monitors. The Internet is for ordinary people now, not curious teenager hackers. And ordinary people will make the rules to suit themselves.
> The Internet will be sanitized and made safe for all the people who forget their passwords and write them in their monitors.
And how, exactly, is this "sanitization" going to occur? Are you saying that having 15 police officers raid a home and confiscate multiple computers (all but one of which had nothing to do with the incident in question), arresting a completely uninvolved person on his way to school, and taking no action at all against the stupid contractor who set up the website, is an acceptable form of "sanitization"?
> The Internet is for ordinary people now, not curious teenager hackers.
That's not what the police action described in the article is saying. It's saying the Internet is for government and corporations, and God help the ordinary people who get in their way. (Btw, I include "curious teenager hackers" in "ordinary people". Perhaps the fact that you don't is part of the problem.)
This can't work, for the simple reason that the Internet has global reach. Unlike other kinds of personal property, a Web server is accessible to the entire world. There are lots of people out there who have no reason to respect US or Canadian law, and there always will be. Prosecuting this young man, or Weev, may make some "ordinary" people feel better, but doesn't begin to deter any actual criminals.
The only solution is site owners taking responsibility for securing their sites, in accordance with the sensitivity of the information on them. The sooner "ordinary" people realize that, the better.
Ordinary young people today are probably even less computer literate than ordinary people my age (mid 30s). They grew up being spoon fed the Internet through the FB and Snapchat apps on iPhones.
Your entire argument is based on this idiosyncratic theory of widespread ignorance. This theory is simply wrong, as a matter of fact. Even if it were true, no historical case ever turned on the unprovable notion that most people are too dumb to understand the truth.
Since you didn't respond when I raised it elsewhere in-thread, I would highlight again the fundamental imbalance between the rules you would impose on Facebook etc. and those you would impose on users. Firms that spend billions of dollars developing their systems only have to be as smart as the most ignorant person we can imagine. Their users, in contrast, must be geniuses to keep up with their many changes to TOS, interfaces, and functionality, while simultaneously those genius users aren't allowed to notice that numbers follow each other in sequence. This is nonsense on its face, but then again authoritarian maneuvers are their own justification, aren't they?
If we're at the topic of wishful thinking, I wished ordinary people would understand basic things about the internet. The purpose of humanity as a whole shouldn't be to dumb things down for "ordinary people". It should be to better teach and educate new generations, so we won't be able to assume ordinary people are dumb.
Web scraping is a normal occurence on the internet not just limited to curious teenage hackers. When I grew up we didn't lock our doors because we knew and trusted our neighborhood. It's like you're asking 4chan to use polite vocabulary.
I don’t think that’s a sensible rule and at the end of the day, it’s not the one that’s going to prevail. The Internet will be sanitized and made safe for all the people who forget their passwords and write them in their monitors. The Internet is for ordinary people now, not curious teenager hackers. And ordinary people will make the rules to suit themselves.