If he can smell it from outside my cellar, then why isn't he able to knock on my door? Or call the cops if I'm not home. Even for actual extremis (such as a fire) I'd generally expect people to call the fire department instead of breaking into my house to put a blanket over a kitchen fire.
With that said I'm sympathetic to this guy's intent. If I were Yahoo or the FBI and he can prove that innocuous access is all he was doing, let's just say I wouldn't go out of my way to throw the book at him.
Because (going back to IRL analogies again), the authorities writ large have the authority to do an exigent search of my home if there's probable cause of a disaster of some sort going on, but local and Federal LE don't exactly have the same right to go around pwning the entire Internet to look for sites that have already been rooted, so in a sense leaving this issue to the authorities is simply leaving it to no one except the criminals, which is also unsatisfactory.
If the right answer to widespread problems like these is supposed to be law enforcement "patrolling the Internet" in some fashion, then we'd need to have way different legal authorities to allow for that. Until then I'm not sure that "only the criminals can search for burning buildings on the Internet" is really the most pragmatic answer.
In any event we obviously can't rely on each and every single important web site's system administration teams. If even Yahoo can be caught, who can you trust?
yeah right, they'll fix your KDE 2 install on freebsd in a jiffy as well
Until then I'm not sure that "only the criminals can search for burning buildings on the Internet" is really the most pragmatic answer.
It's not a pragmatic answer, it's a matter of fact. NSCIA are busy collecting phone calls and developing backdoors.
I'd be careful calling anyone criminal.
