This argument seems like the equivalent of saying, well it is really hard to calculate the movements of 10 planetary bodies, therefore if you have 10 real planetary bodies, they will get confused and fly into space.

The idea you would jailbreak it assumes the system is actually heavily secured like an iPhone. Maybe it's just an Ubuntu system with no special security in place, and it's just a matter of booting it from an external drive or something similar.

Anyway, it would be kind of odd trying to stop you tinkering with it, as if you could tell users not to adjust their valve timing or not to pull their differential apart.

At the current bit coin difficulty, I would have thought even a large botnet of conventional CPUs would be pretty pointless.

It's that time of year again on Slashdot.

Good question. Personally I think Australia should just send a destroyer down there and sort it out, but I doubt we'll have the guts.

Yeah, but on the WWW, how are you supposed to know what is public or private? It's not like there are web sites with a banner saying "Don't come to this web site". No, if the URL works, the assumption is its public. If the URL asks for a user name and password, then you shouldn't go beyond that if you don't have said password. If the WWW wasn't like that, then you'd have to make a phone call to Coca-Cola to see if they're happy for you to go to coca-cola.com.

As for the UK and your claim about "normal lens", what in the heck is a normal lens? What is a high zoom? Really? There's really a crazy law like that?

I do that all the time. For example, I surmised that Apple corp might have an Australian office, and lo and behold, apple.com.au worked. I surmised something else. Their products might be at apple.com.au/products or maybe apple.com.au/store, and lo and behold, that worked too. Guessing URLs is not generally a crime.

The problem is, you don't know what someone else knows. And while you might say most people ought to know they oughtn't be in a certain place, not everyone has the same sense of boundaries as you do. Or in other words, this law that sounds very clever is in fact incredibly vague. I mean just for starters, define "shouldn't be". Shouldn't in what sense?

You've got a point, but on the other hand, what if someone codes up such a "hack" and puts said URLs into some harmless looking web page, and I click on it. Am I now guilty of hacking AT&T?

I'm tempted to say that at the very least, URLs that don't involve remote code execution should at the very least be not considered hacking. If the URL calls a server which executes code in exactly the way it was designed to if you access that URL, then it shouldn't be hacking.

If the URL causes the server to execute a code of logic it wasn't designed to, and wouldn't have done without injection of code... well, maybe its hacking.

I'm not completely happy with this definition because I'm sure there is a blurry line here somewhere, but its a heck of a lot more sensible than just some attorney general arbitrarily saying some URLs are OK, and some are not.

Yah, that IS the electronic equivalent of putting a coded small ad in a newspaper.

By the sound of the article, they might be too stupid to ban it. Rather they'd write some law that says you have to hand over any keys you have, but inconveniently for them, there would be nothing useful to hand over.

Why bother with that story? Just say you wrote it on a bit of paper, and you can't find it. But hey, if you release me from jail, I can spend the next 50 years searching for it.

That's interesting they have a different system cross checking. But what happens when they are in disagreement? Who wins? There might not be time for the pilots to figure it out.

Yeah, the internet isn't the only way to hack something. And Siemen's patch for their CPUs? Who knows if it isn't an NSA effort to hack Iran's Nuclear program? You wouldn't know, would you.

Of course there is. The law. Of course, that may not always save your skin, but it doesn't mean there is nothing at all.