One has to wonder then, whose idea it was to charge him in New Jersey at all...

If there's a precedent already in the state court that it's not unauthorized access if there's no code or password stolen... and there's a pretty clear argument that the case doesn't even belong in New Jersey, how did we get here? Some three years of incarceration later!

(Obviously, the answer is that it's not a crime if a cop does it.)

But you could get $50 and a pizza party... with a chance to win an iPad!

Spin the wheel! Weeeeeewwwow!

Which is just what he didn't do, according to the opinion. I agree, this fact wouldn't be helpful to his case if he was tried in probably any other possible state, other than New Jersey.

I'll try a car analogy. If you're trying to drive to New Jersey and you're starting your trip in Ireland, it's not important that you don't have EZPass or any American money to pay the tolls. There's too much water in your engine by the time you reach the shore, assuming you didn't just run out of gas on the bottom of the ocean. You didn't fail to pay the roadway tolls in Jersey, since you never were in the state of New Jersey. So you don't go to jail for that.

It suggests (by way that no evidence was offered) that he is not guilty of unauthorized use of a code or password, which means he's not guilty of violating the precedent for the statute in NJ. It gives no opinion on whether or not this has any bearing on the federal charge under CFAA. The precedent cited is another NJ case, where the person on trial was a police officer who had a password and used it for reasons against internal policy. There was no password, but I believe the standards of the federal CFAA are actually much lower.

I haven't read the judgement (I am a good armchair lawyer though, have read lots of opinions and regurgitation of other peoples interpretation of the facts) but I am pretty sure that was a part of the New Jersey law, so in any retrial it would be irrelevant, since the standard is lower.

It would have probably been better for Weev if AT&T's servers actually were in New Jersey, since then this judges would be forced to say what they think about the NJ law as it applies to this case, which is pretty clearly what you said. The password or code - there was no such barrier to access, so no illegal access through forged authorization occurred.

This barrier requirement is part of the New Jersey law, and the threshold for abuse in the federal statutes is lower. Ah. Here, found it:
See State v. Riley, 988 A.2d 1252,
1267 (N.J. Super. Ct. Law Div. 2009) (p12 of the ruling)

...except that the situation you just described is the opposite of what happened.

The judges declined to give an opinion on whether or not any law was violated, they vacated the verdict in NJ because of a procedural violation that had taken place -- the venue the case was tried in was NJ, even though the events and parties (AT&T was not a plaintiff, so technically not a party... but the servers in question) were not any of them in NJ.

Almost. You can quit, of course, but it's illegal for your company to let you put pressure on others to quit by threatening to quit. It would seem.

Not just that... even renters whose leases do not forbid sublet, or actual property owners, are not allowed to rent for terms less than 30 days because they likely have not obtained the permit. It's said that this permit is onerous or expensive to obtain and so "is usually ignored."

If you can go to the store and buy one, and put it on your network, and your network monitoring software can show you what it's doing, and it's unambiguously doing something that's easy for you to do, and makes it easy to get something that arguably ought to be a secret without your having performed any heavy duty rocket surgery...

It's public! Any of your customers can gain this knowledge without anything you didn't just plain give over to them! If responsibly disclosed and the company won't do anything about it, then they ought to be exposed. Now what is it that was exposed again? "Private" e-mail addresses?

Come on!

Especially Comcast DNS. But Don't use DNS at all. The fact is you can skip DNS and use a /etc/hosts file. This isn't 1982 anymore, disks are huge and it only takes a couple hundred megabytes to host it. With a cron job to rsync it every hour you no longer need to worry about manually updating it either. (It's simple enough to pass the grandmother test!) For those rare cases where a name isn't in my hosts file, I just request the page using an email-to-web service.

No, he has a wife. Thing is, they're into the swinger scene, so she fucks other guys and, well, so does he. Seriously I don't know or particularly care if he's gay, bi, curious, whatever. He claims to get a lot of pussy (due to being a linux celebrity and an alpha male).

uhh, actually it does. The "startup" definition varies but it generally boils down to not having a viable business plan. It means throwing feces against the wall and hoping it looks like art. Why would a competent programmer work for a high risk company without a viable business plan?

Yeah, I'm pulling a No True Startup and saying if they have competent programmers, they're not a startup.

If you've ever seen Pulp Fiction, visited San Francisco, or been to a LUG or LinuxCon, you've probably seen a leather-clad gay sex slave, aka gimp.

It seems like every time you turn around, another bitcoin exchange is hacked or some startup social network for dogs is secretly uploading all your phone contacts over clear text or a retailer is storing unencrypted cc numbers and passwords. Some of the worst offenders are brogrammers. Is there anything we can do?