MIT Legal repudiated Xbox hacker too

http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=2860

by irq • 14 years ago

160 52 14 years ago

dshep2• 14 years ago

Favorite quote: "It saddens me that America’s so-called government for the people, by the people, and of the people has less compassion and enlightenment toward their fellow man than a corporation."

afarrell• 14 years ago

I found that quote interesting too, as it was telling that the author felt it expressed something noteworthy. I don't see why it should be at all surprising. Corporations are made of living, breathing people. They each have their own organizational culture and set of external pressures that guides their decisions and behavior. The same is true of governments, and government agencies, and offices within government agencies, and cliques of people within offices of government agencies, and ... you get my point.

You get an even greater sense of this when you talk to people who have ever created a corporation or tried to make it more powerful. Gee, I wonder if there are any such people who hang around here...

michaelfeathers• 14 years ago

In the US, prosecution has become a punishment that overwhelms any eventual sentence.

rdl• 14 years ago

Are there other universities known for being better at this than MIT?

davorak2• 14 years ago

The impression many people have is that MIT has or is getting worse on these types of issues hence why it is a big deal to them.

dshep2• 14 years ago

"I started rebuilding my life overseas, and I find a quantum of solace in the thought that my residence abroad makes it a little more difficult to be served."

Does this mean things are better outside the US these days?

jstanley• 14 years ago

Barring the likes of China, things were always better outside the US.

GNUAerospace• 14 years ago

Absolutely! Cheers from Vienna Austria, the birthplace of libertarianism!

rayiner4• 14 years ago

Unless you're interested in e.g. free speech, and your's gets labeled hate speech somewhere like the UK or France. Or you know, any of the wide range of other areas where European laws are more restrictive.

rst• 14 years ago

It depends where outside the US, one imagines --- but there are certainly places that are generally worse. Law enforcement agencies in, say, China, are not known for their respect for the rights of the accused or their scrupulous attitude towards due process.

xyzzy123• 14 years ago

True. However, I have this unfounded assumption that prosecuting reverse engineers is not high on their list of priorities.

On the other hand, messing with the state seems like a bad idea.

Kliment• 14 years ago

Bunnie is based in Singapore.

EDIT: Corrected. I thought he was in Schenzhen but I was confusing him with Zach Smith.

_delirium• 14 years ago

I'm not sure whether things are better generally, but most other developed countries use imprisonment much more sparsely than the U.S. does. Fewer crimes carry prison sentences (and especially fewer nonviolent or first-time-offense crimes), what prison sentences do exist are typically shorter, and prosecutions happen more rarely.

lancewiggs• 14 years ago

The USA has an incredible economy, and the tech scene is amazing in the SF region. it doing business requires incredible hoops due to multi layered complexity, there are homeless on the streets and other signs of a society that fails to look after the less lucky, it has an amazingly poor political system in practise and lousy food, unless you live in the Bay or have lots of money. But foreigners are most scared and worried about being pulled into the quagmires of the US justice system or the US health care systems.

drawkbox2• 14 years ago

Cruel and unusual punishment via prosecution. Prison threats for non-violent crimes. I agree, things have gotten carried far away.

tzs• 14 years ago

What's wrong with prison for non-violent crime? For instance, if someone steals my car from a parking lot, I'm OK with them getting prison time, even if they didn't use violence to get my car.

drawkbox2• 14 years ago

Well in your case a fine and paying for damages. Repeat offenses maybe could constitute jail time. But wouldn't non violent crimes be better served by keeping the person out of the prison system with hardened criminals, further preventing a life of crime. In the end, is that better for taxes and society in general? I don't have all the answers, but in many cases prison for non-violent crimes (i.e. this JSTOR case or drug cases) are misguided and perpetuate the problem. Would you be happy if that person that stole your car was a first time offender and later found out he got caught up in a gang in prison and entered a life of crime? Or would you just collect your insurance, buy another car, and hope that there is some non-violent offender programs that could stop that, or that over time he could repay that to insurance? We have to change that I believe, or we can expect many more situations like the recent events. I hate even talking about the private prison system we have here that profits off of incarceration of non-violent crimes.

In Swartz's case, putting someone in prison that is contributing to society in exchange for locking them up for 30+k per year seems completely backwards, cruel and ancient thinking. A system that can create larger criminals easily from imprisonment of minor or non-violent actions. We should at least differentiate them better.

mbell• 14 years ago

Putting someone in jail is just as likely to turn them in a violent repeat offender as it is to 'cure' them.

TruthElixirX• 14 years ago

Because they only committed economic damage against you. It doesn't make sense to send someone to jail who only committed an economic or property crime because:

They stole from you and harmed you economically. If they go to prison your tax dollars and the tax dollars of others must house them, pay for their care, etc so they are further harming you economically.

It would make more sense to have them provide restitution to you in some form. They should have to pay for:

Damage to the car (if the car still exists) + cost of you not having your car and any sort of issues arising from that (i.e. you were on your way to an interview, you came out of 7-Eleven and your car was gone, you missed your interview and now have no job, or some such) + interest on the previous two things they should have to pay for

If they destroyed the car in some manner then replace the first part of the equation with the cost of a replacement car of equal value.

Prison should be used when someone can cause harm that is permanent such as murder, rape, etc to prevent them from doing it again to someone else. If they harm is just economic in nature then that can be rectified and there is no sense in making everyone pay to house someone who did no permanent damage.

Further more as pointed out below, going to prison tends to make people come out worse criminals.

monochromatic• 14 years ago

"Cruel" is a stretch, and "unusual" is clearly false.

davorak2• 14 years ago

At least in the USA, prison rape statistics were not pleasant last time I checked. Nor is the rate of encountering or being around violence and/or intimidation. Not all prisons are as bad as others but non-violent offenders do always get options on where to go.

Most individuals put around constant violence or threat of such are permanently changed, an unpleasant/undesired change. So for may non-violent crimes many would consider prison a cruel punishment. At least with how US prisons are set up.

My understanding is that historically the "unusual" in "cruel and unusual" indicates unusual from everyday reasonable life. Constantly being around violence to an extent it changes the average individual permanently is unusual for every day reasonable life in the USA at least.

malandrew• 14 years ago

  cruel: 
    (1) willfully causing pain or suffering to others, or 
        feeling no concern about it;
    (2) causing pain or suffering

Intentionally causing bankruptcy for someone (or freezing of their assets) while also threatening them with jail times wildly disproportional to the crime and damages caused by the crime in order to extort a guilty plea before you prove them guilty in a court of law is cruel. Doing so is the willful causing of mental pain or suffering of another human being. If you've ever known another person in the U.S. that has been wrongly convicted of a crime, you'd think it was a cruel system as well. It is especially cruel to those least capable of handling emotional pain.

joezydeco2• 14 years ago

Sorry to be a little cynical here, but I have a couple of questions.

1) Was bunnie's hack of the Xbox keys a MIT-endorsed project? Was it part of his degree work or something he did on his own time?

2) If the work was independent, what's MIT's obligation to shield bunnie in a legal sense? If it wasn't, did MIT step in and say "hey, this might piss off Microsoft if you do this" or was the work just put out there with unknown some degree of oversight?

3) bunnie was an MIT student, Arron was not. The statement "MIT gave up on me too" kind of implies the situations were similar. Were they?

Don't misunderstand me, I have immense respect for bunnie and hackers of his breed, but these things are just bugging me.

jmix2• 14 years ago

I see your legalistic approach to MIT's responsibilities, but this fascination with "endorsement" is missing the point. Universities are not government labs, where you'd expect every participant to clear every activity with their superiors. Research doesn't work that way. And if universities do not stick up for exploration, who will?

Was MIT obligated to defend this fellow? No. Should it have defended him? Most definitely.

joezydeco2• 14 years ago

In my view, endorsement is key. Let's pretend we're listening in on that first phone call from Microsoft to MIT:

MS: "Hey, um, so we've learned that one of your students just published a way to jeopardize our entire project, one that we've spent multiple millions of dollars developing. He seems to have done it in your labs with your tools. What's your take?"

So MIT's response can go one of two ways:

1) "Yeah, how about that? Cool, huh? We didn't know about it but we fully back him and let's see what the internet does with this."

2) "Um, we had no idea he was doing this and didn't ask him to publish. He did this alone."

Do you see where each direction leads?

DannyBee• 14 years ago

Hey, remember that one time recently when an MIT student did something cool that MIT didn't know about, where the thing was obviously going to make large amounts of money, and MIT said "sure, we had no idea, and we didn't endorse it, so of course you can own it!" No? Neither do I.

It's ethically suspect to pick and choose, and say "well, when you do cool stuff we didn't know about, that we own, but the stuff that may get you in trouble, you get to deal with all that unless we specifically endorsed it".

pdonis2• 14 years ago

Was bunnie's hack of the Xbox keys a MIT-endorsed project?

Since the AI lab published the research as an official memo, it seems like they at least endorsed it. The memo (linked to in the article) is worth reading since it makes clear why the hacking of the keys was done: to test how secure the Xbox's security really was.

rywang• 14 years ago

When I first arrived at MIT, I was handed a book on "How to Get Around MIT." I was impressed with the section on hacking, which included the following story about the Harvard-Yale hack:

"DKE has tried to hack the game before, most memorably in the late 1940s when they buried explosive cord in a pattern that would spell out "MIT''. Unfortunately, Harvard discovered the hack and set up a trap. They arrested several students wearing coats lined with batteries. A dean, who had been informed about the hack after the arrest, went down to bail the students out. He pointed out to the detective that the battery-lined coats were only circumstantial evidence. At this point the dean opened his own battery-lined coat and declared "all Tech men carry batteries.''"

My point is that MIT presents itself as a place that defends hacking, and it has at least been lenient in the past.

Zircom• 14 years ago

Do you know anywhere that has a collection of MIT-related hacking stories? I also enjoy them when I see them posted here.

kragen• 14 years ago

Bunnie here says he feels safer from government abuses in Singapore, which has no trial by jury, a single-party government, and the highest execution rate in the world, where all public gatherings of five or more people require a police permit, than in the US.

Does that mean the US has failed?

MIT Legal repudiated Xbox hacker too

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