it's too bad that the discussion around this, both as given in the title of the post here on HN, and the description of the problem, are needlessly inflammatory and obscure the real interesting thing that is going on: the source code release is essentially moot & probably sufficient under the terms of the gpl v2 because the keys that make the kernel valid to the device's bootloader were not released.
Amazon is increasingly problematic; their eventual evolution into a kind of Ultra-Walmart seems more and more inevitable. Maybe my son will think visiting a store to buy a book made of paper, or perhaps any physical good, is as quaint as churning one's own butter. Main street will be maintained as a theme park via corporate sponsorship. The stores will resemble that Korean grocery store with no products on the shelves, just info, images, and barcodes.
the daily life of most women is filled with navigating a hostile space that may break out into sexual violence at any time.
having an obsessed troll on the internet following you around, or threatening you before you show up to a conference, goes way beyond what you're talking about here.
your whole point comes from a place of the privilege of relative security. imagine that is not the case.
you are illustrative of the problem because you are a) ignorant of what harassment is really like b) apparently unwilling to imagine it and c) BLAMING THE HARASSED
i read it as making fun of knee jerk anti-new-language types, as in, all their arguments are pat and repetitive.
maybe that's just my perceptual bias, but perhaps also the greater context of hacker news that you point to in your comment. i tend to believe that things are posted here in support of experimentation.
"For one, it begs credulity that someone who has filed patent applications dealing with cryptography had never heard of Bitcoin until I asked about it. That would be like a journalist claiming he never heard of Twitter."
this is a baseless assertion and essentially the crux of his argument. maybe real cryptographers don't spend any time thinking about bitcoin because it has the same relationship as twitter and real journalism.
The complaint indicates that AT&T's publicly accessible endpoint is a protected computer under Title 18, United States Code, Section 1030(e)(2). a protected computer is basically any computer used for interstate or foreign commerce in the US, or outside the US if it affects the commerce thereof.
the issue hinges on intent - if you know that you're exceeding authorized access to obtain something of value. 18 USC 1030 was created in 1986 by the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and is often panned for being incredibly broad.