[Yes, this is a duplicate. I screwed up my From: line on the prior one] According to an article by Declan in this morning's Wired News, Brian K. West has decided to take a plea agreement in the government's case against him for accessing an inadvertantly left wide open web site at a newspaper. http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,47146,00.html The plea agreement alleges, amongst other things, that Mr. West intended to modify the newspaper's Perl scripts and market them commercially, as well as using a password file to access "private areas." As I remember the original story, Mr. West snarfed a local copy of the site to edit with Microsoft's FrontPage, to see what some modifications to it might look like, and in doing so, discovered that the copy of the site on the newspaper's server could be accessed and modified by anyone without need of a password, with complete access to all its scripts and other files. In the collection of files presented to the public was something that looked like a password file, and Mr. West tried one entry from it to see if access was granted, much like trying a key one finds on the ground in a nearby lock to see if it fits. Mr. West then informed the newspaper, which instead of simply fixing the misconfiguration, called the authorities, who then visited Mr. West under false pretenses, and attempted to get him to incriminate himself, and subsequently raided the premises and seized his computer. The newspaper, which had noticed the log entry from the password being tested, decided the whole thing was an attempt to steal their extremely precious Perl scripts, and market them to the public. The prosecutors, as prosecutors tend to do, managed to lie by juxtiposition by stating the fact of access using a password, a count of files transferred to Mr. West's machine, and the newspaper's allegations of software theft, in a way which suggested that Mr. West had "hacked" his way into the site using a stolen password, and used that access to steal hundreds of files, with the intent of making a profit from marketing the newspaper's stolen intellectual property. In fact, testing one of the passwords was incidental to the file transfer, the files were obtained because the site was wide open, not because a password was used, and the allegations that Mr. West intended to become the next Larry Ellison by stealing some Perl scripts a product of the newspaper's paranoid imagination. Now I find it unremarkable that Mr. West has chosen to take a plea agreement in this case, on a misdemeanor charge, instead of standing trial in the aftermath of the World Trade Center flattening as an Evil Terrorist Hacker, where the government's proof of nothing more than "unauthorized access" could send him to prison for many years. I also find it unremarkable that the plea agreement offered Mr. West to sign contains a complete laundry list of both the newspaper's and the prosecutor's twisting of the facts, and numerous confessions of "intent." What I find remarkable, is that Declan has written an article claiming that the plea agreement constitutes a "confession" by Mr. West, and that it demonstrates how easily "well-meaning" Netizens can be lead astray by a person who's really a dangerous criminal. Declan also has glowing words for the prosecutor, who he characterizes as unfairly maligned, and for the plea agreement, whose every word he characterizes as "fact." One wonders if Declan also considers everything in the Jim Bell and Carl Johnson plea agreements to constitute "fact" as well." The slant of Declan's article is also not helped by the fact that all the links provided by Wired as "also see" are about an exploit in Microsoft's Web server software having nothing to do with this case. Wired News and MSNBC continue to run neck in neck in the Birdcage Liner Olympics. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"