In physical 'hacking' if you don't make any effort to secure your valuables, you can't claim they were stolen. I wonder why it is different with virtual valuables?
That's also not legal. You can't simply walk into someone's house, regardless of whether it's locked. It's unlawful trespass, it's a gross violation of privacy (especially since you took a picture), and it may be legally deemed breaking and entering, burglary, or some other felony depending on jurisdiction.
Also, I believe that the voicemail "hackers" also deleted some voicemails, and in that case something was indeed taken.
I don't think the analogies are doing justice. Nobody's house, not even a virtual one, was involved. An open-to-the-public voicemail system was used. The 'victim' was sympathetic and folks reacted emotionally. Its not clear to me this was espionage, or even a misdemeanor.
You're still trying to link "unlocked" and "open to the public". The fact that you don't lock something does not mean that it's legally open for anyone to use/take/whatever. If your front door is unlocked, it's still a crime for me to enter. If you leave your voicemail unlocked, it's still a crime for me to access it.
These comparisons are getting pretty tenuous, don't you think?
If you run foo.com, and you open it to the public, then you have made the decision to allow the public to use it. You've got a DNS record that tells the world they're welcome to access your site. On the other hand, if I sit outside your house and use your open WiFi to scan for computers inside your house with open ports, I'm probably committing a crime. If you have not made your desktop machine public, my accessing it is almost certainly against your wishes.
I'm thinking that voicemail is pretty public. Not as public as a web site, but more so than your desktop machine - after all, its available 24X7 from any phone in the universe.
The difference is only expectation. Some folks have the expectation that voicemail is as private as, for instance, an answering machine. Which is clearly not the case if you are technically savvy, which I'm thinking a judge is not.
To access my voicemail, you have to enter my pin. If I have not set a pin, there's still a default one. The way around this is to spoof my number (on a phone that uses pinless voicemail access) and pretend to be me. In no case is my voicemail public, either in practice or in intention.
I'm not sure how you think an answering machine is different from voicemail. I can access my answering machine from any phone in the universe, too, or at least I could if this was still 1995. Voicemail is just an answering machine than handles a lot of telephone lines.
It wasn't open to the public. Her voicemails, my voicemails, your voicemails are in no sense published. In the Milly Dowler case, the PI raked through the bins of the dead girl's family a few days after she went missing to find leads on what her phone number was.
Edit: bins == trash (sorry was thinking in anglicisms)
No, but if you don't lock up corporate secrets, or put passwords on computers, then it isn't industrial espionage when I walk off with a copy of same. This is why everybody carries cardkeys - not because they work very well (folks circumvent ours with a coathanger when they forget their badge) but because the act of having cardkeys makes taking stuff a crime.
At home? In a bar? They are completely different. In a bar, it becomes the property of the bar owner. Who is very likely to give it back, but in no way obliged to do so by law.
Covered adnauseum in the 'iPhone prototype left in a bar' thread. Sorry, I haven't learned to search HN history for articles.
It does seem bizarre, doesn't it? Sometimes petty legal issues are resolved using precedent and it can seem arbitrary, probably because it is.
For instance, its accepted in the US that in a rear-end collision its the car in back that is at fault. In Austria I've been told the car in front is at fault!
Both sides could be argued. But like in baseball with the infield-fly rule, a rule gets made to settle it once and for all, and it is really arbitrary.
> Covered adnauseum in the 'iPhone prototype left in a bar' thread.
What on Earth are you talking about? That phone was still the property of Apple. Gizmodo's blogger was investigated for involvement in felony theft. Leaving your property does not stop it from being your property. If someone finds your property and refuses to return it (or in some cases simply neglects to turn it into the police), they are guilty of a crime.
