full-disclosure - Teenager cleared of hacking

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Message-ID: <1066395766.3152.17.camel@tantor.nuclearelephant.com>
From: jonathan at nuclearelephant.com (Jonathan A. Zdziarski)
Subject: Teenager cleared of hacking - Off Topic?

> All that tells me (and anyone else) is that the jury considered there wasn't
> enough evidence to convict him.

Not necessarily; there is obvious evidence that the attack came from his
computer, but a significant lack of evidence tying the actions of
Caffrey's computer to Caffrey.  Until they pass legislation that makes
us all responsible for our own computers (which if it ever does happen
will hopefully also make software manufacturers responsible as well),
they still need to prove he did it intentionally...there probably wasn't
enough evidence linking Caffrey to the girl.

The fact that he was autistic may have also had something to do with it;
I'm sure it wouldn't have put the police in a very favorable light if
the general public got the impression that they were convicting "Rain
Man" of computer hacking.  

There is also the issue of trying to prove that thousands of emails is
technically a denial of service attack...any decent email server ought
to be able to handle thousands of emails...if we base the delegation
"denial of service attack" on the hardware capabilities of the machine,
then sending ONE email to an exchange server could be considered as
such...you get my point though.