cantonrep.com – January 5, 2006:
On Wednesday morning, Forchione filed a felony criminal charge of disrupting public services against Michael W. Stone, 18, of 13634 Mogadore Ave. NW. Uniontown police arrested the Lake High School senior at the school.
The incident occurred Dec. 2. Using a school computer, Stone created a blog on a Web site that encouraged others to use a link to another site. Once at the second site, Stone told users to “hold down F5 to help crash my school server,” according to police reports.
This type of mentality fits in nicely with the idea that changing a URL is hacking and holding down your shift key violates the DMCA.
gota love 1998 version of a DDoS 🙂
Oh, come on! It’s not what he did, but why he did it. The law at least attempts to go to intent. In this case, the intent was apparently malicious (“shut down my school server”).
There are no doubt a lot of goofy charges and lawsuits filed in this climate of DMCA/Copyright stupidity. But this case on the face of it is not a representative of that.
Saying that “refreshing your browser is illegal” is a gross over-simplification of what is going on here. If this kid had jumped on some IRC channel and told all the 1337 h4X0rz to pingflood his school’s IP address, this wouldn’t have made the news…or if it had, methinks a lot more people would be taking the side of the school than that of the kid. A bunch of people refreshing their browsers with the intent to “crash my school server” is just a low-tech version of that.
If their server cannot handle some disgruntled teens hitting F5, then they need a new IS administrator.
JESUS! John..
I wonder how you would feel if it was YOUR computer? Would he still be just a rambunctious kid?
This is completely outrageous. And, get this: according to DigitalBill on the , at this same school, some teens actually hacked into their school’s system and changed some grades, but this only got them a measly detention!!
PS- I love TWiT!! 😀
Actually, that was at a nearby School at Jackson High School.. those were snot nosed preps there too 🙂
A kid decides to get 30 other kids to stand on a table at school so it will break. The kid gets in trouble for trying to break school property.
“Hey, what’s the world coming to when you can’t even stand on a table anymore?”
Pete said, “A kid decides to get 30 other kids to stand on a table at school so it will break. The kid gets in trouble for trying to break school property.”
Bad analogy, it will not break anything. If a kid decides to have 30 kids block the doors to the school, then they will get told to move on is much more valid as a comparison.