How ever tightening hacking laws make you a criminal In 1970, a 14-year-old boy dialed into a nationwide computer network, uploaded a virus he had written and caused the entire network to crash. That boy was Bill Gates. Five years later, he founded Microsoft. A few years later, two young men went around college dorms in California selling boxes of wires that let students bypass telephone- company restrictions and make long-distance calls for free. Those young men were Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, and a later venture they started, Apple, is now the most valuable company in the world. In 2010, another young man, who had already founded a multimillion-dollar company, broke into a utility closet at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He hooked up a laptop to the campus network and downloaded 4 million academic journal articles, most of them in the public domain, from a paid archive to which he had a subscription. He was arrested, indicted twice on multiple counts of fraud and, at a trial that was to have begun in April, faced 50 years in federal prison and a $1 million fine. His name was Aaron Swartz, and last week he took his own life by hanging himself.
Posted on: Wed, 04 Sep 2013 07:31:49 +0000
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