[ryanlol]

>would then apply to people sitting at home pressing F5.

How would such a law be different from the current laws? If you sit at home pressing f5 with malicious intent and succeed at bringing a site down, you're committing a crime.

[parennoob]

I don't know about you, but criminalizing the act of pressing F5 with any intent seems firmly on the way to Aaron Swartz-like cases to me.

What if you are just fed up of waiting for a site to reload and press F5 a number of times? And what about the (probably majority of) instances where the "attacker" is simply a person who unknowingly downloaded malware onto their computer to get free smileys or whatever?

[ryanlol]

>I don't know about you, but criminalizing the act of pressing F5 with any intent seems firmly on the way to Aaron Swartz-like cases to me.

What? Why is F5 a special case here and what on earth does any of this have to do with Aaron Swartz.

>What if you are just fed up of waiting for a site to reload and press F5 a number of times?

Did you intend to bring it down? Was it obvious that your activity would bring the site down? If answer to both is "No" then you're fine, this is how most laws work.

>And what about the (probably majority of) instances where the "attacker" is simply a person who unknowingly downloaded malware onto their computer to get free smileys or whatever?

Why are you even asking? If someone else commits a crime you're obviously not at fault...

Also, what was even supposedly wrong with the Swartz case? It was on solid ground both legally and morally, shame he never gave the courts a chance.[1]

[1]: Might as well expand on this a little so I don't get hidden by downvotes. I don't think Swartz deserved to go to prison, but given that he intentionally violated the law it's hard to argue that he shouldn't have been charged.

[parennoob]

F5 is a special case here because it is the exact same action that a law-abiding person does. The reason I'm stressing the F5 case is because saying "Hey you pressed F5 with this motive, so you go to jail" is equivalent to thoughtcrime – you're being punished for your thoughts rather than your actions.

Now if someone is using tools specially built for DoS I don't have a a problem with them being prosecuted.

[teddyh]

> tools specially built for

That is also a problematic definition. I recall similar arguments being made against "nmap"; should we ban nmap, or criminalize its use? I also remember when Dan Farmer was fired for simply writing a security scanner (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_Administrator_Tool_fo...), using the same reasoning.