[listenallyall]

Are you serious? They planned to launch the equivalent of a digital bomb, knowing full well there would be plenty of collateral damage. Hell no it isn't an "accident"

I will put it another way. I feel quite confident the 9/11 bombers did not know, or specifically target, my friends and acquaintances who died in those towers. Therefore, are you going to claim 9-11 was an accident?

If I intend to rob a convenience store, and in the process of doing so, my gun goes off and the clerk is shot and killed, was it just an accident?

[tchaffee]

Yes I am serious. Are you? How about we keep this respectful and do away with the condescending tone, which is not really welcome here on Hacker News?

9/11 was presumably intended to damage as much property and kill as many people as possible. So no, the people who died as a result of that terrorist attack against the US were not killed by accident.

Yes, if your gun accidentally goes off during a robbery, that is by definition an accident. An accident that could have been avoided if different choices had been made, but still an accident.

If the intended target in this case was the Ukraine, and companies in the USA suffered immense damages it's reasonable to ask if those unintended consequences were accidental. Similar to how a bomb dropped on an Italian border in WWII might accidentally kill ally French citizens on the other side of the border. With cyber warfare it becomes much more interesting, because those accidents don't respect physical distance.

[listenallyall]

I never said the gun went off "accidentally", you added that word to support your otherwise baseless argument. Guns go off during robberies because the robber got nervous or impatient, because there was a melee, because a third party got involved. By deliberately bringing the gun into the situation, the subsequent claim of an "accidental" firing is nullified.

A guy drinks two quarts of whisky at his favorite bar then drives home. On the way in his drunken state he runs a red light, smashes into a school bus and kills a 9 year old he never met named Mikey. Whoops, sorry Mikey's mom and dad, it was just an accident! Because Tchaffee says so.

[tchaffee]

Great example. Killing someone while drunk is called involuntary manslaughter. Because it's an accident. It was not planned. It wasn't intentional. I never once claimed that accidents can't be horrible. Or that reckless behavior that results in an accident should not be punished. I never said it was "just" an accident. That's you putting words in my mouth. What I said is very simple: if it wasn't part of the plan, it was an accident.

[listenallyall]

Absolutely false.

Dec. 2: https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/2019/12/drunk-driver-who-ki...

Nov 14: https://www.inquirer.com/news/david-strowhouer-sentence-dui-...

Nov 8: https://eccalifornian.com/drunk-driver-given-second-degree-m...

Nov 15: https://www.pressconnects.com/story/news/public-safety/2019/...

first-degree manslaughter, third-degree murder, second-degree murder, first-degree vehicular manslaughter

"Involuntary" isn't in any of these. And these are just the first few search results.

[tchaffee]

It's only false if you are willing to be a victim of confirmation bias.

"DUI manslaughter charges are more common than DUI murder charges. Simply put, an intoxicated driver is arrested after causing an accident that resulted in the death of another person. The driver did not intend to cause the death, but it happened as a result of drunk driving."

https://dui.findlaw.com/dui-charges/dui-manslaughter-and-dui...

It would be child's play for anyone at this point to use a search engine to dig up loads of examples of people convicted for involuntary manslaughter as a result of killing someone while drunk driving.

[listenallyall]

You get points for tenacity, I'll concede that. But your argument is simply wrong. You stated: "Killing someone while drunk is called involuntary manslaughter" Of course, most of the time it is. But you didn't qualify with "usually" or "often" (or with "while driving", for that matter). A single example of killing someone while drunk NOT equating to involuntary manslaughter, is sufficient to prove your statement to be false, same as if you had said "prime numbers are odd."

The flaw in your logic this whole time is your insistence that anything unintended = accident. Things can be unintended but also not an accident. All the previous examples. Involuntary manslaughter laws tend to use the word "unintentional" but not "accidental." How about the Free Solo guy -- certainly he didn't intend to die, but had he slipped and fell, when the whole point of the climb was to do it without any safety equipment, it couldn't be classified as an accident. Car "accidents" are rarely accidents -- in most cases, one party failed to follow a safety signal or violated some rule. And yes, if you deliberately drop a bomb near a border, you can't claim the allies you killed on the other side were accidental. Collateral damage, yes, accidental, no.

If you cannot see that, or that it isn't "accidental" when a serial drunk driver kills someone, or a gun getting fired during a robbery also isn't accidental -- or when a government unleashes a computer virus that it knows will likely affect hundreds/thousands of computers owned by people or companies it doesn't care about -- well, you're maintaining a position about which few people would agree.

[listenallyall]

Wait, didn't even reach the absurd final paragraph. If I have a bomb with a blast radius of say, 200 meters, which I drop 50 meters inside an Italian border, knowing full well the blast radius extends into France, you are still claiming deaths in France from my bomb are just an accident?

[tchaffee]

Please point out where I said you know the blast radius and which direction it heads. Not to mention it's an analogy and I'm not a bombing expert. You can probably figure out my point.

[listenallyall]

>> a bomb dropped on an Italian border in WWII might accidentally kill ally French citizens

"On an Italian border." Where else could the blast possibly go, except on both sides of the border?

[tchaffee]

The other possibility is one side of the border.

[listenallyall]

That would be an impossibility with WWII technology. It's irrelevant -- the scenario you described already acknowledged the bomb crossing the border and killing French citizens on the other side.

[corodra]

That's called manslaughter... You don't get to walk when you rob a place and "accidentally" shoot someone. A sassy judge should ask "Did you accidentally rob the place too?"

[tchaffee]

To be more specific, involuntary manslaughter. Which is broadly speaking an accident that occurred while committing a crime. Or due to some other negligence. We are still firmly in the territory of accident, regardless of the legal consequences.

[corodra]

You still get punished for it... That's the whole argument. Even it's an accident, it's not the same kind of accident as turning a corner and spilling coffee on them.

[tchaffee]

The thread is not about whether or not whoever did it gets punished. The question is whether or not it was accidental or if damaging Merck was an intentional act. Based on the evidence so far, it sure seems like damaging Merck was a result of negligence and not intentional.

[corodra]

Releasing a computer virus intended to replicate and spread on any machine it can... like... wtf are you arguing for? The whole point to the thing was to cause massive damage to whoever the intended target was, with little care for collateral damage. It was meant to spread hard and fast and cause damage. If you infected a Merck employee with weaponized ebola and that employee traveled to the USA while the strain was still in incubation, then got USA citizens sick with ebola, "Oh, it's okay, it was just an accident. No worries! You didn't mean to hurt the USA. Want to have some cheesecake with us?" Replace the USA with Germany, Japan, Chile, Mexico, South Sudan, I don't care. I'd feel just as strongly about this. It's not a Russia-USA issue. It's a "Russia literally gives zero fucks what happens to the world." I don't see bags of rice given out to poor countries with the Russian flag on it.

It was intentional even if Merck wasn't targeted. Negligence and accident aren't magic words to hide behind if your initial goal is to cause harm in the first place. Stuxnet at least had a bunch of parameters and was highly specialized so it only deploy on its intended target with little to no chance of opening up its payload on an unintended target. I'm not going to argue whether or not Stuxnet was morally in the right. But, it sure as shit proves there is a format of trying to make sure unintended targets don't get harmed in the process of widespread release of cyber warfare.

[corodra]

Not arguing with you. But I think a digital bioweapon is a better analogy than a bomb. Since it spreads without control after release, like a... well... virus. If a country released a bioweapon somewhere and it affected "un-intended targets" there's going to be a lot of international problems with that.

I kind of feel, and I'm not going to pretend I'm an expert, that digital warfare should be treated closer to biological warfare than just your typical bombs and bullets kind. Generally, and holy shit I know someone is going to flip their shit for me saying this, but generally a regular bomb (not nuke) is an acute type of problem. After it goes off, it's GENERALLY harmless after that. Yes, structure collapse, contamination, gas leaks and other after effects. But not really more booms from the bomb. Weaponized ebloa can still make more people sick, not affected by the original release. Same with NotPetya and other cyber attacks. After deployed, it can affect more and more targets as time goes on.