[dang]

Techdirt is in a category of sites whose submissions are penalized by default on HN. This category is for sources that produce a lot of fluff but also the occasionally substantive piece. There are various ways for the penalty to be lifted, one of which is moderator review, which is how it got lifted here.

Your description might be fair in general, but this article is more substantive than the typical riler-upper. If you know of something that it misrepresents, by all means correct the record. But it doesn't misrepresent the info you quoted—on the contrary, it communicates it clearly and includes the exact same quote.

[tptacek]

2nd graf: suggests Craigslist "abused" the CFAA to "kill" a company. Instead, Craigslist relied on the one private cause of action in the US code specific to enforcement of ToS's --- a limited cause, with limited damages. It was inaccurate to call this an "abuse" (it's the whole intent of 1030g!) and misleading to invoke the CFAA boogeyman over it.

4th graf: Claims Craigslist relied on a "tortured" definition of CFAA, linking to another Techdirt story about a judge's upholding of Craigslist's claims on two different counts. "Torturous" here means "the suggestion that access was unauthorized after Padmapper received a cease and desist from Craigslist's lawyers, and changed IP addresses to evade a ban.

6th graf: Techdirt grossly misrepresents Orin Kerr, perhaps assuming readers won't click through to the Volokh story they quote out of context. Kerr sees the ruling as a missed opportunity to more rigidly define "unauthorized access" as "circumvention of technical controls" but does not disagree with the ruling. HN readers in general would not be happier in a world where Kerr's view of the CFAA was reliably enforced.

Most importantly, I think: the article also never makes the argument it teases in its headline: at no point is it ever made clear how Newmark has "made the CFAA worse".

This is a defect density rate worthy of early-period PHP Wordpress.

Your normal instinct about Techdirt is almost always going to be right. It's not a good site. I'm glad it's penalized. Penalize it more.

[ericd]

Hey Thomas, big fan of your comments generally, but you're mischaracterizing what we did. We never issued another server request to them again after the C&D, let alone changed IP addresses to evade a ban afterwards. This is uncontested, and we weren't included in the CFAA claims. We were fighting for the right to summarize listings and link to them, not for the right to access their servers when they don't want us to, nor to include the full text of the postings on our site.

[tptacek]

Sorry, I was working from the link Techdirt provided to back up the "tortured" application of CFAA. I really wasn't trying to characterize exactly what your team was doing. But I was also imprecise and I sometimes forget that the principals of these stories are on HN, too. I apologize.

[ericd]

No problem, it's hard to know what's going on when every writeup of a story gets at least 30% of the details wrong :-)

[dang]

OK, those sound like good points. We've taken the CFAA bit out of the headline and can swap the URL to a better article if there is one.

[crusso]

I found the article to be misleading and of pretty poor journalistic quality. It reads like a rant and I would hope that HN would not make an exception for a Techdirt rant.

For example: the line, "Craig himself has contributed to this misleading perception with this tweet implying he's giving his own money to EFF" was especially confusing since the proceeds of a lawsuit are in fact "his own money".

[dang]

Fully agreed about rants in general. But I also agree with the commenters pointing out that complying with a lawsuit settlement is really not the same thing as a donation. That, plus that the story is significant, is why we haven't penalized this article the way we normally would. I'd be happy to swap it out for a more substantive, less ranty article, if one exists.