Missouri is really a beautiful state, except for all of the trash that voters keep dumping in the capital, Jefferson City.
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Something tells me he thinks the Internets is a series of tubes.
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Don’t rat me out but I taught myself how do build websites a hundred years ago by studying source code until HotDog Frontpage and Dreamweaver came along.
I still occasionally use Nvu to tweak content here and there.
Who knew I was breaking the law? Well, besides governor idiot.
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Hi Mark @frauenfelder ,
The link in your story is to “httx://govt” and not to the Post-Dispatch article. Can you please fix the link?
Thanks.
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He’s not “likely” to be charged. That’s the threat, not the reality, and the threat is the whole point. The next Missouri reporter (or private citizen) who stumbles on damning information through legal means will have that whispering in their ear.
Missouri governor issues bogus threat to journalist who used “view source” feature on web browser
was the headline you were looking for.
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The real story isn’t that Parson is an idiot (of course he is), or that he’s douche bag (of course he is), it’s that really doesn’t care:
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that people know that he’s a idiot
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that people know that he’s douche bag and that he’ll hurt anyone and do any kind of political theater to further his agenda.
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I think you’re right that he won’t be convicted, but this is potentially more than just grandstanding for re-election. Politicians and corporations have a strong interest in inhibiting whistleblowers. They want to create a general feeling that publishing stuff like this - even if legal - will attract a bad kind of attention.
The only way I can think of to counter that is for really great things to happen for this journalist as a result of his being targeted. Like, I hope his career gets a huge boost, or he gets a lot of crowdfunding support.
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I imagine if they are told to prosecute, they will, even if the case is dismissed out of hand. That will cost the reporter and newspaper time and considerable money before it gets in front of a judge.
It’s a warning shot to others as much as to the reporter. It’s a stupid one but that’s what stupid people do.
Many judges seem predisposed to let a case proceed even if it is obviously bogus as both a “they deserve their day in court” and because most judges used to be lawyers and I am jaundiced enough to think they look out for their brethren’s income and to ensure a continuing demand for the profession.
And if they get a judge who does not know HTML from Egyptian tomb carvings it could go into extra innings as this stuff looks like Black Magic to most people even when it’s a built in function.
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Sorry, that picking locks analogy is BS. A better analogy would be forgetting your wallet/purse at someone’s house and then charging them with theft after they called you to let you know you forgot it there.
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“Did you look through my wallet!?!”
“Yes. That’s how I knew it was yours, to call you!”
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Almost. I mean, he has the AOL CD, but he never gets around to getting his grandchild to install it for him.
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Aye, it is truly a state of misery…
I admit I intruded into the boingboing mainframe and absconded with this important cypher. I’m ready to be cuffed.
script id=“boing-ready”>
window.advanced_ads_ready=function(e,a){a=a||“complete”;var d=function(e){return"interactive"===a?“loading”!==e:“complete”===e};d(document.readyState)?e():document.addEventListener(“readystatechange”,(function(a){d(a.target.readyState)&&e()}),{once:“interactive”===a})},window.advanced_ads_ready_queue=window.advanced_ads_ready_queue||;
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If Parson’s been trying to prosecute him for months, the chances of a Grand Jury returning an indictment are diminishing. I wouldn’t be surprised if the grand jury already returned a No Bill.
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This was supposed to be the original graphic for the post, but then the timorous attorneys upstairs at boingboing corporate weighed in:
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I do not know where they dug up the details, but in the YC Hackernews thread it was mentioned that the specifics of the issue was this:
- SSN’s were included as a part of the
ASP.Netviewstate which gets stored in the page code. - By default the viewstate is BASE64 encoded and not encrypted.
- This is a common developer Oopsie to assume the viewstate blob is more secure than it actually is.
- It is also a common lazy programmer issue to put stuff into the viewstate which should not go there.
Ref:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/aspnet/bb386448(v=vs.100)
ETA: here I guess:
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I’d say a more apt analogy is this:
A guy goes into public nude from the waist down. A friendly reporter points out that he forgot his pants. The guy promptly sues the reporter… for peeping. “How dare you look below my belt! That’s a breach of privacy!”
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That’s why it is open source in the intelligence sense of the term, i.e. information available to the public. No specialised tools, no cracking passwords, no cracking crypto, no reliance on human sources.
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Because nits are being picked, and those nits are at the heart of the confusion, please note that the analyst didn’t use the words “open source intelligence”; they specifically used the words “open source tools”. (The phrase was quoted in the newspaper article, which means an exact quote, not a paraphrase, summary, or shortening.)
Had the analyst said “open source techniques”, I’d have agreed with you.
Supposedly the governor has refused to change his mind despite a number of attempts to correct him. That’s on him and nobody else, so he should still face consequences for this abuse of authority.
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He should have had the privacy of breeches.
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