alt Hacker NewsAny instance anywhere that a court has considered an UA sufficient for access control? Especially one published under a copyleft license?
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Spoofing a User-Agent by itself is not illegal. Browsers, curl, bots, monitoring tools, and privacy tools do this constantly for legitimate reasons.
The legal risk comes from why you are doing it and what protections you are bypassing.
If you are doing it specifically to bypass Bambu's authorized access, then it is very likely to fall afoul of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The mechanism (spoofing the UA) is entirely incidental to the motivation (bypass authorized access), which is what the law cares about.
I don't think courts basically ever settle narrow technical questions like that. Any court decision would carry with it particular baggage based on the rest of the specifics, so I don't think it would have established a clear precedent either way.
The funny part here is it seems Bambu is more exposed to a libel suit than the developer is for... checks notes clicking 'Fork' on Bambu's github. Since the moment he did that, his software was supposedly in breach of Bambu's...expectations.
weev got convicted for something pretty similar to this. His conviction was vacated, but he did spend time in prison for unauthorized access to an AT&T server that only required a specific user agent and a guessable numeric device ID number.
At least in the US, the law against unauthorized access to a computer system has no requirements for how good the security has to be. If you should reasonably know you're not supposed to be using it, that's potentially enough to make it illegal.
Techies like us get caught up in mechanism all the time in discussions like this.
But, though there are some explicit laws where that’s how it works, that’s not generally how the legal system works. If I have a private server, and I don’t give you permission to access it - or, even better, tell you not to, it doesn’t really matter how I secure it. If you access it, you’re in the wrong.
To give a physical analogy, it doesn’t matter how I’ve secured my house. Even if the door is open, you’re not allowed to just waltz in (or, to take it a bit further, come in and start using my stuff).