alt Hacker News>He was charged with felonies for stealing PDFs for publicly funded research papers, he was tried as if he hacked these systems.
He did hack these systems and MIT's network. They had video of him in the MIT wiring closet and a mountain of circumstantial evidence. I'm not saying it wasn't pursued aggressively out of political motivations, which seems supported if you dig enough, but the facts of the case were about more than PDFs.
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demo4567 • yesterday at 11:06 PM
that is not hacking.
I don’t think plugging a laptop to an open switch port and launching a script to scrape webpages to get PDFs to an external drive is hacking per se.
If it was, impersonating home users en masse to scrape the whole web to train models would result in lifetime in prison. Now we call it fair use.