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posted by martyb on Sunday November 30 2014, @04:57AM   Printer-friendly
from the shades-of-"Weev"-and-Aaron-Swartz dept.

Thanks in part to America’s ill-defined hacking laws, prosecutors have enormous discretion to determine a hacker defendant’s fate. But in one young Texan’s case in particular, the Department of Justice stretched prosecutorial overreach to a new extreme: about 440 years too far.

Last week, prosecutors in the Southern District of Texas reached a plea agreement with 28-year-old Fidel Salinas, in which the young hacker with alleged ties to members of Anonymous consented to plead guilty to a misdemeanor count of computer fraud and abuse and pay $10,000 in restitution. The U.S. attorney’s office omitted one fact from its press release about that plea ( http://www.justice.gov/usao/txs/1News/Releases/2014%20November/141120%20-%20Salinas.html ), however: Just months ago, Salinas had been charged with not one, but 44 felony counts of computer fraud and cyberstalking—crimes that each carry a 10-year maximum sentence; adding up to an absurd total of nearly a half a millennium of prison time.

http://www.wired.com/2014/11/from-440-years-to-misdemeanor/

 
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  • (Score: 2) by sjames on Monday December 01 2014, @04:07PM

    by sjames (2882) on Monday December 01 2014, @04:07PM (#121545) Journal

    You still seem pretty hot about it yourself. They could have done what Gnome does. Just open a file window showing the contents of the CD. If the user doesn't know about click the little picture to make things happen, they're simply incapable of using Windows at all.

    But as for current issues, have they yet made their interface show the user the difference between opening data and running a program? That confusion is certainly a big part of the problem with Windows machines getting trashed.

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