Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!ptimtc!nntp-server.caltech.edu!nyet
From: nyet@nntp-server.caltech.edu (n liu)
Newsgroups: comp.admin.policy
Subject: Re: RFC on my "abuse"
Message-ID: <1991Jun25.202243.17284@nntp-server.caltech.edu>
Date: 25 Jun 91 20:22:43 GMT
References: <1991Jun25.154257.7452@m.cs.uiuc.edu> <1991Jun25.173013.3784@mp.cs.niu.edu>
Organization: California Institute of Technology, Pasadena
Lines: 35

rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes:

>In article <1991Jun25.154257.7452@m.cs.uiuc.edu> jjones@uiuc.edu writes:
>>[stuff about looking for anonymous accounts, etc]

>  Do you ever walk down the street, and as you do so, walk up to each house
>and test the front door to see if they left it open?

>  I suspect if you ever did this, the local police would not have been as
>nice to you as your computer administrator.

>  Yet, in effect, this is exactly what you did on the net.  Only, worse still
>you didn't walk down the street to do this.  You drove down the street in
>a car that had been provided to you for totally different purposes, thereby
>making the owner of the car (that is, the computer center and the university)
>unwitting accomplices in your activity.

I thought we all agreed that these "house" analogies were misleading.

See, what he was really looking for was the sign that says "we are open"
on the front doors of buildings that allow public access... and was
using the publicly subsidized transportation system provided by the city
by taxes and for a small fee dependent on the individual's usage. $1 per
cpu unit, mile, hour, etc.

I can make a huge number of these real world "this is my house, it's mine,
go away" analogies to backup ANY position I feel like taking. In fact,
nothing substantial about "ownership" in "c-space" has been agreed upon
at all, while everyone does agree that breaking and entering is a felony
here in California.

So to make another analogy, its not even like comparing apples an oranges.
More like apples and love/reality/color (pick your favorite abstraction).

nye