Kind: Reads

I’m putting together this play list for my wake and writing about my life while I am able. Time will come when I won’t have the strength. I want to make sure that my daughter Siobhan ( born with severe intellectual disabilities) understands what is happening and that she feels included in the process. I’ve used some songs she will recognize. In this way she’ll hopefully feel included.

This Essay develops an approach to interpreting computer trespass laws, such as the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, that ban unauthorized access to a computer. In the last decade, courts have divided sharply on what makes access unauthorized. Some courts have interpreted computer trespass laws broadly to prohibit trivial wrongs such as violating terms of use to a website. Other courts have limited the laws to harmful examples of hacking into a computer. Courts have struggled to interpret authorization because they lack an underlying theory of how to distinguish authorized from unauthorized access.
This Essay argues that authorization to access a computer is contingent on trespass norms—shared understandings of what kind of access invades another person’s private space. Judges are unsure of how to apply computer trespass laws because the Internet is young and its trespass norms are unsettled. In the interim period before norms emerge, courts should identify the best rules to apply as a matter of policy. Judicial decisions in the near term can help shape norms in the long term. The remainder of the Essay articulates an appropriate set of rules using the principle of authentication. Access is unauthorized when the computer owner requires authentication to access the computer and the access is not by the authenticated user or his agent. This principle can resolve the meaning of authorization before computer trespass norms settle and can influence the norms that eventually emerge.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has handed down a groundbreaking decision today on the federal computer hacking law,  the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).  In HiQ Labs v. LinkedIn, the court held that scraping a public website is likely not a CFAA violation.
Under the new decision, violating the CFAA requires “circumvent[ing] a computer’s generally applicable rules regarding access permissions, such as username and password requirements,” that thus “demarcate[]” the information “as private using such an authorization system.”  If the data is available to the general public, the court says, it’s not an unauthorized access to view it—even when the computer owner has sent a cease-and-desist letter to the visitor telling them not to visit the website.
This is a major case that will be of interest to a lot of people and a lot of companies.  But it’s also pretty complicated and easy to misunderstand.   This post will go through it carefully, trying to explain what it says and what it doesn’t say.

Read Why I Have a Website and You Should Too by Jamie Tanna

A persuasive look at the many reasons why you should have your own website, and some of the benefits it will bring you.

Released mid-2016, the Twenty Seventeen theme is still incredibly popular, with over 1 million sites using it. One downside is that it comes with very limited customizations compared to other themes.

It’s been roughly one year since WP Engine acquired StudioPress, the makers of the Genesis Framework. There’s been a lot of forward progress, but it may have left some people feeling unsure about how to work with Genesis or best take advantage of new features.