The meme that keeps on giving

Back in my day senior pranks generally involved naked dudes at school in some form or something destructive that cost the school plenty of money to fix. I approve of the current generations senior pranks.

certainly they could get expelled for this prank. arrested too, but might not get on their permanent record if they are under 18.

?

Why? There was no damage done, and they exposed potential weaknesses in a school system’s security. (Imagine a school shooter using it to tell everyone to assemble in the gym or something, they needed to know their security sucked).

Sr pranks I saw in person included covering the hallways in liquid dish soap. That caused the school to close, and cost thousands to clean up, yet no charges were pressed (I think the entire sr class got an hour of detention or something weak). I’ve seen others where teacher’s/principal’s car was put on the roof, or disassembled then reassembled in the teacher’s lounge with no way to drive it out.
As Sr pranks go, this seemed innocuous, almost pleasant.
I suppose a hard nosed principal and DA could bring charges, but both would lose all public support from their community and possibly their jobs.

A reasonable school district/principal would agree, but the way "hacking" laws are written, even bypassing a password by guessing "password" is an intentional breach, and unless they have written consent ahead of time (like white-hat penetration testing companies get), then it's against the law.

So, just depends on what the school wants to do.

Worse that this. If you go to a publicly available page with no authentication, and just look at all the data being sent down to your browser (rather than just the data that the browser displays) you can get investigated. IIRC this is what that nutjob governor in Missouri^(?) recently went full-on attack dog about.

Yes, Missouri. The unhinged ignorant governor wants to prosecute reporters for viewing source data, but there’s no law about this, no hacking required, just a left click, and despite the governor’s politically motivated attempts to force a case, the prosecutor has declined to file any charges against the reporter who noticed and reported that the government website had publicly posted the social security numbers of every teacher in the state….likely because the only crime was on the government’s part….including the continuing politically motivated retaliatory investigations against the reporter who discovered this inexcusable lapse in security under the governor’s nose.

He (the prosecutor) should file charges against the website administrator for exposing 100000 teachers to identity theft, and the governor for abuse of power for trying to prosecute the whistleblower for reporting the non existent security to the government, he even held off publishing his report to give the school system time to fix the issue before it became public knowledge.

Anyone surprised the governor is a Republican, a moron, is more than willing to abuse his power to try to avoid embarrassment for his administrations incompetence, and has absolutely zero idea of how websites, the internet, meta data, or hacking work, or in many cases what they even are (probably thinks the internet is a bunch of tubes, hackers use hatchets, and that meta data is secret proprietary data)?

Sweet zombie Jesus, these morons get worse daily….I think Trump secretly requires them to eat >1gram of pure lead per day. Stupider by the minute.

I hadn't heard about that story. Funny and sad at the same time. Definitely would get thrown out of court if the prosecutor did bring charges. Reporter did the right thing (telling them), it's a shame he's getting backlash of stupidity.

When it comes to sensitive data, the government and corporations have due-diligence requirements that weren't met here (even if it was unintentional/temporary), so maybe (IANAL) the teacher's union could file a class-action suit? They'd probably settle out of court for 1 year of LifeLock or some other such BS. Maybe the website was created by the Governor's grandson or nephew as a high school project? Mistake is worse than incorrect ACLs on a S3 bucket...

Me neither, but when I looked into what @noims mentioned, that’s what I found.

The overt abuse of power over their own stupidity is outrageous. Worse is the near total support he (and other moronic governors) have from their voters for these spiteful, illegal, retaliatory political moves that hurt them in the first place. It’s so sad the “rational” party has become the irrational party to save itself from extinction. Courting the morons among us was the most anti American thing I can recall.

I’m thinking of Florida, who just refused $165 million per year to cover all infrastructure and services in Orange County in a spiteful idiotic move against Disney for not going along with the anti gay laws the pedophile party just enacted. Not only that, they also effectively blocked Disney from any new construction, as if that’s good for Florida. Non Orange County residents seem to think this is a good move, but they likely won’t when their taxes go way up next year…OC taxes are expected to rise over 25% next year alone, likely far more in the coming years.

Next, maybe Musk can buy Disneyworld and ruin it too, and Disney can move to a state willing to put its sovereignty in their constitution.