Re: Computer Misuse Act breaks WebArch (ws Re: Section 5.4.2 of RFC 3986 not actually 'legal' syntax_)

/ Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org> was heard to say:
| On Thu, 2005-10-13 at 11:40 +0100, Henry S. Thompson wrote:
[...]
|> The issue for the TAG is surely that exploratory modifications of URIs
|> are in a sense _invited_ by their very nature, and thus should never be
|> describable as unauthorized -- by publishing
|> http://www.example.com/a/b/c, I implicitly publish all
|> path-transformed versions of that URL, don't I?
|
| No, I don't think so.

I do. And I'll go a step further, I think running an HTTP server
explicitly grants the public permission to attempt to GET any and
every URI that could possibly exist.

| But look at your server logs, and you'll find tons of bots trying
| to exploit well-known server bugs. That's clearly anti-social
| behaviour, and I'm somewhat sympathetic to efforts to outlaw it.

I'm not[*]. As Tyler Close suggests later in this thread, it appears
that, in the UK at least, following links on this page

  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2005Oct/0020.html

exposes you to risk of criminal prosecution.

It is no longer safe (in a very literal sense) to surf the web in
the UK.

|> Danny, Rigo, is there a point here the W3C or the TAG should try to
|> address?

We commented on deep linking, I think we should surely comment on
this.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

[*] I might be, if legislation was formulated in such a way that it
was only going to net the antisocial creeps, but there's nothing
antisocial about attempting a GET on a URI and getting a 404.
-- 
Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM / XML Standards Architect / Sun Microsystems, Inc.
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