Felony For Refreshing a Web Page?

therandomw writes "An 18 year-old boy was recently arrested in Ohio for telling fellow students to refresh the schools web page in order to slow down the server. He is being charged with a felony and is currently being held in jail. According to Canton City Prosecutor Frank Forchione 'This new technology has created a whole wave of crimes, and we're just trying to find ways to solve them.'"

Oh Crap!

[rodgster]

Fark!

I just commited 7 felonies waiting for this story to appear.

Article slashdoted...

[Eyah....TIMMY]

... after all the /. readers held down F5 to see if it really worked

Apply this to eBay...

[NaruVonWilkins]

and you've got a new way to fill the jails!

the media

[User 956]

I love the complete bullshit way this article [wkyc.com] frames the situation. He didn't put a link, he "created a website, which connected to the school's system." ooo.. sinister.. yeah...

But wait, don't order yet!!

[shystershep]

New, only on Slashdot, the Outrage-O-Matic!!

Simply take the bare facts of a story, throw in some out-of-context quotes and counter-factual insinuations, and that boring story about some punk's criminal mischief is suddenly about the Man's insane overreaction to a harmless prank!

It's fun for the whole family! Get yours today!

Holy Crap

[jandrese]

Slashdot is in a heap of trouble.

In other news ...

[bushboy]

.. Canton City just got their first set of traffic lights installed.

Frank Forchione was quoted as saying :-

"Hot Diggidy, this new fangled technology sure is mighty fine !, but it's created a whole wave of crimes, and we'll just have to find ways to solve them."

Does this mean that it's also a felony

[multiplexo]

to press all of the buttons on an elevator at once?

Re:Let the slashdotting begin

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah. If it doesn't work at first, just hit F5 to try again. It'll work eventually...

everybody hold down F5 to help crash slashdot.

[Anonymous Coward]

it's not a "public service" so it's legal!

"clearly, we must protect the children"

[Triumph The Insult C]

i think we should bring a class action lawsuit against all companies that make keyboards, they are manufacturing unsafe products that encourage criminal behavior in america's youth by their continued inclusion of the button 'F5'

Re:must be more zero tolerance

[Bin_jammin]

Maybe someone will post a mirror and we can reload that. That'll show 'em.

Re:must be more zero tolerance

[Anonymous Coward]

Boy if they thought a few people in a chat room would be bad....

Or

Witness the firepower of a fully armed and operational slashdotting!!

Re:Seems like a waste of time and money

[User 956]

So if I tell someone to shoot the principal that would be exercising my free speech?

Straw man? Is that you?

Re:Let the slashdotting begin

[John3]

Uh oh...did you just commit a felony?

Re:Seems like a waste of time and money

[JWW]

Causing a tremendous amount of damage?

I'm sure the kid didn't cause a tremendous amount of damage. Not so sure about what the slashdotting will do....

School

[taskforce]

The school in question is Lake High School in Uniontown Ohio.

http://lake.stark.k12.oh.us/ [k12.oh.us]

The site is actually down, which is a shame; it would have been a nice oppurtunity to see if we could get Zonk thrown in jail for posting it on the Slashdot front page.

Re:must be more zero tolerance

[MightyMartian]

Does this mean I'm going to be charged with a felony? I can't wait for the extradition hearing?

"Your honor, the defendant is accused of taking part in a Slashdotting of a high school web server in the United States, and faces felony charges."

Wow

[g0bshiTe]

"18 year old man arrested for DDoSing his schools website by encouraging other students to quickly click refresh. In retaliation for his incarciration, he used his telephone call to call his freind Stevie, whom he told to post to /. and all the schools servers were /.ed."

Canton, OH is not known for common sense

[ChipMonk]

Last year, an article on the WEWS Channel 5 website had this gem of a quote:

"School officials are not sure they [know] what has caused so many pregnancies..."

Someone needs to get these people a clue-bat.

Re:Let the slashdotting begin

[CountZero117]

you have some major cahones man, posting it on your account and not AC ;)

Re:Does this mean that it's also a felony

[Anonymous Coward]

Just tried it.... you piece of crap, I was stuck in the elevetor for 30 mins.

Re:Low-tech DDoS?

[Skye16]

Since his intent was to crash the school server, even as a joke, then his intent was to crash the school server. It doesn't look very good for him.

Of course, they would have been better off letting him slide than making a few hundred thousand / million geeks curious all at once. That server probably unhooked its own ethernet cable, packed up its keyboard and mouse, and walked out the front door by now. Or it melted and dripped all over the carpet.

Vulnerability exists on Linux as well

[Pakaran2]

As a concerned user of fully patched Gentoo, I have tested the "F5 causes excessive reloading" vulnerability. It works on Konqueror, Mozilla and Firefox, with all patches installed, including hardened kernel. Local access to the machine is NOT required; the F5 vulnerability can be triggered when opening a web browser through, e.g., SSH forwarded X connections.

I hope there will be a patch soon!

New technology

[Jotii]

This new technology has created a whole wave of crimes

Behold the refresh button, the wonder of modern technology.

Re:Canton City website

[JabberWokky]

Actually, they aren't sending stormtroopers... they decided to send in the Hero of Canton, the Man they call Jayne.

--
Evan

You know, with this kind of logic...

[Rude Turnip]

Cmdrtaco & Drew Curtis should be on death row!

Re:Does this mean that it's also a felony

[multiplexo]

Just tried it.... you piece of crap, I was stuck in the elevetor for 30 mins.

Good thing you posted as AC, otherwise Frank Forchione would be sending the cops after you and you'd probably wind up in one of those "pound me in the ass" penitentiaries.

Re:Low-tech DDoS?

[Idimmu Xul]

Well I clicked the link to the schools homepage, KNOWING that I would help bring it down.

Whatcha gonna do, punk!

Re:Let the slashdotting begin

[wuie]

Sure! I've always wanted to win at a felony!

Re:the media

[Stevyn]

It should have said:

"He hacked into a web server (logged into blogspot) and modified the internal structure of it's files system (uploaded a web page) that created a "hyperlink" to the school's entire computer infrastructure (link to http://lake.stark.k12.oh.us/hs [k12.oh.us]). He then called upon his gang of evil cohourts to help him destroy their "servers" (asked people even more bored than him to visit that page and press F5 a few times until they realized it was as dumb as reading the blog). This caused a massive meltdown of "computer technology" which nearly destroyed the computer systems (they got more than 5 hits a day and wondered what was up).

btw, the parts in parenthesis is (reality)

Re:Seems like a waste of time and money

[John3]

Causing a tremendous amount of damage? WTF? He's not DDoSing Air Traffic Control.

Yes, but what if there was a snow day announcement and nobody could access the web site to check if school was open. Oh, the inhumanity!

Re:must be more zero tolerance

[Philip K Dickhead]

Hell,

Doing F-5 on /. is normal, no?

Re:Must Have A Pretty Bad Webserver

[__aaclcg7560]

This school must have a pretty bad webserver if simply clicking on refresh brings the server to its knees.

*cough* Windows 98 *cough*

Re:Canton Law Dept page

[glassjaw rocks]

Yes! My city is getting owned.

Re:Canton Law Dept page

[KenCrandall]

Well, a Manual Distributed Slashdotting Denial Of Service would be an MSDOS. :-) (Lame, but it made me giggle to think it up.)

Re:must be more zero tolerance

[metternich]

You know gouys, They might just use the /.ing of the site as evidence against him in the trial.

See how destructive his actions were, your honor. The school's servers were down for days.

Re:Number of hits

[raoul666]

Jesus. I could handle 900 hits by tapping it out personally over the bloody phone line with one of those morse code thingys.

Re:must be more zero tolerance

[MikeFM]

Great, I now have my scripts bitch slapping their server 24/7. Nothing these dick wads don't deserve. I hope someone donates a lawyer to the kids cause.

Re:must be more zero tolerance

[superdominican]

This story is very important. Slashdot should follow for the next few months. Make sure the URL is posted during that time so that we can be kept up to date on what their side of teh story is.

Re:must be more zero tolerance

[aplusjimages]

I think they took it down. Now I can't see whats for lunch on Monday.

Re:must be more zero tolerance

[mindaktiviti]

I tried your link but it didn't work, so then I tried refreshing a bunch of times but it still didn't work! :(

Re:Low-tech DDoS?

[Metrol]

He deserved a week suspension.

Yeah, a week of sitting at home hitting F5!

Re:must be more zero tolerance

[ABaumann]

Actually, I think it's just the opposite.

"It couldn't possibly be him. He was in jail at the time of the second attack."

Re:Canton Law Dept page

[cammoblammo]

'Manual Slashdotting Denial of Service' works better. Of course, 'Slashdotting' implies 'Distributed.'

Come to think of it, it implies 'Manual' too.

I did it! I'm glad I did it!

[AmazingRuss]

I'd do it again!

(click)

BAAAAHAHAHAHAHA!

Re:must be more zero tolerance

[jimicus]

It really was a joke to say that the site would crash, because it wouldn't - and didn't.

Until it was slashdotted.

Re:must be more zero tolerance

[chphilli]

Wow - you saw how much trouble this kid is in for refreshing his school's website, now you're trying to Snail-Slash the Stark county jail? You're brave!

Which ordinance? This one?

[syukton]

HTTP Status 500 -

----------

type Exception report

message

description The server encountered an internal error () that prevented it from fulfilling this request.

exception

java.lang.NullPointerException
        OrdinanceGet2.doGet(OrdinanceGet2.java:43)
        javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet .java:743)
        javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet .java:856)

note The full stack trace of the root cause is available in the Tomcat logs.

----------

Apache Tomcat/5.0.19

Yeah, I hate it when I break that ordinance...

Re:must be more zero tolerance

[Headcase88]

It's a very valuable page. No wonder the school and police were after this fellow. He wasn't just taking some lousy page that no one read in the last 3 months temporarily out of service, he was trying to stop students from "achiev[ing] their full potential for intellectual and personal growth". Clearly, he had to be stopped before he went on to more illustrious crimes like overwhelming the server that powers the site about sidetalking [sidetalking.com].

The felony is obviously for...

[itior]

Theft!

He is making them steal MEGAHERTZ!

Experiment

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets see how my school district reacts.

http://www.oasd.k12.wi.us/ [k12.wi.us]

Please show damages

[jnaujok]

Excuse me for pointing this out, but where exactly are the damages that relate to this felony. If this kid finds a lawyer with even an ounce of brains, the court case should last thirty seconds.

Lawyer: Why do you have a web site?

School: So the public can access it.

Lawyer: So, is the same machine running it today?

School: Yes.

Lawyer: Does it run on the same connection?

School: Yes.

Lawyer: And it runs the same software, with the same data?

School: Yes.

Lawyer: So, in fact, nothing was erased or altered on the machine in any way? Correct?

School: Yes.

Lawyer: Did your service provider charge you with any extra fees?

School: No.

Lawyer: So, apart from a handful of extra traffic, which you admit slowed down but did not stop, damage, or destroy hardware, software, or data, and which did not cost you any extra money, you had not other damages?

School: Uhm, well, I guess that's correct.

Lawyer: Tell me, do you sue the driver in front of you if he slows down, or charge the slow walking grandmother holding up the line with a felony?

School: Uhm, no.

Lawyer: Tell me, if all the phone lines are in use at the school because people are calling them, is that a felony? Are prank calls a felony?

School: Er, no.

Lawyer: So, your basis for the "damage" in this case is that a student basically asked his friends to "call-up" the computer until you had a busy signal.

School: Yes.

Lawyer: In fact, your entire web site listed less than 900 hits before it was Slashdotted into oblivion. Tell me, have you started legal proceedings against the news agency that took the story national, or Zonk for posting it on Slashdot?

School: Erm, no.

Lawyer: So, you're only willing to harrass young children? To send a child to prison for what amounts to no more than a phone call where they hang up? Is that what you feel is acceptable? Is that, in fact, what you view as teaching our children?

School: Er, do I have to answer that?

Lawyer: Well, you are making me wait, keeping me busy, I might have to file a felony suit against you for that...

Re:must be more zero tolerance

[dogbreathcanada]

Does this mean we're all going to be charged with a felony too?

Re:must be more zero tolerance

[ingoldsby]

Heh...

Unable to connect
Firefox can't establish a connection to the server at lake.stark.k12.oh.us.

* The site could be temporarily unavailable or too busy. Try again in a few moments.

* If you are unable to load any pages, check your computer's network connection.

* If your computer or network is protected by a firewall or proxy, make sure that Firefox is permitted to access the Web.

Re:must be more zero tolerance

[sharkey]

Maybe if you design a mod for GTA that involves sodomizing a high school student in a small cement room with barred windows, Jack Thompson will donate his legal services.

Re:Does this mean that it's also a felony

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, if it's a Space Elevator [wikipedia.org].

Re:The Prosector has permanently killed that serve

[ENIGMAwastaken]

Being from Ohio, I'd like to defend the state or whatever. But I really can't. Dumbasses abound. The entire government of the state is a joke. Top to bottom bullshit.

Re:Canton Law Dept page PDF

[el americano]

That *was* engrossing, but personally I found this 7.2MB pdf on Zone Change Procedures to be even more informative:

http://www.cityofcanton.com/safetyservice/bldgcode s/zonechangesample.pdf [cityofcanton.com]

not only did it kill the HS' site...

[potus98]

Not only has this killed the High School's website, but it seems other schools (and stuff) were hosted on at the same place:

Lake High School http://lake.stark.k12.oh.us/hs/ [k12.oh.us]
Lake Middle School http://lake.stark.k12.oh.us/ms/ [k12.oh.us]
Lake Elementary http://lake.stark.k12.oh.us/le/ [k12.oh.us]
Hartville Elementary http://lake.stark.k12.oh.us/he/ [k12.oh.us]
Uniontown Elementary http://lake.stark.k12.oh.us/ue/ [k12.oh.us]
Lake County District http://lake.stark.k12.oh.us/ [k12.oh.us]
Staff Login http://lake.stark.k12.oh.us/login.php [k12.oh.us]
Athletics http://lake.stark.k12.oh.us/athletics [k12.oh.us]
News http://lake.stark.k12.oh.us/news/news.php [k12.oh.us]
Help Desk Login http://staff.lake.stark.k12.oh.us/helpdesk/login.p hp [k12.oh.us]
Mr. Wood's Homepage http://lake.stark.k12.oh.us/~wooddave/compsciiii-o bjectives.php [k12.oh.us]
AP Calculus http://lake.stark.k12.oh.us/~erbdave/Calculus/inde x.php [k12.oh.us]
Mr. Erb's Homepage http://lake.stark.k12.oh.us/~erbdave/main.php [k12.oh.us]
Jester Labs http://lake.stark.k12.oh.us/~wooddave/jesterlabs/i ndex.html [k12.oh.us]

BTW: According to Google's cached version of their site from Jan 1, 2006 03:32:05 GMT:

"This page has been viewed 580 times! Powered by CMS Made Simple 0.10.4"

Heh heh heh... IF it ever recovers from the /.ing it'll read "This page has been viewed 7.2*10^36. Please see Mr. Erb for conversion details."

I wonder what would have happened...

[buddyglass]

...if he'd told all his friends to mail a bunch of letters right around Dec. 25 in order to bog down the postal service! Denial of Service!

Re:must be more zero tolerance

[Steepe]

Population density != intellegence

Actually I have found the reverse to be true, to a point. With a dense population, you have more stupid people per square block.

Re:Does this mean that it's also a felony

[Ambush]

Does this mean that it's also a felony to press all of the buttons on an elevator at once?

Nope, but if you send all the lifts to the same floor all at once, then it's a felony! ;-)

THATS funny....

[dartarrow]

from google cache of the site

: Lake High School
1025 Lake Center Street
Uniontown, Ohio 44685-9462
Office [phone]
Attendance [phone]
Fax [phone]

Office hours when school is in session: 7:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. All visitors must enter Door #1 and sign in at the main office.

Lake High School is located in Stark County, Ohio. A total of 1220 students in grades nine through twelve make up the student body.

Powered by CMS Made Simple 0.10.4
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Think we should report a bug...?

Re:must be more zero tolerance

[True Grit]

No, No, there's no "think" in there, and you forgot "Jim".