On Sun, Feb 06, 2005 at 05:41:27AM +0000, geni wrote:
She's been banned from Wikipedia according to policies imposed by the legal owners of Wikipedia's servers. This means that she does not have permission to use those servers. Doing so might actually be a criminal offense, depending on the laws in her jurisdiction.
As far as I have been able to figure out the laws in this area probably not. If she was hacking someone elsees acount or using a hack to edit from a blocked IP then it probably would be but not until then.
I'm not so sure. Authorization tends to be about permission, not about the technical capability to do something. (For a U.S. example, consider Perl guru Randal Schwartz's difficulties with his former employer Intel. Schwartz clearly had the technical capability to do what he did, but -- to take Intel's side -- lacked the permission to do so. So he was convicted.)
Wikipedia clearly states up front that by default, "anyone can edit". However, Wikipedia's policies -- endorsed by the owners of the servers it runs on -- state that this permission can be withdrawn by the Arbitration Committee in case of policy violation. The proceedings for doing this are clearly laid out and have been followed. I don't see any reason that this withdrawing of permission should be taken any less seriously than any other.
The technical details -- usernames, passwords, IP blocks and so forth -- are peripheral. Computer misuse laws in both the US and UK talk about unauthorized access to computer resources -- not "hacking accounts" or the like. The core of the matter is that a person (a human being; not an IP address or an account) has been told that they are not authorized to use these computer resources ... and that the person persists in using those resources regardless.