You May Not Like Weev, But Your Online Freedom Depends on His Appeal

You May Not Like Weev, But Your Online Freedom Depends on His Appeal: Here’s a reminder of what happened: Weev and Daniel Spitler discovered and publicized a security hole in AT&T’s website. After spoofing his web browser to look like an iPad, Spitler discovered that AT&T’s website published iPad users’ email addresses when someone entered a URL that included an iPad’s unique identification number. He created a script to keep entering random numbers to emulate the iPad IDs and got more than 114,000 email addresses as a result. Weev disclosed this security hole by telling journalists about the discovery and shared the list with Ryan Tate (then at Gawker, now at Wired), who published a story — not the email addresses — on the incident.