Doing the right thing can vary by culture, perspective, and situation. What is right or wrong to us may be entirely different to someone who's family is starving as just one example. Given the world-wide nature of the Internet, as a species, it is unlikely we are going to be able to agree on a single set of rules or punishments within our life-time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_computer

This specifically. I think that for a lot of tech workers the valley is a great security blanket. They know if their current gig falls through there will be another one waiting just around the corner. No need to uproot and move. It's actually sort of strange on the surface. There are a lot of engineers in the valley who move around to various companies fairly frequently which looks on paper like they don't have a lot of stability, but in reality the sheer number of available jobs is providing that stability, even if their longevity of employment with any one company does not.

https://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/924307/

This is what proxies are for. Assuming it supports proxies. It would of course be wholly untrustworthy as it's likely vulnerable to a whole host of functional middling exploits.

First, it's not hard to imagine that someone might try to get their account banned for a GitHub terms of service violation keeping in mind that GitHub holds the account owner accountable for content in their repository. This is true even if that content is from other account holders they've given access to their repository. In this case, anonymous access is intentionally being provided which could of course go very, very, very wrong.

"You agree that you will not under any circumstances upload, post, host, or transmit any content that:

is unlawful or promotes unlawful activities; is or contains sexually obscene content; is libelous, defamatory, or fraudulent; is discriminatory or abusive toward any individual or group; gratuitously depicts or glorifies violence, including violent images; contains or installs any active malware or exploits, or uses our platform for exploit delivery (such as part of a command and control system); or infringes on any proprietary right of any party, including patent, trademark, trade secret, copyright, right of publicity, or other rights."

https://help.github.com/en/articles/github-terms-of-service

Understanding what the tool does, GitHub might be forgiving on the ToS violation front. The problem is with the second scenario: law enforcement. It's very likely that in a lot of jurisdictions, law enforcement, prosecutors, etc., wouldn't initially understand what's going on here and even if it can be explained to their satisfaction, I think very few of us would like to spend a night (or more) in jail while attempting to explain.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/08/unintentional...

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/61646.php

On the gas meter on my house anyway, the underground pipe mates at a valve. It doesn't seem hard or particularly dangerous to shut that valve off, disconnect the meter, connect whatever, then open the valve again.

I was part of the early CD-ROM days with a Yamaha CD-ROM burner in 1994. It was well over $3000. It wasn't until 1995 that HP introduced a writer for under $1000 at $995. Worse, the early burners didn't have any cache, so to support the Yamaha, I was using a high-end dual-processor Pentium system that was in the neighborhood of $16,000 and I still got plenty of buffer under-runs! On top of all this, the first writeable CD's I purchased were in the $30/each range.

While in school in the 80's I learned that the standardized tests the school were administering didn't mean anything. They had no barring on my ability to graduate or go to college so I stopped caring about them. This opened up the freedom to do things like fill out multiple bubbles per line and otherwise get creative. About a month after filling out a test like this I got called into the office along with my parents. I was a pretty well known hacker at the time, running a couple local BBS's and whatnot. The state superintendent of schools was in the meeting and demanded to know what I did to their test scanning system. It turns out that I most likely caused a buffer overflow as line after line of multiple answers on the bubble sheet caused the system to crash. It took them weeks to figure out it was my test and in the mean time deadlines were being missed, etc.