Slashdot Mirror
All We Want Is Whatever's On Your Machine
kubla2000 writes: "A breathless story about how the best defense against [fill in the blank: piracy, virii, hacking] is a good offense at CNet. What struck me most though is that in the midst of the rant from Timothy Mullen (no stranger to hacking the hack as this story from computerworld magazine shows, was a throw-away line justifying the RIAA and MPAA's appeal to Congress to make it legal to do this! It seems the bandwagons have started rolling. Who's next to jump on?"
What he says on the issue is: What he seems to be advocating is decriminalization of defending your computer against an active attack. I tend to agree. It's like saying it isn't theft to take a crowbar away from someone who is using it to jimmy your front door.
The author has blurred all sorts of lines, viruses and worms, copyright and attack, defense of ones computer and defense of ones IP.
I'd be interested to hear Mullen's comments on the story.
-Peter
We've already seen something akin to this, at least on a small scale.
:P
Working as a telephone tech support person for a non-tech sector company, Klez was particularly annoying as we would get angry telephone calls from our own corporate executives about how our server based antivirus program wasn't working, as they were getting angry emails from people at other companies telling them to stop sending them the Klez virus.
All because the damn thing sent false header information and someone outside both companies had been infected, people would continue to blame the wrong parties when their own antivirus program would point them at the wrong culprit, despite all the media stories explaining the damn thing in clear detail.
We had a number of execs refuse to believe us when we told them their machine was clean, as "obviously" we were wrong according to the people at the other company. Even had one high up try to install her own antivirus program because she didn't trust ours and ended up trashing her computer.
I just loved the whole telephone support deal during the peak Klez season.
If this article were advocating that people could go on "white-hat" vigilante attacks against people they didn't like, everyone would point out how ridiculous that would be. Well this is really pretty similar, because if you say that it is legal to crack computers causing problems to other computers, then you have all kinds of ways of weasling out of trouble for cracking. Script kiddies would be delighted!
As usual, this just sidesteps the more important issue which is that of secure software. If Microsoft tied up he bugs in Outlook and finally realised/admitted that secure by default is more important than snazzy and integrated by default, we wouldn't have half these problems. And if the software industry in general were really made to be more careful about its security, we could sit back and relax *a little*.
This sort of idea does little to prevent malicious scripts, and does a lot of encourage vigilantism, which is exactly the sort of nonsense that just makes things worse, and opens the legal doors to companies cracking into your computer to check if you've written about their products (y'never know lol).
> Is it me, or is this story's headline totally
> incoherant?
No, it's cut straight out of 'The Slashdot Guide for Guaranteeing your Submission is Accepted', chapter 2 which discusses creating a sensationalist headline that enables people to leap to conclusions about a story before reading it.
Bonus points are awarded for managing to make it sound like it's an issue of the man against the little man.
Cause yeah, I picked that up too.. the headline and following text had almost nothing to do with the actual story.
I'd suggest the guy submitted before reading the story, but trying to comprehend the lack of thought that would require makes my brain hurt.
It's important to remember WHY vigilante actions are generally illegal:
I can only think of one set of circumstances in which our culture and law condone vigilante justice: self defense of a human being against bodily harm.
It is important to remember that computer crime is almost universally property crime. With rare exceptions there is absolutely no danger to the person of a human being posed by computer cracking, and thus no reasonable basis for authorizing vigilante justice.