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Ethical Lines of the Gray Hat
Facter writes "There is a great article on CNET about the ethical debate between white/gray/black-hat hackers - interesting to note is that it reports the "fading away" of the "gray" definition between white and black, due to the DMCA hindering anything in between.."
really? ok.. so do you investigate hardware designs and modify equipment that YOU PURCHASED as a hobby? if so then you are a Black hat and need to go to jail by your definition.
Security means nothing with the term hacker unless you are an un-educated manager. What you are referring to is a cracker and a completely different individual....
Please, get a clue as to what term is what. I dont care what the illeterate media calls them or how they use the term... a HACKER is not a criminal but a software and hardware genius...
A CRACKER tries to break into systems or bypass security. Why is this so hard for people to understand? The drivel that spews forth from the anchorwoman/man's mouth does NOT make it truth.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
While the ethics of cracking have always been interesting, the legality has never been an issue. It is, and for years has been, a crime, essentially, merely to knowingly obtain unauthorized access or to exceed authorized access to a computer owned by another. [Alas, many companies have injudiciously asserted these criminal charges against former consultants, merely to beat a bill with a nasty counterclaim.]
However popular it is to join the bandwagon railing against the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions (people seem to forget that the DMCA is itself an omnibus of technical and non-technical issues, good, bad and indifferent, and ranging from boat-hull designs to ISP immunities), the article's focus on DMCA is misplaced -- almost irresponsibly so.
The big guns against cracking conduct have been in place for years, and well before DMCA: The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the ECPA and countless state computer crime and regular theft statutes. All of these tend to be much broader in scope and reach, and far easier to prove and enforce. After the enhancements (from a prosecutor's point of view) made in the USA-PATRIOT Act, CFAA has become an even more powerful tool. The FBI didn't need a DMCA to get Kevin.
At the end of the day, the HP nonsense was just that: nonsense. The reason the HP DMCA threat was never pressed was simple -- it was a no-play claim, and everybody knew it. However, there are and have for years been a kazillion laws to beat up on anybody who engages in unauthorized access or exceeding authorized access of any kind, and regardless whether the conduct amounts to any circumvention of an effective copyright protection scheme.
I'm not arguing cracker ethics, or defending DMCA. I'm simply saying that the focus of the article is wildly misplaced. DMCA is just barely an interesting curiousity in the enforcement quiver -- so far as real cracking goes, it isn't even a fourth-string defense except in the oddest cases.
This may be true, but I refuse to use the term incorrectly when I know better. Please read the following. I did not write it, it is from someone on a mailing list, when someone misused the term "hacker", then argued that it was the accepted use of the word. The author puts it better than I ever could. (you can view the original post to the list here
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If you haven't already, read Orwell's "1984".
The use of words is absolutey critical, and using language for social engineering by governments, churches, and corporations is not the stuff of science fiction ... just ask anyone who works in marketing. It happens every
day, and the deleterious effects on our society and our world which result
are trivial to see. (ponder the definition of the word 'terrorist' and how
fluid it has become, and the real, physical consiquences which are apparent
and resulting in no small part from the misuse and mutation of that word)
Now think to yourself: Who owns the rights to every dictionary in circulation (Merriem-Webster, Oxford, what have you)?
That's right, the publishers. Organizations that have been members of the copyright cartel since the sixteenth century, a cartel which in its history had at least one person drawn and quartered for possessing a printing press and not being a member of the cartel.
With respect to the word 'hacker' it is highly debatable whether the misuse of the term was deliberately and knowingly inserted into the dictionary as a form of semantic engineering, or whether the publishers simply picked up on the misuse of the term being promoted and propogated by another copyright cartel: the entertainment cartel.
The same applies to the word 'piracy,' though poking through some very early dictionaries certainly suggests its definition was changed as part of a conscious effort at semantic engineering (the incorrect, propoganda definition of the word equating copyright violators with rapists, pillagers, and murderers on the high seas was in at least one dictionary long before misuse of the word had become widespread).
What is known for certain is that, for other words of political significance, dictionaries have been known to publich definitions adhering to one political agenda or another PRIOR to their widespread use in language. The "authority" of the dictionary has been used, more than once, to deliberately modify and change the use of language to promote a political agenda.
If you're really interested in such things, look up the history of the usage of the word 'he' and 'his' as a gender-neutral or gender-indeterminate pronoun. In the United States, the use of 'they' and 'their' (singular) was in widespread use around the turn of the 20th century. Grammaticians displaced that, deliberately, with 'he' and 'his'. One of the comments made by one of these early 'semantic engineers' was something to the effect of "as in nature, when there is a choice, the male pronoune shall dominate." It is only in recent years that the use of 'they' and 'their' (singular) as a gender-neutral pronoun has come back into use, despite the linguistic orthodoxy to the contrary.
There are other examples, indeed a plethora of them from the cold war and even the war on drugs.
In other words, blind faith in the dictionary is as misplaced as blind faith in anything else (e.g. religion, government, or McDonald's). The publishers have as many ulterior motives, and as unreliable ethics in persuing those motives, as every other industry has come to have.
You misused the word 'hacker' on a mailing list of people who know better. You were corrected, you have been educated, and your response is to call everyone a hypocrit.
A community of hackers, in the old and august meaning of the word, is not at all hypocrictical for being annoyed with you for misusing the term and equating them to a bunch of petty criminals, any more than a person of a particular ethnicity, who stands for freedom, is a hypocrit for being angry when another group deliberately denigrates them. Or, put another way, fighting speech with speech is not the same as advocating censorship, and you should recognize the difference.
Frankly, you should drop the attitude, admit you made a mistake, and move on. Everyone makes mistakes ... that is part of life. Clinging to them out of
stubbornness, however, is just silly.
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My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.