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What Do You Think of Online Vigilantes?
gwoodrow asks: "I'm a member of the (primarily) Mac community Spymac. I originally joined for the 1 gb of email, but eventually found myself joining in on discussions in the forum. Today, I received an email from a supposedly anonymous Spymac member ("supposedly" because the smart guy didn't mask his IP). Basically, it said that he or she had harvested 10,000 member screen names/email addresses from Spymac's pages and that this, paired with the ability to view individual member's profiles, created a major problem because of the extent of information so readily available. The email this person sent out and the forum discussion that follow are available here. All cracks and personal opinion about Spymac aside, what do Slashdot members think of online 'vigilante' justice?"
"Some viruses are released with little notes within that say things like - 'this is why you need to do X or Y to fix your software' Some hackers have also gained infamy by hacking a major system allegedly to help. Do you support such actions and why? Are virus/trojan writers, hackers, and spammers doing a noble deed or going about things in the wrong way? If you don't agree generally, are there exceptions when online vigilantes are fully in the right? Is the accessibility of vulnerabilities a good excuse to partake in such actions, or should there be ethical bounds regardless?"
Why is it people expect to be anonymous online still? If you want to interact with people and have them know your name, birthday, address, etc then that's up to you. However no one is stopping you from using a fake last name/address/bday and still interacting on the same level. Why is it people put personal data in obvious places, and then get mad when someone shows how easy it is to discover that data.
Because it seems like you don't. A vigilante is someone who tries to bring people to justice by working outside of the law. The key here is that they are doing something which they belive is moraly right.
From your description, it sounds like someone just... grabbed some published information and started threatening people with it. There's no indication in your writeup that this person was even trying to do something 'good'.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Ebay has a problem with fraud. Especially in electronics/computer auctions. They do, in fairness to them, attempt to monitor and control fraudulent auctions, but clearly they are losing the battle. There has been an individual lately trying to sell the new Motorola V710 on eBay. (It's is as yet unreleased.) A number of people have determined that beyond using the regular channels, such as registering a complaint with eBay, they (or one person in particular) need to take more aggresive action and have managed to "guess" the password to the AOL account that the auctioner is requesting correspondance to. He made it clear a couple of times that he "guessed" the password, but didn't "hack" the account. Despite what I may think about auction scammers, taking the law into your own hands is foolish. You are opening yourself to civil and possibly criminal liability. Is it worth it? Doubtful. In today's paranoid security landscape, regardless of your intent, you could easily wind up being the scapegoat. Last I checked, any attempt to access a service which you are not licensed to use is a crime. ie, You can "scan" whatever you want, but as soon as you connect... BLAMO! Off to the slammer you go!!! A word to the wise.
Doing what was described here is not being a "vigilante"--A vigilante is a private citizen (lacking official authorization--not a police officer or other governmental authority) who catches and/or punishes criminals for crimes outside of the established legal system. What this guy did was identify a security weakness and used it to make a point about it. That sounds either like civil disobedience, a technical infraction done to prove a point more than to cause actual damage or harm, or being a "good samaritan" in that he identified a problem and offers to help solve it even though he has no obligation to do so. Since (at this point) no law has been broken, there is nobody to catch, and no opportunity for a "vigilante" to act. If someone bad did get the list of members and sold it to a spammer, and I found out who did it and gave him a black eye in retribution, i'd be the vigilante.
Doh. "might have screwed up"? I'll counter with "no it wouldn't". Care to explain why exactly that would have made it invalid, or skew results significantly enough to produce multiple magnitudes of order discrepancies? And your "Adam and Eve" angle was truly bizarre: are you claiming they lived in there for eons before that supposed 6000 year period started? Or that unlike the bible says, there was a specific, gasp, l Granted, similar excuses are rather common with fundamentals, but I'd expect more from someone who truly tries to convince crowd (Slashdot readers) that supposedly has stronger natural science background than the average US population.
Your comment is either fundamentalists sly take on abusing the (too) common relativist attitude of too many people (even educated ones have), or part of that apathic relativist agenda. "In fairness' sake, let's consider unfounded claims of one non-open minded party, no matter how easily debunkable they are" (as in trying to claim evolution a "controversial" subject when it's not one at all). That's not fairness, that's being gullible and letting fanatic minority abuse the good nature of people (well, plus bad self esteem less educated folks have WRT anything smelling of "science").
The debates between fundamentalists with their cemented views (having painted themselves in corner with fundamentalist interpretation of their holy book, be it bible, quran or whatever) and scientists (or people with strong natural science background) are uneven battles of wits, one side generally being unarmed. The end result is that "intelligent design" proponents end up pointing ostensible contradictions in tiny details, and trying to convince those completely derail whatever theory are railing against.
Finally, note that while I do consider fundamentalist believers bunch of ignorant cuckoos, I have no problem with normal pragmatic religious people. Most christians do NOT believe in literal interpretation of the bible; only the vocal minority in US of A tries to present different picture.
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes