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?"

Comments

Assumption of anonymnity

[Stubtify]

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.

Do you know what the word "Vigilante" means?

[autopr0n]

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'.

Re:cover all yer bases

[Doomdark]

And if good old Noah's flood did happen it might have screwed up the climate something rotton so there goes the basis for carbon dating (carbon ratios in the atmopshere).

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.