Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Please don't hack my computer at 127.0.0.1. Thanks!
Report it to the authorities. Alternately, post the info here on /. and then don't worry about it. Somebody will do something, and it won't be you.
Lasers Controlled Games!
to show you how much you need a deadbolt.
yeah, no, that sounds like a bad idea.
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.
My opinion has always been that if you stumble across somthing, then you should absolutely tell those that need to know, and NOT the general public (at the very least, not until those responsible have had a reasonable chance to repair whatever the problem was). However, purposely breaking in to private servers to show how much they need to beef up security (or similar such actions) is tantamount to breaking in to someone's home to show how bad their door locks are; it's breaking and entering, and it's a crime. If you want to do penetration testing, you really need to get permission from the owner before they start tearing in to their system.
anyone who uses p2p apps should join up. they request that you only report websites and stuff, but ips and timestamps are probably fine. all the reports are forwarded to the appropriate law enforcement agency.
Problem is, without downloading it, how do you tell what's child porn? Don't tell me you can tell by the filename, because you can't. There are people out there who label ordinary stuff as child porn. I don't know why, maybe because that makes more people download it (??).
And if I had downloaded some, I'd delete it quick and not tell anyone, just in case. Call me paranoid, but too many people have got themselves in trouble by trying to help out lately.
Considering the lack of speed and sometimes lack of ability when it comes to investigating cyber crimes, on line vigilante's may be the only option. This type of behavior does 2 things.
1. It provides some deterrant
2. It forces law enforcement to step up to the plate.
Example? There is an on line porn site that has pictures of a girl, about the ago of ten having hard core sex with an adult. I found out because a domain I admin with a catch all e-mail was recieving bounces from this sites spam. I reported it. Nothing happened for a few days so I traced the actual source of the pictures to a freeserver. The pictures were removed in minutes, I continued to follow the sites from free server to free server until it stopped working (I haven't checked in a while).
I made that persons life more difficult and hopefully caused him to leave more "trails". Each free server admin I talked to said that they would save any logs that they had. Now why couldn't the police do what I did for the 2 weeks or so?
cluge
AngryPeopleRule
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
Vigilance, watching for problems that affect our community, and then telling the community about noticed problems is what is known as "civic duty". Using authorized access to community resources, then notifying the community that such access creates risks greater than they accepted, or expected, is a community service. Especially when that access, authorized by the community itself (eg. via a webserver), has subtler implications than are discernable to most members of the community (eg. non-techs). If we see something going wrong, it's our responsibility to tell people about it. That makes everyone safer.
Vigilantes do more than just find problems. They act on their information, using their judgement to change the problem, supposedly into a solution. But justice is a specialized process, like science. When unqualified people engage in risky acts with dangerous consequences, they expose the rest of the community to unacceptable danger. Looking for problems, and telling us about them, protects us. Acting on one's own, especially without telling the rest of us, creates risks as severe as, or worse than, the "problem" being "solved".
Eternal vigilance is no vice.
(with no apologies to Barry Goldwater)
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make install -not war