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Death Penalty For Hackers?
EMIce writes "The New York Times Op-Ed page has a piece entitled Worse Than Death (Obnoxious but free registration required) that calls for harsher 'hacker' penalties as a deterrent, quoting one academic as recommending even well, the death penalty - as a deterrent for the likes of Sasser author Sven Jaschan. Let's face it, businesses are becoming more dependent on their computers but they continue to be a point of failure, and subsequently, frustration through lost profits. Perpetrated breakdowns are now pushing that aggravation towards an edge. The author suggests commuting the idea of a death sentence into a lifetime of servitude doing viral cleanup. What role should enforcement play in such cases and is this too harsh, even considering the billions in damage that is sometimes caused?"
http://www.bugmenot.com/view.php?url=www.nytimes.c om
Somone call John Dvorak...his title as reigning champion of the blithering idiots is being seriously contested.
Just who is this John Tierney, anyway? Judging from his whining about 'man-years I've spent running virus scans and reformatting hard drives', he doesn't sound like any computer profesional I know...perhaps if he was a bit more in the know, he'd know that although Microsoft had released a patch for this loophole on 13 and 28 April 2004, many companies had not applied this protection before Sasser struck. Perhaps some of Mr. Tierney's considerable ire should be redirected towards the hordes of lazy sysadmins who had a solution for the Sasser worm, but chose complacency over vigilance.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
...public floggings of idiots that don't sufficiently protect/firewall their computers!
Ahh. That explains the demise of Phrack I guess.
Death by pop-up.
Or pop-under...
Most folk'll never lose a toe, and then again some folk'll...
No amount of money loss is worth a loss of someones life.
Indeed, there can be no crime for which the death of an individual can be justified.
Otherwise pure hypocrisy rules.
The death penalty should not even exist for murders/rapist/horrible-crime*!!
My own opinion...
because he costs companies millions in lost revenue, but CEO of company who commits fraud and loots the pension funds for billions gets nothing or maybe a few years in prison?
Yeah, we're looking at the right places for deterence.
Good to see restraint in the discussion. We wouldn't want to lose our heads over this issue!
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
Wowsers. Makes me wonder what the punishment would be for the software vendors whose products are virus friendly?
Companies are always quick to blame the 'hackers' when something bad happens. What they need to do is look inside first at themselves. Besides the fact that the vast majority of damage done to company computers is an inside job, most of the external damage (caused by worms and viruses, etc) is caused by people not patching vulnerable systems or having a poor network setup. The virus/worm writers certainly aren't innocent, but a lot of the companies are as guilty for not doing what they need to to defend against such attacks.
- AMW
Must we rekindle the hacker v. cracker speech? I say Death to all lowlife scriptkiddies!!! :D I'm sure we can all agree on that, right?
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Commuting the hacker death penalty to a mere "blue screen of death" penalty might be in order. While we are at it, institute such a penalty for the bozos as NYT for making us type Elmer Fudd, pw Wabbit in order to read their info.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
A) Companies could go to Linux as a now viable optional, especially in the server space. Linux has everything from identity management, to basic server capabilities, and everything else in between. B) Well, ok, viruses will always exist, but I have never in my life gotten one. Perhaps if companies took experience ofver certification, less of the ineptitude would exist, and therefore less viruses would establish themselves on corporate machines.
Please, try not to sound so stupid...
We must stand firm with our allies, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Syria, in sending sinners to god for their eternal punishment. If they're not guilty, they're martyrs, and we've hastened their journey to their eternal reward, to the root account in the sky.
"Kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out" - T-Shirt at the Republican National Convention
--
make install -not war
Yes, lets kill hackers, but lets let more and more child molesters out of jail
priorites people
I hope that we reach that point far in advance of advocating the death penalty for electronic trespassers. Even a fan of stiff penalties should pause and reflect before going there based upon a dispassionate cost/benefit analysis.
The worse-than-death ideas in the article are amusing, though.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
Isn't it a little harsh? What happened to the punishment fitting the crime? If nobody died then no death penalty.
I don't care how much money was lost.
I think I think, therefore I think I am.
Computer crime penalties are already out of whack, that is they are more severe than many physical crimes.
Intent should be taken into account, is someone commiting computer crimes as an intellectual exercise, or are they doing it for terrorism or for monetary gain.
loosing most of the income for the rest of your life seems like a much harshier sentence, than death.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
You can always make more later, but you only have one life. Murders and rapists get less penalty for messing up / ending people's lives than these people want for hackers who screwed up a bunch of businesses? Whatever happened to life being important, and when did the almighty dollar take precedence over human lives? Admittedly it is a _lot_ of dollars, but I still think one life outweighs how many cars some rich people can buy. Besides, other businesses like anti-virus companies, and IT companies MADE a lot of money due to things like viruses / spyware / spam, etc. So it's not like it was a total loss for businesses.
-Jesse
Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
I love americans! that some of you would even entertain this idea long enough for it to get to this stage. I love you all!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...is to make them work the Help Desk of any random ISP.
With those kind of punishments I'd have to go back to my old ways of raping and pillaging through suburbs.
Hmm, drunk driving sounds like more fun..
Goes to show the location of this nations values with talk such as this.
What about a rapist? I don't see them being executed. Is $xxx billion in financial losses due to Sassar (or whatever) worth more than a young girl's chance at a "normal" life?
Putting it in that context... well... just kinda makes ya sick, no?
ABH: jail time
Rape: lots of jail time (in theory)
Running somebody over accidentally whilst drunk: Probably jail time and a ban from driving
0wnz0ring j00: Death!
Hmm...can we get a sense of proportion here?
Save the death penalty for those that deserve it, like kid touchers. This is quite possiblly the stupidest idea ever (aside from Windows ME that is...)
Except for the fact that the idea is horribly wrong from an ethical viewpoint, it also simply won't work. The efficacy of a punishment is more related to the chance of being caught than to the severity of the punishment.
Despite the risk of huge fines, almost everyone downloads movies at a regular basis, because the chances of being caught are near zero.
therefore probably causing a few trucks to be late. maybe $10,000 in economic damage. Should I be jailed?
I can uderstand death penalties for people who cause the deaths of numerous other people, but harming companies' profits? Come on. Unless you author a virus with the intent that it shuts down a hospital's life support systems then you shouldn't get death.
Realize that for fast driving, this penalty is gets imposed automatically during the act.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Notice how there is no more drug use since we've had harsh penalties for several decades. We can do the same thing to wipe out hacking. And your genitals should be removed if you are convicted of connecting to an unauthorized open WAP.
get the "death" penalty. I think the guys from Enron and MCI, etc, who cost 10's of millions of damage in the form of lost pensions and 401K's for their employees should recieve an equivalent "death" penalty.
Wouldn't this weed out the hacker pool? Only the best would survive to breed...or do they?
Last year a German teenager named Sven Jaschan released the Sasser worm, one of the costliest acts of sabotage in the history of the Internet. It crippled computers around the world, closing businesses, halting trains and grounding airplanes.
A) A 21-month suspended sentence and 30 hours of community service.
B) Two years in prison.
C) A five-year ban on using computers.
D) Death.
E) Something worse.
If you answered A, you must be the German judge who gave him that sentence last week.
If you answered B or C, you're confusing him with other hackers who have been sent to prison and banned from using computers or the Internet. But those punishments don't seem to have deterred hackers like Mr. Jaschan from taking their place.
I'm tempted to say that the correct answer is D, and not just because of the man-years I've spent running virus scans and reformatting hard drives. I'm almost convinced by Steven Landsburg's cost-benefit analysis showing that the spreaders of computer viruses and worms are more logical candidates for capital punishment than murderers are.
Professor Landsburg, an economist at the University of Rochester, has calculated the relative value to society of executing murderers and hackers. By using studies estimating the deterrent value of capital punishment, he figures that executing one murderer yields at most $100 million in social benefits.
The benefits of executing a hacker would be greater, he argues, because the social costs of hacking are estimated to be so much higher: $50 billion per year. Deterring a mere one-fifth of 1 percent of those crimes - one in 500 hackers - would save society $100 million. And Professor Landsburg believes that a lot more than one in 500 hackers would be deterred by the sight of a colleague on death row.
I see his logic, but I also see practical difficulties. For one thing, many hackers live in places where capital punishment is illegal. For another, most of them are teenage boys, a group that has never been known for fearing death. They're probably more afraid of going five years without computer games.
So that leaves us with E: something worse than death. Something that would approximate the millions of hours of tedium that hackers have inflicted on society.
Hackers are the Internet equivalent of Richard Reid, the shoe-bomber who didn't manage to hurt anyone on his airplane but has been annoying travelers ever since. When I join the line of passengers taking off their shoes at the airport, I get little satisfaction in thinking that the man responsible for this ritual is sitting somewhere by himself in a prison cell, probably with his shoes on.
He ought to spend his days within smelling range of all those socks at the airport. In an exclusive poll I once conducted among fellow passengers, I found that 80 percent favored forcing Mr. Reid to sit next to the metal detector, helping small children put their sneakers back on.
The remaining 20 percent in the poll (meaning one guy) said that wasn't harsh enough. He advocated requiring Mr. Reid to change the Odor-Eaters insoles of runners at the end of the New York City Marathon.
What would be the equivalent public service for Internet sociopaths? Maybe convicted spammers could be sentenced to community service testing all their own wares. The number of organ-enlargement offers would decline if a spammer thought he'd have to appear in a public-service television commercial explaining that he'd tried them all and they just didn't work for him.
Convicted hackers like Mr. Jaschan could be sentenced to a lifetime of removing worms and viruses, but the computer experts I consulted said there would be too big a risk that the hackers would enjoy the job. After all, Mr. Jaschan is now doing just that for a software security firm.
The experts weren't sure that any punishment could fit the crime, but they had several suggestions: Make the hacker spend 16 hours a day fielding help-desk inquiries in an
I wouldn't be surprised to see a death penalty for hacking in places like China within the next few years. They have no problem executing people for commercial fraud involving as little as a few thousand dollars, so extending those penalties to hacking isn't a big stretch for them.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
I work at a hospital..what if one of our critical care systems were to be infected? Now, we have backups and take pains to ensure that no outside things can get in, but nothing is foolproof. If it affects the care of patient (I.e doctor cant get into a system to see past history of medications right away), who's fault is it? What if it infects the police computer system, and a cop in a squad car cant identify a criminal who has a warrant out, and then he goes and commits murder that would have been prevented? Extreme and unlikely examples, yes, but people who write such things open up the possibilities that this may happen and they should be punished. Do they deserve the death penalty? I don't think so, but life is a reasonable sentence considering the systems that it could affect.
Last year a German teenager named Sven Jaschan released the Sasser worm, one of the costliest acts of sabotage in the history of the Internet. It crippled computers around the world, closing businesses, halting trains and grounding airplanes.
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Which of these punishments does he deserve?
A) A 21-month suspended sentence and 30 hours of community service.
B) Two years in prison.
C) A five-year ban on using computers.
D) Death.
E) Something worse.
If you answered A, you must be the German judge who gave him that sentence last week.
If you answered B or C, you're confusing him with other hackers who have been sent to prison and banned from using computers or the Internet. But those punishments don't seem to have deterred hackers like Mr. Jaschan from taking their place.
I'm tempted to say that the correct answer is D, and not just because of the man-years I've spent running virus scans and reformatting hard drives. I'm almost convinced by Steven Landsburg's cost-benefit analysis showing that the spreaders of computer viruses and worms are more logical candidates for capital punishment than murderers are.
Professor Landsburg, an economist at the University of Rochester, has calculated the relative value to society of executing murderers and hackers. By using studies estimating the deterrent value of capital punishment, he figures that executing one murderer yields at most $100 million in social benefits.
The benefits of executing a hacker would be greater, he argues, because the social costs of hacking are estimated to be so much higher: $50 billion per year. Deterring a mere one-fifth of 1 percent of those crimes - one in 500 hackers - would save society $100 million. And Professor Landsburg believes that a lot more than one in 500 hackers would be deterred by the sight of a colleague on death row.
I see his logic, but I also see practical difficulties. For one thing, many hackers live in places where capital punishment is illegal. For another, most of them are teenage boys, a group that has never been known for fearing death. They're probably more afraid of going five years without computer games.
So that leaves us with E: something worse than death. Something that would approximate the millions of hours of tedium that hackers have inflicted on society.
Hackers are the Internet equivalent of Richard Reid, the shoe-bomber who didn't manage to hurt anyone on his airplane but has been annoying travelers ever since. When I join the line of passengers taking off their shoes at the airport, I get little satisfaction in thinking that the man responsible for this ritual is sitting somewhere by himself in a prison cell, probably with his shoes on.
He ought to spend his days within smelling range of all those socks at the airport. In an exclusive poll I once conducted among fellow passengers, I found that 80 percent favored forcing Mr. Reid to sit next to the metal detector, helping small children put their sneakers back on.
The remaining 20 percent in the poll (meaning one guy) said that wasn't harsh enough. He advocated requiring Mr. Reid to change the Odor-Eaters insoles of runners at the end of the New York City Marathon.
What would be the equivalent public service for Internet sociopaths? Maybe convicted spammers could be sentenced to community service testing all their own wares. The number of organ-enlargement offers would decline if a spammer thought he'd have to appear in a public-service television commercial explaining that he'd tried them all and they just didn't work for him.
Convicted hackers like Mr. Jaschan could be sentenced to a lifetime of removing worms and viruses, but the computer experts I consulted said there would be too big a risk that the hackers would enjoy the job. After all, Mr. Jaschan is now doing just that for a software security firm.
The
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
are you kidding me, death penalty for hacking, thats absurd. next well be chopping peoples hands off because they stick up their middle fingers. overkill.
How about some harsher penalties for treason instead?
"...Death penalty..."
"is this too harsh, considering the billions of damages"...
Wow. So the upshot of this is that the government should murder you if you cause people to lose lots of money?
(Unless you have lots of money, presumably, as in the case of certain CEOs who ruin the life savings of people naive enough to believe that the stock market is a sufficient substitute for a governmental pension system...)
May I point out that things have become just a little bit sick and perverted?
File this one under batshit crazy ideas. Killing more people is always the way to go. Also, I wish that more of my tax money went toward incarcerating people over insane paranoia. Perhaps I should write an op/ed piece.
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That punishment doesn't fit the crime. In many ways our justice system makes victims out of the perpetrators of crimes when the punishment is way out of proportion to the actual crime committed. When that happens, the justice system is perpetrating an injustice on the person found guilty in court.
I don't like how some people think that just because someone is obnoxious or causes minor damage (and let's face it, virus infestations are fairly minor compared to the gamut of actual crimes that people are let off the hook with much less punishment) that they should be put away for ever or even put to death. I think it reeks of a completely blown sense of proportion. Unfortunately, the voters who think this way are more prone to vote than people who are more sanely-minded.
Should the punishment for releasing a virus be tough? I don't think so. I think that it is a pretty benign "crime". It is crucial that we keep a sense of proportion when discussing the sentencing stage of justice.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
Yeah, that's really where we want to head - execution for hackers because "businesses depend on their computers"? yeah, great idea, isn't the RIAA's argument that copyright infringement costs businesses money?
With the government in the pockets of big business, the last thing we want is some NYT Op-Ed shouting his mouth off about how people should be executed for crimes against corporations' bottom lines - who knows what ideas they'll get...
Dealing with lawyers would be a lot less tedious if they all looked like Casey Novak.
The general public get criminalized, and people who (while complete pricks) aren't physically harming anyone get sentenced to death.
At the same time, the **AA is running protection rackets and giving MS a reason to control the hardware you paid for. Not just in the US, but the rest of the world too. Both companies supported by a warmongering government that never should've been reelected.
Call me crazy, but I think a public rebellion is in order here.
I'd appreciate it if any death penalty advocates could please cite a published work (in a reputable journal) which clearly shows statistical evidence that the death penalty actually acts as a deterrant in the mind of would-be criminals.
As far as I can tell, it's just something that sounds really good. You know, "Criminals will be very scared of being killed for their actions, because normal people are very scared of being killed." From the little I know about the workings of the human mind, most sociopaths don't react to things the same way the rest of us do, and people who cause massive damage on an any scale - economic, physical, emotional - are sociopaths.
Anyway, I'd just appreciate some good evidence for the "deterrant" hypothesis. Then I'll start to believe it might be a good idea.
the idea of putting convicted producers of malware to work fixing the problems they created is probably the single most effective and poetic sentence that could be reached. but i think that's not coming any time soon.
look at the terms kevin mitnick was/is forced to endure as a result of his sentencing. it seems to me that a lot of people would need to have a change of heart about what sentencing means before we ever see that sort of sentencing.
ed
Don't have time to RTFA, but I'm curious about using deterrents against non-technological white collar crimes that cost people billions of dollars (Tyco, Enron, etc.). I'd say these are more diabolical and deliberate than some computer geek who wants to feel importance in the world by writing a mass-mailing worm.
Thats nice.
Jeffery Dahmer's are out there.
Michael Jackson's are out there.
Hackers are out there.
Oh and the hacker should be the one sentenced to death. Er, umm. yeah.
Eric
Many professions where wrongdoing is a serious offence have employed license revocation as a successful deterrent. While software development is not a licensed activity, having a similar punishment (e.g. prohibition to be employed in any computer-affiliated capacity) might be a solution for a problem. Needless to say, that this is a drsatic measure and it should be applied to serious offenses only (i.e. viruses/worms, etc.)
"I'm tempted to say that the correct answer is D[eath], and not just because of the man-years I've spent running virus scans and reformatting hard drives. I'm almost convinced by Steven Landsburg's cost-benefit analysis showing that the spreaders of computer viruses and worms are more logical candidates for capital punishment than murderers are."
Right. Because capital punishment is all about cost-benefit analysis. Make the accountants the executioners!
mbbac
holding software developers and companies responsible for poorly written software? Check out the EULA, Windows blows up and wipes out your accounting software, the most you can sue the vendor for is the cost of the software in question. Where's the incentive to software companies to write better code?
Scientia et Potentia
... but a massive hack attack certainly shouldn't be considered a legitimate way to seek a six-figure job opportunity.
Apart from the whole idea of a "death penalty" being sickening, the average hacker wouldn't fit in the electric chair anyway.
And good luck if you try killing them by injecting harmful chemicals into their Pepsi-stream.
Unfortunately, I am not Wil Wheaton
Those estimates come mostly from patching costs. But applying patches has to be done anyway and admins who don't do it are negligent. So the real cost there is zero. Then they also claim damages based on lost business. Bull. If a customer goes somewhere else that is still up and running then the fault is of the CIO for using Windows or the admin for not patching the systems. And if a customer can't buy because the whole internet is wonky well then he will come back and buy that item later after everything is better.
Some people seem to forget that certain IT luminaries including Jobs and Wozniak were playing around with blue boxes and cracking the phone network in their younger days. Some of our greatest innovators started out as young people who pushed legal boundaries and used technology in less than ethical ways.
I'm not equating phone freaks with script kiddies, but stupid ideas like making the punishment for this kind of behaviour worse than what rapists or murderers (crimes which result in real physical or psychological damage - as opposed to electronic crimes that may end up forcing the industry to improve security practices, monetary damages aside) receive is idiotic. Especially when young kids are involved.
Let's think about this rationally.
-Laz
The death penalty is underused anyway, especially given how effective and efficient it has proven to be. And after using it on those "hacker" evildoers, how about extending it to corporate officers presiding over corporations involved in earnings "misstatements" and tax shelter schemes?
"Let's face it, businesses are becoming more dependent on their computers but they continue to be a point of failure, and subsequently, frustration through lost profits"
Wow. Corporations loosing profits is now a logic reason for a death penalty.
Maybe it will stop the "I found a finger in my Chili" people though.
Or we should kill everyone that report a business to their local BBB... That is bound to make a dent in a corporation's profit.
Oh! oh! I got it! Such a law would make all those bible-belt-Disney-boycotting-asshat think twice!
For worms or viruses that usually just cause wide scale network outages and economic damge? That's jus too extreme for what usually happens. It's not like these things end up killing people. I'd hate to see how that academic treats their kids at home.
How about the death penalty for the corporate CEO's, COO's, CFO's, CIO's, and board members who do not secure their networks and lose customers personal information?
It's just an op-ed. It's meant to create a stir.
What is done here is "window dressing". What helps combat crime is increasing the chance to get caught. Will this proposal do anything about that? No, it only helps to fill up prisons with potential security experts...
extern warranty;
main()
{
(void)warranty;
}
As a kid, I used to think the death penalty was a great idea.
At about age 16, we had a school debate on the subject. I was on the 'pro' death penalty side, but that debate sowed the inital small niggles of doubt.
By the time I was 18, I realised the death penalty was completely barbaric. If just one innocent person is executed, that's tantamount to state sponsored murder. That's not to mention that capital punishment doesn't seem to deter crime anyway - Texas is executing more people than ever.
One of the interesting things - if you have a debate with most pro-capital punishment people, they go awfully quiet when you ask them what would they do if they were falsely convicted of a capital crime. How would they feel as they were about to be gassed for a crime they didn't commit?
I'm glad the EU outlaws capital punishment - it's a concept that should have disappeared in the 19th century. As Ghandi said - an eye for an eye and soon the whole world would be blind.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
The poster needs to have his humour detector adjusted. It should be obvious that Tierney is not quite serious about the death penalty. It's more than a bit tongue-in-cheek. Quote from the article:
Make the hacker spend 16 hours a day fielding help-desk inquiries in an AOL chat room for computer novices. Force him to do this with a user name at least as uncool as KoolDude and to work on a vintage IBM PC with a 2400-baud dial-up connection. Most painful of all for any geek, make him use Windows 95 for the rest of his life.
as long as it's not just for hackers. If we up the penalties for any kind of dishonesty/fucktardism that costs society a lot of money, then execute the people who carry out those policies (such as the executives of large corporations), then I will go along with this. Just make sure that the dollar amount you cost society is the determining factor, not the reasons behind why you did it.
Best. Comment. Ever. Enjoy!
Why not give those people a good ol' public whipping?
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
Really, does the punishment fit the crime? If no lives were lost, then the death penalty far surpasses the punishment warranted. Is a corporate bottom line worth the killing of one person? I say no.
Death penalty for hacking / writing viruses? Hmmmm... That's a tough one. At the police academy that I attended, there is one question on the written exam that, if answered incorrectly, will result in expulsion from the academy. That question is, "When is the use of deadly force justified?" The Answer: "When your life or the life of another is in imminent danger."
I consider the death penalty a use of deadly force, and in most cases, it would not be justified for the typical hacker|cracker (your preference), especially some dumb script kiddie. Millions or billions worth of damages/losses due to some worm != someome's life in iminent danger.
If, on the other hand, a virus or worm were to, say, screw up the life support systems at a hospital, or somehow mess up the core temperature control system at a nuclear plant (causing a meltdown), then I would say the the death penalty could be justified.
"Teleporting Rodents with D-Cell Battery Displacement" theory -- IgnoramusMaximus (692000)
Instead of "hacking" as a crime, perhaps the "hacker" should be charged with any crime that happens as a result. Break into a banking system, and it's fraud and possibly theft. Break into the 911 system and cause several people to die because they couldn't get help, and it's murder. Then, you don't have to make up new punishments and new laws and the punishment will be appropriate to the damage done.
It just seems obvious to me. Am I missing something here?
I think all crime should be the death penalty. Speeding - death hacking - death robbing thousands of people through corporate fraud - 2 years in federal summer camp Gotta keep the lower classes in check Androk
Thats nice. Jeffery Dahmers are out there. Michael Jacksons are out there. Hackers are out there. Oh, lets sentence the hacker to death. Erm yeah.
-- The box said Windows 2000 or better... so I installed Linux
death penalty for those smart enough to exploit flaws and help our technology grow...
but people who KILL other people and rape children get ~20 years
you're kidding me...
He's NOT a computer professional, he's an Op-Ed columnist. That would be why his opinion is on the NYT Op-Ed page. He has a background in science writing among other things.
m l
Here's the oh-so-hard-to-find bio for you savvy computer professionals:
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/opinion/tierney-bio.ht
Personally I think cutting off one hand would help quite a bit. It'd slow 'em down at least the next time.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
This entire article seems to be trollish .
.
.
.
First , though I hate to be pedantic , the incorrect use of the word hacker gets to me , specially when discussing something as serious as the death penalty
Secondly , the right to life is inalienable , and cannot be taken away unless you have forfeited ( means of forfeiting it include not recognising it in another human ( which means trying to murder / actually murdering someone ) , or some other action which shows that you do not recognise it as a right ) it
A crime which results in financial/reputational ( is reputational a word ? ) loss cannot be considered a forfeiture of your right to life , as you have committed no action or made no statement to the effect that your right to life is nullified
The articel seems to have intended to get a rise out of the technical community , and the best thing I could ask to do it to ignore it and not give the topic legtimacy by discussing it seriously .
Let's not forget that the plague of viruses is largely to blame on poorly written systems. Vendors of comercial OSes should not be permitted to hide behind EULAs and should be sued for damages for providing insecure products.
I reckon that would help a bit.
The 'net is, well,... the net.
It's not safe, it's not child freindly, it's not simple and it's not cheap. There are viruses on it.
I think people rushed into the 'net for the creativity, the wildness of it all. Now, rather than deal with the flip side, people want to ratchet down on the wildness and have their old lives back. Unfortunately imposing heavy control and penalties goes against many ideals (creativity, responsibility, market-forces ideology) that may be more important than cleaning some spyware off a PC occasionally.
so they are saying they are willing to kill someone jsut becuse they made them lose money.. killing someone becuse they killed someone .. i can see that..
but taking a life for damage to things and lose of money..
why don't we jsut put a price on everyones head first that way i can tell if i am worth dieing for.
the day that they go through with this .. is the day i will remove my self from this so call world
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Of course this is too harsh.
Do rapists, killers, pedophiles and other kinds of criminals get death penalties or lifetime jail ? Not in my country. Not in any country of the EU. Even in the USA, only killers get death sentences, and other kinds of crimes don't get you such harsh sentences (but correct me if I'm wrong here).
Immaterial "crimes" like cracking into a computer system are only crimes because we decide so. We decide so because it is a way of ensuring the stability of our economic system. That's fine, but if we begin to compare that in severity to physical crimes, where people get injured, where violence happens, that means that we have forgotten everything. If we jail more severely (lifetime) a computer cracker than a rapist (usually 2 years jail), then we are totally decadent.
War doesn't prove who's right, just who's left.
Welcome to the USA, where money is more important than children.
SYS 64738
RTFA dude.
Clearly you should be given the death penalty.
So this whole "an execution saves us $100M" concept is kind of troubling -- it's based on estimates that an execution deters a certain number of murders. Say, 10, at $10M per murdered person.
Some people also estimate that an execution deters zero murders -- after all, the vast majority are committed in the heat of the moment.
If zero murders are prevented by execution, then each execution really costs us millions of dollars in fees for a constitutionally-entitled defense and appeal.
So the comparison at the heart of this blather is potentially bogus, as are many monetary estimates of impact of things like piracy (and to a lesser degree, malicious hackers).
circa75.com
If for example his actions led to a hospital or something similar no longer functioning, resulting in the death of patients, then yes, the death penalty would be in order.
http://jcsnippets.atspace.com/ - a collection of Java & C# snippets
only loss of profit. is the state going to kill or incarcerate me because some asshole is not going to have 8 mansions instead of 5? unitedstatians are brain damaged from birth.
You are under arrest for crimes against profit. You have the right to ... well, nothing. A summary hearing by the corporate tribunal followed by execution shall follow shortly.
I recall reading somewhere that lawyers originated in ancient Rome because plebians were not entitled to any form of justice, so they had to hire a member of the nobility (ie someone with money) if they were so ungrateful as to demand redress against some other noblemann that raped and pillaged everything they held dear.
Fortunately though this guy is a nutjob with no influence of policy, of which there is no short supply either in the modern or ancient world. Too many people seem to get a stainless steel boner thinking of a world like this for it to bode well for any of us though.
To all businesses: quit crying about your lost profits you greedy f***s. I mean is this for real, the death penalty... the USA makes me wanna puke THANK GOD I'm not a PIG HEADED AMERICAN B****. thank you
Culture of Life?
The More Knowledge you have the Luckier you Get- J.R. Ewing
If there is a manditory death sentence for these crimes, and the members of the jury do not agree with the manditory sentence, they probably won't convict. There are people who are wholly against the death penalty for any crime and they will be on the jury. If the sentence is a long prison term, these same people will more likely convict.
You know what will help industry more than murdering 18 yr old punks who need a schoolin but not a killin?
NOT USING FUCKING INSECURE OPERATING SYSTEMS AND TOOLS!
If the "market" was so worried about security then the fucking market should stop using Windows.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
What if someone raped your child or SO?
Perhaps "how you feel" should not be a factor in the severity of the sentencing.
Justice should be served cold, not hot. Too often logic and reason gives way to emotions and the public's desire for a lynching. That is a travesty.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
but... well... yes I am...
6 2261
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=116538&cid=98
Shaking a few kids around wont change a thing for people who did learn from decades of computer security research and now use their experience to attack stuff while covering their tracks rather thant defacing or Ddosing sites... Ofcourse changing an industry doesn`t need legislation but objective reporting. Like say articles comparing the security design of windows against the security design of multics. Ofcourse that isn`t something publishers like the new york times can do anything about, they are bussy printing windows advertisements or articles that may as well be advertisements in the way the compare windows xp eye candy against windows 2000 eye candy to conclude microsoft is making major improvements.
what about harsher penalties for making insecure software?
Yes, businesses. BUSINESSES. Corrupt CEOs completely wipe out their own businesses, and are punished by spending a number of years in a low security prison resort. So why sentence a kid to death for causing several sys admins grief?
That being said, if a Sasser-type worm had caused planes to crash or was otherwise responsible for death, then throw the book at him. But, this article really comes across as some guy in a suit going off the deep end.
If you need more proof of this, look no further than one of the lines in the article:
I'm almost convinced by Steven Landsburg's cost-benefit analysis showing that the spreaders of computer viruses and worms are more logical candidates for capital punishment than murderers are.
We should learn from George Carlin...
1. Shouldn't anyone punish the company responsible for the crappy software that could so easily be hacked? Read the following and translate into your favorite software corporation.
George Carlin: Most people in this country want to expand the death penalty to include drug dealers. Drug dealers aren't afraid to die. They're already killing each other by the hundreds on the streets every day, in gang wars, turf wars - they're not afraid to die. It means very little to kill a person who's not afraid to die. If you want to stop the drug trade, you'd kill these bankers who are laundering the drug money. Let's execute some of these white, middle-class Republican bankers. And I'm not talking about any of this soft stuff like lethal injection, I mean crucifixion!
2. If decided to use the death penalty for hacking, please make it watchable using some of Mr Carlins best ideas...
George Carlin: Certainly Jews and Christians can both enjoy crucifixion from a certain standpoint. I could take it a step further, I would crucify them upside-down, and I would let them be naked. Naked and upside-down once a week during halftime of the Monday Night Football game! This is a marketing country, this is a country of popular culture - let's play into it. Wouldn't you like to hear Dennis Miller explain why the nails have to go in at a certain angle?
If we start nailing one of these white bankers a week, and the drug trade is going to start going down. And we could go further, because I think there are some creative possibilities here.
Some are a little more sophisticated. You dip a guy in brown gravy, and you lock him in a small room with a wolverine who's high on angel dust! Or you could just shoot a guy. You could get a high-speed catapult, and you just shoot him into a brick wall! Perhaps you line 'em up and you do fifteen of 'em; when one of them is fired off, then the next one - rapid fire capital punishment. Course, then you have to stop everything to clean off the wall, since cleanliness is right next to Godliness. That's one of my - I won't call it a solution - but it's one of my suggestions. To get this culture to warm to what it professes. If we're going to kill people, let's be imaginative; raise a little money to pay down Social Security. The debt seems to be in fine shape, let's pay down Social Security, and sell these spots to Budweiser, someone like that. Something you could gamble on.
There are some fine forms of execution that perhaps deserve a second look. Beheading hasn't been used in a long time. You could have the head roll down a little hill, where it could land in one of five numbered holes. Also a favorite is burning people in oil. Maybe we could French-fry a few.
All I have to say is losing millions or billions isn't worth killing someone over.
If we put businesses in charge of prosecuting someone toward the death penalty due to money loss, it'll be a very different world we live in.
i know that legally corporations are individuals. what crime against another individual would require death? murder? ok so here's the deal, you start killing hackers *only* if they take down the company. if not, quit trying to get special priveleges for your corporate individual, and trying to punish other people because your HR Department is doesn't hire qualified techs, or you haven't given your tech tema the opportunity to update the machines, or haven't trained your employees to not be computer idiots. lets not kill some kid for exposing your company's incompetence.
This whole article can be sumed up as FUCKING STUPID. If we're going to execute hackers (or at least the FUD throwing medias interpretation of hackers) we can at least even the playing field and execute all the other troublemakers, i.e. Politicians, Lawyers, and Lobbiests to name a few. Lets face it the world would be a lot better place without that kind of trash.
You know, when a girl is wearing a short skirt, and she's walking at night alone? She's just as guilty of rape as the guy who rapes her, for not defending herself adequately.
</SARCASM>
That sort of thinking is nonsense.
Not that I agree with this article either. I have a hard time taking anyone seriously who uses a "cost-benefit analysis" to determine who should live and who should die. (Why not just kill all the old people?)
Members of the Masters of Deception never crashed or disrupted computers (although one was falsely accused of crashing the Learning Link), yet their arrests in 1990 led to months or years of jail time. Many of them were not white, and all of them come from working class backgrounds.
This is how the soi disant justice system works. Ken Lay stole millions, and lives in a mansion and is a free man, but he is wealthy and let George W. Bush use his private plane. Someone who walks into a store and steals gets sent to prison. That is because the government, like all governments, exists so that one class can rule over another one, in the case of the US, the idle class over the working class.
http://slate.msn.com/id/2101297
Here's the original essay on this subject by Steven Landsburg in Slate.
Landsburg has earned a reputation for original thinking on economic issues. I always find my assumptions successfully challenged when reading one of his essays.
(While I've never met him, he's a friend of a friend.)
... it raises my blood pressure.
You motherfucking slimy capitalist piece of SHIT!
How DARE you even THINK that punishing a hacker by death is fair.
Look at the analogy this way: You left your house with the windows unlocked, a few wide open, and the front door bolted securely with a paperclip. Somebody robbed you. That man gets probably tops 1 year in jail. Why? BECAUSE YOU'RE A MORON! YOU LEFT YOUR SHIT UNSECURED!
I know you stupid flunkie businessmen seem to think that you don't own your shit, with your Digital Rights Management, leases, service contracts, and all that bullshit, but that's part of capitalism: YOU DO. You FUCKING OWN THE COMPUTERS THESE VIRUSES ARE INFECTING. PROTECT THEM. If you don't change your oil in your car, your motor will sieze. If you take it to the dealership and say it's their fault, they'll laugh you all the way to the used car lot.
$10B in economic damage? Here's a hint: There'd be no damage if you'd be vigilant.
Stupid fucks. Maybe you should be the ones on death row for allowing so much economic damage.
So punishment for crimes are determined by what most inconveniences large corporations now?
That would amount to, what? A year or two in Club Fed, with weekends off and reduced sentence for good behavior?
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Sounds like a perfectly
Not written in the same spirit, but we can treat it like it was, and maybe it'll help people come to a conclusion of what the penalty should be.
There are 01 kinds of cars in the world. The General Lee, and everything else.
I always find this kind of thing amusing. This is really a manifestation of the fact that normal people are just basically fed up with computers. Worm writers are an outlet for this frustration, which gets us here, repsonding to an op-ed recommending the death penalty for a 17 year old who wrote a program.
Why amusing? Because "normal" people don't seem to turn their anger on some of the root causes. I mean, admit it, the prevalence of worms is really a symptom, not a cause. Anyone who isn't "new here" knows where I'm going with this, but I'll say it anyway: turn an eye towards Redmond for the real culprit.
For folks that a tire of having to run anti-virus, anti-spyware and constantly download and install "service packs" that break programs that they've already paid for, this one is for you. May we all learn to take security seriously in the *design* of the software, rather than tacking it on as an afterthought. Treating security like it is a trivial toy just so you can tack another bullet on the box is the real crime.
I'm serious when I say that I look forward to the "next generation" of operating systems that will hopefully take security FAR more seriously than this generation did. I'm not talking about Longhorn, I'm talking about the operating systems my children will be using (children I don't have yet). Will worms and viruses still exist? Sure. They always will. But at least we'll have some doors with locks, and perhaps a security system by then; right now, most of us live in a tent that we bought that advertised "Sturdy, intruder repellent vinyl!".
Can we do this for spammers as well? Killing them all off would be most beneficial...
I would agree 100% that his final suggestion is a fate worse than death. At least I get to use Win2k (and occassionally linux when the boss allows it) and I hate my job and would never want to work it the rest of my life (which is why I'm in college). That punishment is PERFECT! I'm laughing already at him screaming over chat room lag and dropped calls on that dial-up. Talking to AOLers typing, "is this thing on?", "hello?" and "I don't have an any key", all at mind blowingly slow GWAM. Amazing. Pure genious.
A cost-benefit analysis should never be the basis on which a person is killed. A human life, despite what your insurance agent tells you, is priceless. What a vile, vile man.
The damage from an inside job is limited to a single entity. The worst case is where that entity is a bank and you're stealing from hundreds of thousands of customers, but more often the inside job is just stealing from the company itself.
This dipstick (and the editorial is pretty damn foolish) is rightly pointing out that there's a difference between the limited damage done by a single insider and the immense damage done by outsiders who can be everywhere at once with a worm or virus. To make a hysterical analogy, it's like the difference between killing somebody and genocide. Both bad, but different scales.
Like I said, the article is pretty stupid. Insiders can cause plenty of damage, the more so because they've got all the access they need. A company is obligated to defend itself against the insiders, too. But the thing with insiders is that you know who they are, and can use that to your advantage. It's the ones who manage to hack in from outside that do stuff you can't anticipate.
"To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all laws into contempt" --Elizabeth Cady Stanton "The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws." -- Tacitus, Roman senator and historian (ADc56-c.115)
When there's problems in countries like the USA such as poverty or a lack of health care, the big businesses say that the market will cure the problems. That we just need to find a way to make it profitable and all problems will be solved. They even say this for the environment, that all solutions need to be market driven or they won't last. Well fuck the big businesses who are losing 'billions' of dollars to the hackers. Let the free market sort it out.
While I'm opposed to the death penalty in general, I can still see why many support it as a potential punishment in case of treason or murder. But is it warranted for hacking? Of course there's the case of someone being able to hack into a system and take control of automated trains or the like, and thereby killing people. But in that case I would imagine current laws being more than sufficient to prosecute.
But hacking by itself? I can't see any case where material/economic damage done should lead to the death penalty. If that was the case, then surely we should also use the death penalty in other cases with huge financial damage? For CEOs convicted for large-scale embezzlement or fraudulent accounting? Gee, I wonder if that would a popular proposal in Washinton D.C.?
you're now a prime candidate for hackers who do not share your enthusiam for killing virus writers. Looks like your job, and hopefully lifestyle, just got a lot harder due to you publishing your imbecilic short-sighted opinions.
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
Death penalty he pondered?
The death penalty has been applied on murderers, and yet we don't see murderers going away.
(I'm not totally against the death penalty - proven serial murderers deserves it.)
I just don't see how the death penalty would prevent script kiddies around the world from using exploits and using virii kits to make the next generation virus/worm.
Besides, the real hackers who actually contributes to computing may be lumped into the crackers, and put to death. I'm not so sure whether society wants this to happen. And what to do with admins that are not diligent at all with being up to date and being patched? Should we enact the old British punishment for treason for those sysadmins - hung, drawn and quartered?
Since nearly everything involved computers, this left him very helpless. Restaurants had computers at the tables that you used to order, for example--so he could not get food at a restaurant unless he asked someone to order for him. Same for pretty much any purchase, or use of public transportation, and so on.
The idea behind this punishment (which was for one year) was to make him see how dependent society was on computers, and therefore how serious and bad a crime it was to do anything that threatened the security of or the public's confidence in computers.
while it might be nice to have a way to discourage people from breaking into computers, it's wrong to use a person to achieve such a goal.
best college pickem site ever: pickem.terrbear.org
...is a German. And there has never been, and will never be a Death Penalty in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany. Period.
"quoting one academic as recommending even well, the death penalty " I would hate to have that academic as a prof, I can only imagine what he would do if you were caught plagerising.
Voice your opinion!
Oh sure... this makes sense... why not penalize the idiots who leave their networks unsecure? That's like leaving your car door open and the keys in the glove compartment but the guy who steals the car gets the book thrown at him and the courts pity the "poor guy" who's car was stolen because he's an IDIOT. US government is simply retarded sometimes.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it. -Alan Kay
If we punish with the death penalty those whose actions upset the lives of many many other people, and also cost lots and lots, then there is a long list of people who qualify. CEOs who rob pension funds, for example. Various politicians....
Let's see, the death penalty for writing a virus that disrupts someone's ability to get their work done for a little while, but we still hand out comparative slaps on the wrist for rape.
You can either complain, or do nothing. You don't get both.
Punishments should be harsher than they are currently, but death or a life sentence is way out of line for the crime. Once they start putting child molesters to death then maybe someone can start to think about it for computer crimes.
The fact that someone actually misconfigured software or didn't administer the system that was hacked properly - or at all - of course doesn't mean a thing. Sure. They aren't liable.
Hey, let's go and weld some blades (knives and stuff) all over a car, drive on the wrong lane and honk to the other cars!
Deterrents rarely work usually due to the reasoning of the mind. Most of the people that you want to deter from these criminal actions firmly believe they will not get caught, so the potential punishment does-/will-not relate to them. They believe they have covered their tracks, have impenetrable security, and/or loyal allies. Combined with egos that believe law enforcement personal are stupid and lazy and that the target(s) of the attack(s) have insufficient security - the deterrent factor is practically useless.
Some deterrent punishments should be applied by law to discourage would-be criminals, but our best strategy is a good defense combined with a good societal education (teach young children about crime and punishment - make them understand that engaging in criminal activity will result in capture and they will be punished severely).
Is it April Fool's Day or does July 12th serve this purpose on the east coast?
I don't need a signature.
Come on! Posters here on Slashdot regularly call for hideous slow deaths for spammers and worm writers (myself included). The thing is, everybody knows such things aren't going to happen. The admins who hang out here are venting. Given an actual opportunity to torture a spammer to death; I wouldn't actually do it. I'm not ruling out a good old fashioned country ass-whipping though ;-).
I said it here.
I once had a signature.
What I dislike here is the double standard. Basically we have corporations _whining_ because they can't figure out how to hire the right folks to protect their networkers(or are too cheap to do so). On the other hand, we have CEO's of major corporations running places like Enron and Anderson that are essentially criminal organizations--and getting a complete slap on the wrist. Look at Ken Lay, the worldcom CEO, Milken. These folks all get the best justice money can buy-the type of service the average hacker just can't afford. The damage a crooked CEO can do at the helm of a major corporation makes what hackers do _pale_ by comparison. I don't see hackers leading the US into a pointless war in which thousands of young americans die or are permanently disabled to protect oil interests. I don't see hackers promoting products like thimerosal that may be causing permanent disability in children(or buying crooked politicians to get preferential legislation). I don't see hackers getting a corrupt president elected by vote fraud to refuse to enforce immigration law so corporations can make more money.
If the corporate and governmental leaders want rule of law-they had better start by holding themselves accountable. Is is the corporate and governmental leaders that have created this state where the law is not taken seriously because they have exempted themselves from it.
I'm starting my own private internet to get away from you people.
The problem is not with the hackers. The problem is with poorly written software that allows this kind of attack/hack happen. If it wasen't for hackers our software would be very insecure and would be leeking holes everywhere. You can't say software companies/hardware companies fix security holes just becuase they might find a security risk. They are all re-active to security issues and NOT pro-active. You ask me, the death sentance should be given to anyone who releases a Operating system that requires 6a service packs just to make the software fuctional. A software company needs to take more responsablity for the software they release. Perhaps they should stop trying to push "new" releases all the time and just focus on one "good" product.
Excellent idea. For a second, let's assume you're serious. That would mean no hackers would be extradited to the USA, because most countries won't extradite to countries where the criminal may face the death penalty. Yeah, that's just what you want. People who propose to wreck the legal system by introducing completely out of proportion penalties should get the death penalty, because they certainly cause more damage than any single hacker ever could.
What a nutcase.
The first question I have to ask is: if our business networks can't stand up to script kiddies, how will they stand up to a real attack - say, from well-funded cyber-terrorists? If your network can't stand up to a script-kiddie, you should be prosecuted, not the hacker.
Personally, I think we should pick a number, say $1000000. If the yearly income of the hacker is less than that, the company whose network was compromised should pay the difference as a fine. If the hacker's yearly income is above that, the hacker should be fined. All sources of income can be counted - including illegal ones.
It's not perfect, but it's a start...
How about those who are supposed to be educating users in the proper use of a computer but don't include anything about security and best practices (because they don't know themselves): Death to the school teachers for thinking that "teaching kids about computers" means "teach them Word and Excel". Death to business managers who fail to properly train their staff in proper security protocols. Better yet, death to all IT managers who continue deploying Windows!
"Hackers" and "Virus writers" (somehow TFA gets confused and makes them sound like they are the same thing), are obviously bad guys and should be punished. But when a 19 year-old kid who uses a virus-writing tool-kit to script a virus gets harsher penalties than a murderer or a rapist, that's ridiculous!
Let's get some perspective people. If your computer systems are so critical that they mean more than life itself, you'd better have the world's best administrators, redundancy up the wazoo, and NOT be running Windows on them! There will come a day when computers will be driving/flying us around, diagnosing us, perhaps operating on us and maybe even teaching us. Before that day comes, we have a lot of work to do. We have to hold ALL PARTIES responsible for their [ab]use of the systems - from the manufacturers to the users.
Frankly, every time a new virus hits, I'm more pissed at the clueless end users who's infected machines keep spewing the garbage forth than the writers of the crap. I mean really, how long will we be seeing NetSky, SomeFool, etc? They show up daily in my virus scans. Those clueless users aught to have their computers impounded and their network connection severed until they can prove they care enough to learn how to be a responsible computer user.
You wouldn't allow just anyone to get behind the wheel of a car without training, demonstration of proficiency, and a license. When computers become "life threatening/critical" like a car can be, we should have no less. We also hold auto manufacturers responsible for the flaws in their designs/manufacturing - we should do no less for commercial OS developers.
"terrorism" and "pedophilia" are the root passwords to the Constitution
On the other hand, it is conceivable that people may die as a result of a virus in hospitals, for example.
To me, a virus release could range from a misdemeanor vandalism charge to possibly as high as manslaughter in the extreme case. The crime is serious, but you are right, some people do tend ot lose perspective. Perhaps a turn in the total perspective vortex would do some good.
Nice to see America returning to the core beliefs it was founded upon, like religous intolerance and slavery.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Of course it's blown completely out of porportion. The thing is that people demand harsh penalties for crimes that affect them. The sort of rich, influential people who get things done in the legislature are far more likely to be affected by viruses, computer hackers, or pimply teen-agers downloading off Kazaa than by a mugger, drug pusher, or serial killer. Hence, John Q. Hacker gets 25 to life, while a murderous, drug-pushing thug walks the day after he's arrested.
"Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber" -- Plato
Does the word HYPERBOLE mean anything to anyone? The author obviously did not mean that these hackers should actually get murdered, he was merely citing an extreme thought in order to make a point that they were not being punished harsh enough.
I would love to see this discussion focused more on how the law should deal with willful negligence in developing/deploying security controls for financial, critical, and private computer systems.
Speak truth to power.
"quoting one academic as recommending even well, the death penalty - as a deterrent ... Let's face it, businesses are becoming more dependent on their computers"
Computers / Software / OS's were never designed for business. It's not the hackers fault. They're useing the machines as they were designed / intended.
How about the death penalty for the folks that push this digital-heroin on the masses.
dude are you dumb....IT'S A CORPORATION!! NOT A PERSON...even if you take a company down it does not deserve a death penalty...a company does NOT exist, it's an idea with a name regulated by laws. I really hope hackers take down as many companies as they can out of SPITE. I can't even believe this is a consideration. WHAT A FUCKIN JOKE!
...people who cause massive damage on an any scale - economic, physical, emotional - are sociopaths.
I would ammend that to say that people who intentionally cause massive damage are possibly sociopaths.
The history of our discipline is replete with examples of people accidently causing such mayhem.
The "first ever" internet worm, the 1988 internet worm, written by Robert Tappan Morris, brought the internet to a standstill, but was intended to be benign. There was a defect in the worm which caused it to replicate out of control, and eat up all the PIDs on the unix machines it infected (it was actually designed specifically NOT to do this; only one instance should have been running on the infected machine at a time, but software bugs are everywhere).
More recently, a worm intended to patch machines against Code Red had a defect in it that caused some machines to be rebooted without being patched. The "fix" worm was more annoying for many people than the original Code Red was. I had one friend who was unable to patch his system on his dial-up connection, as his machine would be rebooted by the "fix" worm long before he had time to download the microsoft patch.
As they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. A university ethics course would force most people to consider the problems with writing a "good worm", but most of the authors involved aren't in university yet.
Although, people who accidently unleash terrible worms are unlikely to be deterred by the death penalty, either.
Why not first have the death penalty for corporations? If that works out, we can move on to considering the death penalty for amoebas, and more complex organisms, on up to hackers or whatever.
Seriouslloyd, people act like it was such a big deal when arthur anderson went down or that enron place, ooh, we can't be too tough on corporate crime because that might mess up "the economy."
It should be much easier to wipe out a corporation when it does wrong than just jailing a bunch of manager-crooks. We don't really know who should take the fall, so let the whole corp cease to exist.
You think that I'm a communist to say that? No. I say let those evil.com companies that are found innocent continue to rape and pillage. You think that I'm irresponsible to let millions of fixed-income retirees suffer because all they had was stock in evil.com? No. Let them know about the new death penalty for corps law in advance so they can get their pension funds out of companies that are likely to be indicted under the new law. You think it's just not practical? Well, is the death penalty for humans practical?
Breaking systems in cars have to work, why not say a server that interprets http/1.1 requests be fit for its purpose.
I say that regardless of intent, a buffer overflow is a trojan. With free software, is it warranty-free.
Microsoft on the other hand should be the ones having fines for each breach, and ensure safety in their software.
nzbzakw
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Quoting one academic as recommending even well, the death penalty - as a deterrent for the likes of Sasser author Sven Jaschan. Let's face it, businesses are becoming more dependent on their computers but they continue to be a point of failure, and subsequently, frustration through lost profits.
Traditional belief is that life is priceless - that no price can be put on life. Death penalties, thus far, have generally only been applied to [those enforcing like to believe] deter/punish/prevent the destruction of other lives.
It's nice to see that, in modern America, we've finally reached the point where life does now have a dollar value. Cost businesses more than that amount and people argue your life should be taken.
Classy.
Of course, what should be pointed out is that the European Union has the declaration of human rights. One part of it includes the right to life. Another part includes that no European nation may extradite to a nation that threatens the death penalty for the alleged criminal.
So, in the case of the Sasser worm, American academics can posture about death penalties for lost profits all they like - and, in doing so, would simply guarantee the creator would never have been extradited to the U.S. in the first place.
Remember: Just because the United States now regularly features in the top five of Amnesty's annual list of human rights abusing nations, it doesn't mean anyone else is going to play along.
Worse Than Death
By JOHN TIERNEY
Published: July 12, 2005
Last year a German teenager named Sven Jaschan released the Sasser worm, one of the costliest acts of sabotage in the history of the Internet. It crippled computers around the world, closing businesses, halting trains and grounding airplanes.
Which of these punishments does he deserve?
A) A 21-month suspended sentence and 30 hours of community service.
B) Two years in prison.
C) A five-year ban on using computers.
D) Death.
E) Something worse.
If you answered A, you must be the German judge who gave him that sentence last week.
If you answered B or C, you're confusing him with other hackers who have been sent to prison and banned from using computers or the Internet. But those punishments don't seem to have deterred hackers like Mr. Jaschan from taking their place.
I'm tempted to say that the correct answer is D, and not just because of the man-years I've spent running virus scans and reformatting hard drives. I'm almost convinced by Steven Landsburg's cost-benefit analysis showing that the spreaders of computer viruses and worms are more logical candidates for capital punishment than murderers are.
Professor Landsburg, an economist at the University of Rochester, has calculated the relative value to society of executing murderers and hackers. By using studies estimating the deterrent value of capital punishment, he figures that executing one murderer yields at most $100 million in social benefits.
The benefits of executing a hacker would be greater, he argues, because the social costs of hacking are estimated to be so much higher: $50 billion per year. Deterring a mere one-fifth of 1 percent of those crimes - one in 500 hackers - would save society $100 million. And Professor Landsburg believes that a lot more than one in 500 hackers would be deterred by the sight of a colleague on death row.
I see his logic, but I also see practical difficulties. For one thing, many hackers live in places where capital punishment is illegal. For another, most of them are teenage boys, a group that has never been known for fearing death. They're probably more afraid of going five years without computer games.
So that leaves us with E: something worse than death. Something that would approximate the millions of hours of tedium that hackers have inflicted on society.
Hackers are the Internet equivalent of Richard Reid, the shoe-bomber who didn't manage to hurt anyone on his airplane but has been annoying travelers ever since. When I join the line of passengers taking off their shoes at the airport, I get little satisfaction in thinking that the man responsible for this ritual is sitting somewhere by himself in a prison cell, probably with his shoes on.
He ought to spend his days within smelling range of all those socks at the airport. In an exclusive poll I once conducted among fellow passengers, I found that 80 percent favored forcing Mr. Reid to sit next to the metal detector, helping small children put their sneakers back on.
The remaining 20 percent in the poll (meaning one guy) said that wasn't harsh enough. He advocated requiring Mr. Reid to change the Odor-Eaters insoles of runners at the end of the New York City Marathon.
What would be the equivalent public service for Internet sociopaths? Maybe convicted spammers could be sentenced to community service testing all their own wares. The number of organ-enlargement offers would decline if a spammer thought he'd have to appear in a public-service television commercial explaining that he'd tried them all and they just didn't work for him.
Convicted hackers like Mr. Jaschan could be sentenced to a lifetime of removing worms and viruses, but the computer experts I consulted said there would be too big a risk that the hackers would enjoy the job. After all, Mr. Jaschan is now doing just that for a software security firm.
The experts weren't sure that any punis
to put M$ out of business as I doubt they could stay afloat after loosing that many employees and CEO's....
The author suggests commuting the idea of a death sentence into a lifetime of servitude doing viral cleanup.
OH yes... what an excellent idea! Let's reinstiture slavery.
I'd be in favor of the death penalty for hackers ONLY if we first have a death penalty for executives of companies who rape the public with their scams.
Or what about the death penalty for illegal industrial polluters?
Funny how corporations want us to help them protect their profits through all sorts of draconian measures but when it comes to crimes committed by corporate crooks they're all in favor of the status quo.
Did you know white collar crime costs the public more than all other crimes combined? Its true.
Since when is loss of money, however big, an acceptable reason to kill someone?
Might I suggest we might be a little too ruled by corporations?
Certainly "death penalty" is being said for shock value, but there really hasn't been anything like the "hacker problem" (really, virus/worm writers) before the Internet became a big element of world business. Before the last 10 years, how could any one person cause a billion dollars worth of lost productivity across the globe, without killing a bunch of people and/or being president of some nation?
The issue is that it's too easy to cause a big disruption, but that's a flaw in the Internet. Since it's possible for one person to create a new Sasser by fooling around with code, a strong deterrent IS in the best interest of society as a whole.
Effectively, worm writers are terrorists. I don't imagine they think of themselves as terrorists, and I doubt they write worms for any cause, but that's the effect of their work: they cause economic imbalance and halt productivity more effectively than the London bombings. No one is dying over this, so the death penalty is absolutely ridiculous, but you can't wave your hands and say lazy sysadmins are at fault and worm writers should be thanked for exploiting security flaws.
...I'll just make it short and skip to the point. This guy is a douchebag. -Rob
The problem isn't with the virus-jerks, although I'm not excusing their actions. The problem is software companies aren't held accountable like in other industries.
If Ford, for example, made a car that due to a glitch caused it to run poorly and eat gas, there would be a lawsuit against them in no time flat. If they did it consistently, people would stop buying from them.
That doesn't happen in the software industry. People write crap software that costs "profitability" when it goes haywire ( which happens often ), and the decision makers just shake their heads and mutter something about being the nature of the game.
Virus-jerks aren't the problem, they are a symptom.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
...I swear I'll quit using computers for good and go live in a cave. And yes, I work for a TLA. Big companies just so rock when it comes to making simple, quick upgrade management...
It sounds more like an article to incite a flameware.
Death for what essentially amounts to property damage goes against the concepts of a punishment that fits the crime in American justice. It may even be an 8th Amendment violation ("cruel and unusual punishment"), but I'm not sure about that. I'd certainly make that argument.
"Death" for hacking does not at all address the concept of rehabilitation either. Murderers are not automatically put to death in many states in the US... it certainly shouldn't even be on the table for a hacker.
My take is that, in America anyway, we will see penalties such as those seen for white collar crime (a la Martha Stewart). Prison sentences, should at least be on the table for hacking, especially in relation to the amount of damage done.
Do I think a guy should go to prison just because he broke in to prove a system isn't secure? Probably not the first time, but if it is a second, third or fourth offense, it should be a felony with at least some time in the county slammer.
I've got a better idea. How about a death penalty for incompetent computer illiterates who clog up my internet with their whiny bullshit? Let's torture the ones uppity enough to do it on a news site.
I don't care about how many "billions" were lost due to a virus. It's clear that most such numbers are massively inflated and totally unverifiable.
Since when did damage to Corporations become worse than hate crimes and murder? O.J. Simpson gets off, but that guy who wrote Sasser, little kid, let's lock him away for life!
How about we make our desktops secure enough that script-kiddies can't write exploits, at least?
Imagine if our banks had screen doors and graham-cracker safes. I don't think we would throw every guy who walked in and took $10 in the slammer.
It sounds as though he wants to execute any perp who commits a crime dealing a serious financial blow to any company or individual. This is ridiculous. How can you place a price tag on human life like that? Sounds like he'd want to execute the board members at Enron or Tyco on principal...
There's no way that any virus caused more actual economic damages than the manipulation of californias energy prices by Enron, among others.
I think that the poster's humor detector is probably fine. There just wasn't any humor to detect. While I'm sure you're correct that Tierney was trying to be funny, I think that he failed miserably. I'm sure that the original poster will not be the only one to take this article seriously. Worse yet, many of those people will come away believing that there's a justifiable rationale for executing hackers.
Perhaps the editurd had an unpleasant episode. He doesn't realize how much his own negligence contributed. Most likely he was using MS software, unpatched at that, and probably even without the NIST recommended configuration [registry].
Those who feel themselves partially responsible often scream blame the loudest. It reduces their own guilt.
He's not actually advocating the death penalty for hackers! Instead, he is suggesting that "something worse than death" in the minds of hackers should be used as a deterrent. I think most of us can agree with that.
Now let me get this straight. This guy is calling for the death penalty to Hackers? True, hackers can cause monitary damage, sometimes going into billions of dollars, but when you put it on context with crimes which (apart from one or two US states) don't carry the death penalty such as Paedophilia or Rape, is it really worth an equal or worse penalty than those other crimes? Yes, there is the possibility of unemployment for workers at a lower level, which may cause social discontent, but you cannot compare hacking to something as barbaric as Paedophilia or rape. I don't know about you, but I rate physical crimes on individuals more serious than computer crimes on industries.
Some think the Internet is a bad thing. I just think that AOL is a bad thing.
therefore probably causing a few trucks to be late. maybe $10,000 in economic damage. Should I be jailed?
Yes, you should.
No sig
Does that mean that being a briliant, enthusiastic programmer will be a crime now? I mean... Crap...
Oh... You mean the pop-culture, retard, backwards meaning of hacker... As in hackers the movie? Whew... I thought I will have to outsource myself somewhere else :P Heh, silly normal people and their miss-appropriation of technical jargon...
I'm teminally incoherent
Most millionaires are actually wealthy from their own efforts.
"if you don't believe the historical racial distribution of wealth has any continuing effect"
What is the name of the first corrupt "rich white old" CEO that comes to mind? Bet it is Ken Lay. His childhood: "His father, Omer, tried selling farm equipment and working in a feed store, but became a Baptist minister after bankruptcy forced the family to seek refuge with relatives"
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Yep, computers and information are assets of the company! Now, WHY DONT THEY PROTECT IT? I mean, you have car insurances for your car right? You got insurances for the house too!
What has the company done to insure that his information and infrastructure is secure? What has been done each year to better the situation? External audit of the company? I mean, big company have to do external verification of there finance to comply with Federal regulation. Why don't they do it with security?
Control points on all information? Who consulted, changed or print what information, from where and at what time? Who has that? Less then 1% of companys.
I could write forever, so I'll just stop right now
No sig for now.
a murderous, drug-pushing thug walks the day after he's arrested
Are you just being even more ridiculously hysterical than those calling for over-harsh punishments for hackers? Do you have any documented examples that you can quote to us of murderous, drug-pushing thugs walking the day after they are arrested. (I presume that by "murderous" you mean that they have committed murder rather than that they merely don't accord with your particular version of "normality".)
Something is happening here but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr Jones.
I see two problems here: A lifetime of servitude cleaning up viri? Not a good idea.. They F#$ked it up, you think I'll trust them to fix it? Laws: They all have borders. The Internet is borderless. Just tighten up your ship and sail on, I'd say.
Is a blowhard, no nothing columnist. For a compare and constrast, he wrote an article a while back (can't find it now, it is probably behind the pay-wall) saying that the recent white-collar punishments were way too harsh, and these poor execs didn't do anything so bad as to call for 10 year stretches alongside all those dangerous criminals.
I forget what 8 was for.
With the PATRIOT act, hacking is a treasonous act of terrorism.
And they hang ya for treason...
Any lawyers able to cite state codes?
Hypocrits! They call for the heads of hackers who exploit flaws in programming, but for terrorists captured at Guantanamo Bay Cuba and other places in the middle east we need to make sure they're facing the east when they pray?
We should be calling for the death of CRIMINALS who want to bring down our country, not hackers who exploit flaws in programming!
Brooklyn
Until we start to see the death penalty for fscks like the Enron guys and the Tyco guys, this is totally ridiculous.
On the whole, the death penalty is not proportional to the damage made by breaking into computer systems.
Also, the organizations that do not put enough effort in protecting sensitive data are partly responsible for the cybercrime inflicted upon them.
Banks must absolutely guard the assets put in their trust. Hospitals should not put highly sensitive patient devices (heart/drug monitors) on a network. Armies should not have fireNuclearMissile() method behind a simple TCP server.
Then you can ponder on whether the death penalty is proportional to any thinkable crime.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Slashdot overreacts to tongue-in-cheek article by non expert computer user? Shocker.
I must say I was also miffed by Jaschan's light sentence. One thing that Tierny doesn't mention was that Jaschan was tried as a minor, having been apprehended a few days before his 18th birthday. It apparently makes a big difference in sentencing.
Personally I think Tierny's (and Landsburg's) analysis of the social impact of hacking and the potential deterrent is intriguing. Take the article for what it is, a quite successful attempt to use humor to dramatize a serious problem and a unique way of looking at it.
Much more disturbing to me than Tierney's joking around is the apparently dead serious blame-the-users-and-sysadmins attitude of many of the responses here. WTF are you guys thinking? This is like saying, "Those Londoners deserved to die, they weren't careful enough watching for people with heavy backpacks!" Maybe in today's world we have to take evil for granted and take on the onus of defending ourselves from it, but that does not justify shifting the moral burden from the criminal to the victim.
Martin
While the idea of the dealth penalty for virus release is silly, consider this:
When the virus author releases the virus, he is really committing crimes against millions of people. I don't find it at all silly to consider these as separate crimes. Let's see: Illegal Access to Electronic Device. Up to 10 years, per offense.
That would make these virus writers think twice, yes. And yes, I personally find this idea quite just. Each victim has rights, too, you know.
C//
and the software companies that produce them, it's not the fault of the virus writers that Microsoft's flagship product is such a heap of steaming crap, Linux is a very real alternative that companies should consider.
Professor Steven Landsburg, an economist at the University of Rochester is the person you should really nominate for the John Dvorak Memorial Moron of the Year award. Mr Tierny is simply reporting on the "good" professor's latest idea.
For the record, death is never the answer. An IBM PC/AT with 2400 baud modem and EGA graphics might be, however.
that dont understand the difference between a hacker and a cracker, and irritate hard working guys no end?
1. Few months in prison and some social service
2. 10 years in prison
3. Death
4. Worse than death
5. Both 3 and 4
If you've answered anything other than 5 you are the person in question or a moron.
Find out who led Fannie-Mae into its scandal....
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
So why is it different for computers. Why are the hackers not the ones responcible for commiting the crime. Why do so many people blame the sysadmins. Yes it is their job to keep the systems patched, but they have other work that needs to be done as well and sometimes things don't always get done the moment the sysadmin becomes aware of the problem.
There are also zero and one day exploits for which is rediculus to expect ALL sysadmins to have ALL of their systems patched in time. Stop blaming the victims and blame the ones at fault. I think the hackers should have to work hard labor and work off the damage they have done. The more damage the longer the sentence.
The article requires registration: Some people don't know, but if you want a quick e-mail address that takes no setup, just type in AnythingYouWant@dodgeit.com, then go to dodgeit.com and you can get the registration e-mail.
I agree with the above post, but not just because of the enron scandle. Business leaders are negligent for underfunding, underetimating and overbelieving in their technology. If..
"businesses are becoming more dependent on their computers but they continue to be a point of failure, and subsequently, frustration through lost profits. Perpetrated breakdowns are now pushing that aggravation towards an edge."
If that's true, then why not architect the technology to be prepared for failure. I've been doing that for as long as Unix dreamed of being VMS. Which if it's so expensive to do it right, why are you letting your business depend on it? This is business malpractice. Not following best practices and preparing for graceful failure opens them to liability.
My point is that gross liability and business negligence should be criminal violation of public welware and trust and open to criminal penalties.
Democrats and Republicans only disagree about how to enslave you
Why not initiate the death penalty, it will be another law they do not enforce. We let rapist, killers, molesters, and general psychotic people roam free or pay for them forever with our tax dollars by imprisoning them for life and not allowing them to work and pay for there cost of living. Why not initiate the death penalty, heck I do not mind giving away more of my hard earned tax dollars away to morally psychotic people....
killing someone for having forced him to start doing regular backups. Or for refusing to have American-style "democracy" forced unto him.
Force him to memorise that inane article?
The NYTimes Op-Ed piece is just a brief summary of the original article in Slate by Steven Landsburg.
"Feed the Worms Who Write Worms to the Worms The economic logic of executing computer hackers."
Various politicians?
I suppose a lot less people would run for president if, after their term(s) were up, the public voted "life or death." Very similar to a Roman Ceaser getting voted as a god or tyrant after their death.
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
But, since it's here, like everthing else related to property, hysteria rules. I mean, if they can take your house to build a strip mall, let's take it that last step and start killing people for lost profits. We all know that money is more important than the lives of mere humans, whose only purpose is to serve those profits.
What?
As Ghandi said - an eye for an eye and soon the whole world would be blind.
As wise as Mr Gandhi ever were, he didn't know his mosaic laws well enough to use it for analogies.
"An eye for an eye" is not about the right to poke out the other bloke's eye because he poked out yours. It is about reconciliation by trying repair whatever damage you caused the other guy. So, if you kill his sheep, by will or accident, you should compensate him with a sheep, so that you can both get on with your lives. When it comes to bodily harm, there is no way you can restore the other guy's eyesight, but you can try to compensate him for the *worth* of the eyesight. We're talking ancient damages legislation, to replace the older system of blood vengeance which was not uncommon. There were even guidelines established how much different bodily harms were worth.
It's your fault if you know that Windows is the mostly commonly targeted OS for virus attacks, spyware, etc. but decide to use it anyway without caring about protection.
It's even more your fault if there are patches and security fixes available from Microsoft before or shortly after an outburst, but you decide not to download them.
It's your fault for opening that email because the subject happened to be something about XXX pics of some celebrity. It's your fault for downloading some .exe file some randome person says is a program they'd like you to test.
It's your fault for browsing seedy sites that are likely just trying to get some type of spyware onto your computer. It's also your fault for using a browser that can be exploited if you know a better alternative is out there.
I realize that a majority of the people here understand computer security to an extent that they can keep themselves free of viruses and spyware by choosing alternative operating systems, keeping anti-virus/spyware software up to date, not opening emails that look suspicious, not browsering porn sites that are throwing all kinds of garbage at you, and any other number of things (firewall) that can keep a computer safe. However, there are a lot of idiots out there who really shouldn't be using a computer because they don't understand some of the basic safety information above.
I could go to a random construction company and ask if I could use some of their heavy machinary. Odds are they won't let me because I don't understand how to opporate the equipment in a safe fashion. If I got behind the controls of a huge crane, I would probably cause a lot of damage. The same thing applies to people who sit behind a computer without knowing some basic safety information. I'm not asking that everyone be a Linux guru or know every single thing about computers, but at least they should know how to keep their computer from getting infected and causing damage by infecting others.
A lot of people like to put the blame on Microsoft for making a seriously insecure OS, and to a certain extent they have a point. There are a lot of "features" in Windows OS's that make them vulnerable to all sorts of attacks. People shouldn't need to have a firewall, multiple anti-virus programs, and a host of spyware catchers just to maintain a basic level of security, but they should take the time to make their systems as secure as they can and avoid habits that generally lead to spreading viruses and infecting their computer with spyware.
It's not a funny joke because I will not be suprised if some Texas rep proposes something like this. Lay some of the blame on your lousy network admin who didn't bother diversifying your servers (different OSs where possible), firewalling them properly, and keeping them up to date. Lay some blame on the managers who refuse to give their employee's training in how to spot email viruses (not helpful in the case of Sasser, but relavant for the hundreds of other email viruses), and some for the employee's who don't take that training seriously. Lay the rest on the hacker who released that virus, but keep in mind most of the damage caused by that worm could have been mitigated by a competent network admin.
" even well, the death penalty - as a deterrent for the likes of Sasser author Sven Jaschan. "
Yeah, we know that wherever the death penalty exists there are no murders...
I would buy karma from ebay but I'm not sure I can trust the seller.
Hold the hacker personally liable for all damage which results, in both civil and criminal senses.
On the civil side, the cracker/author/whatever could be sued to recover any financial damages, on a first-come first-served basis. The one catch here is that only actual damages may be awarded in a case, rather than punitive damages. This is not so much to protect the author from further financial harm, since all of his assets are likely to be drained anyway, but more to ensure that as many bodies as possible can recoup whatever damage is incurred.
On the criminal side, the author is considered to have directly caused all damage resulting from the virus. The crimes are not considered premeditated unless the virus or hack specifically targeted a person or group for damage. In any case, these charges will almost certainly include many counts of theft and/or fraud, but could even include manslaughter if actual deaths result. If police departments or courthouses are hit, then the charges might also include obstruction of justice.
This law does not bring the death penalty into things (unless you can somehow bring up a premeditated murder charge, which would be quite difficult), but it does no more or less than hold the author/cracker/whatever responsible for the consequences of his or her actions. The sentences for such things are likely to sound outrageous and extreme, but they would in fact be no more than what a person who travelled to all of these locations and committed these crimes in person would face.
Let me be blunt: I am all for the death penalty. Capital punishment is a useful, and appropriate, means of punishment for certain crimes.
Hacking a computer or delivering a virus is, in and of itself, NOT one of them. Anyone who thinks it is must be using some type of psychotropics. The very idea is insane.
As someone pointed out, however, there are instances where I would support the death penalty for some one who maliciously used a computer. Like if they hack the airline computers and crash an airplane full of people fullspeed into a terminal, causing (intentionally) the death of hundreds of people. An extreme example, but I would support the death penalty in that case--or any other where the crime would normally carry a death penalty if committed without a computer.
Cyber-crime is no worse (or better) than any other type of crime, and should not carry a special penalty above the normal crime.
Although many here will think I am crazy for supporting the death penalty at any level, that is a personal belief (even if it has political and social consequences). I would not (ever) support the death penalty for theft, but in multiple manslaughter/homicide cases, I think that it is for the best.
Using a computer to steal $500,000,000 does not change the crime from theft to murder. Now, if you killed someone in the process of a robbery, then you would be tried for that as well.
The short story? I can't imagine what crazy world this guy lives in, but the death penalty is not an appropriate punishment for cybercrime just because a computer was involved! Idiots!
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!
Exactly, I'll fully support the death penalty as long as there is a rider on it that invokes the death penalty for Company executives that violate laws.
having a CEO beheaded for his typical underhanded tactics is worth every bit of it.
Funny how the death penalty is suggested for crimes that the poor typically commit... Hmm, I smell financial bigotry. the rich trying to kill the poor.
Lets take a look at the other side. While I agree that on a micro level violent crime is more egregious than hacking. But what do we do with the hacker that brings down -- lets say -- a hospital's power supply and someone dies? Or opens (another) hole in our national defense to some bad types? Do we make the distinction between someone who pulls the trigger versus someone who enables the trigger (potentially multiple times)? If we look outside of the violence, if a hacker causes *billions* in damage -- that is certainly a LOT more economic damage than the typical death row type... I know good hackers to be generally amongst the most gifted coders. They might do well to come out from behind their machines and observe the damage, loss, and pain they cause. Having 'fun' and claiming the black kudos needs to be tempered with the reality of the havoc they inflict -- even if not intentionally. Personally I am against the death penalty. But at some point this 'fun' needs to be reconciled with some level of *personal* responsibility.
If you take a step back and just reflect, this is simply just another knee-jerk reaction, and I consider it a form of "computer rage".
It will be more difficult, but let's just fix the systems.
--- You are in a little twisty maze of comments, all different.
Where is Microsoft's responsibility in this punishment scheme?
.. when you could issue it to one Bill Gates?
If you're going to execute hackers, you should certainly think about executing people like Ken Lay and others like him who have *stolen* billions of dollars from "regular" people everywhere.
Virus infestations are NOT minor. There is no excuse to writing and releasing a virus. Absolutely none. It's willful destruction of the property of potentially millions of other people for no particular reason.
And the potential loss caused by that can be the in millions or even billions of dollars. And sometimes the destruction isn't even fixable if the poor schmucks didn't have backups. And I'm not just talking about rich corporations here... don't forget the tens of thousands or even millions of individuals who don't have an IT department to fix the mess for them.
Martha Stuart got, what, 3 or 6 months for something that potentially cost others less than $100,000. Of course hackers and virus-writers shouldn't get the death penalty, but you better believe they deserve to do some very serious time for causing so much destruction... and again, with no useful purpose.
This is rediculous. If I bought a car, and found out that someone could steal it because the manufacture only used one set of keys for every car I would blame the manufacturer of the car.. NOT the car thief. Hackers are simply the symptom of the problem. The true problem is software companies who are devorced from the damage their bad planning and poor testing cause. Until Microsoft, and companies like it are held responcible, legally, for the quality of code they produce, hacking will remain a major problem. To stop hackers, the only thing that will work is to force the big software companies to pay for their mistakes. After all, their mistakes cost us ALL. Mathew Edlund Edmonton, Alberta
This reminds me of an Isaac Asimov story, I think it is "The Life and Times of Multivac". As I remember it, the "ultimate penalty" is reserved for only the crime of attacking a computer, (or THE computer really). The story talked about how damage to Multivac would damage society. Very similar to the arguments being put forth here. Once more sci-fi predicts the future.
The New York Times Op-Ed page has a piece entitled Worse Than Death that calls for harsher 'hacker' penalties as a deterrent, quoting one academic as recommending even well, the death penalty
Well, the Supreme Court just declared the death penalty for minors unconstitutional, so I don't think this will have much of an impact.
Umm, hello?
Computer hackers are usually not 'poor'. Poverty is starvation. Poverty is homelessness. Having a computer immediately implies a certain standard of living has been reached-- one that is well above real poverty.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
I believe punishments should be based on the potentiality of the criminal committing the crime again.
If you come upon some kid who checked^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hhacked into a school website and checked his acceptance status without even being aware of what he's doing, then it's not likely he'll seek out further trouble. A minor punishment is sufficient to deter him.
On the other hand, if there happens to be some psychopath that gets his woo-woo's off of releasing computer viruses and costing billions of dollars from corportations, then a harsher punishment is required to deter him in the future.
Unfortunately, it seems to me that today's justice system is leaning further towards providing vengeance for the victim's behalf, instead of assuring that society is safer.
It just doesn't make sense to sentence someone based on how much monetary damage they caused. The purpose of law is to maintain a civil society, not to substitute one's eye for another's time in jail (or worse).
- shazow
I understand that corporate America is probably a wee bit upset with having hackers interrupting their abilities to present us with "valuable offers" and "service". But the DEATH PENALTY?!?. Give me a f*cking break.
Isn't this is the same group that presented us with such fine quality citizens as Bernie Ebbers, Ken Lay, and Dennis Kozlowski?. Isn't this is the same group that can't be bothered to apply basic computer security to something as simple as shipping a backup tape? Isn't this is the same group that routinely sells customer information to the highest bidder without so much as a simple background check ("O.K. Mr Osama, that'll be 50,000 street addresses and social security numbers for $2500.00. Is there anything else we can do for you today?)?
Tell you what. I'll allow hacker death penalties when we make corporate raiding a capital offense. At least impose mandatory sentencing that entails terms longer than six months and service in a real jail with all the other real criminals. Oh, and no more of that negotiating the terms of your arrest sh*t, either.
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
i agree with you.
it's a vexing issue in the US. Voters tend to for the most part, be out of touch with the masses. How ironic is that?
First off, I think that we're at the point in the US where we have to determine exactly what we mean by incarceration. Is it punitive or rehabilitative? My understanding of the philosphical precepts behind American incarceration (please correct if I'm wrong) is that one enters into an implied contract as a citizen to respect the rights of fellow citizens. Breaking that contract is cause for removal from society in order to PROTECT THE RIGHTS of your fellow citizens, not to punish you, the perpetrator. My thinking is that it was designed as a social quarantine.
That said, non-violent offenders should in no way be considered and/or put together with those who are violent. It's simply absurd. An example of absurd sentencing laws are the Rockefeller drug laws in New York state that carry strict sentencing requirements for offenders, most of whom tend to be non-violent.
I can imagine in a fully productive society, similarly minded criminals are grouped together and rehabilitated in a manner that allows them to build some revenue to fall back on upon release.
In regards to the benign nature of virus deploymnet, I think that contingency here, as always, is tantamount. Some code that infects medical machines in a hospital could lead to countless deaths, as is code that scrambles the routing of automated NYC subway trains. It's the difference between being stopped for a DUI and running a couple of guys over after a bender. DUI guys get to enjoy the numerous pleasures of walking/public transportation for the next couple of years (no license), and the hit and run guy gets to wash curtains upstate under the watchful eye of Tiny, his short-tempered, amply muscled roomie.
un burrito me trampeó.
OJ Simpson got off without a murder conviction because they were simply unable to prove he murdered someone.
When there is not enough evidence to convict someone of a crime, they get no punishment.
"It's a feature not a bug"
Only if I can execute a business the next time it rips me off with a sub-quality product/service or erroneously bills me.
A gin in the hand is worth two in the bottle.
Or could we make a simpler suggestion: How about some people start taking some responsibility for their own computer's security? I mean, how many of these people live in crime ridden neighborhoods and leave their doors open and cars unlocked only to complain when things get stolen? I'm betting none. See they've taken some responsibility for their own security, they moved to places with less crime and purchased locks for their doors. And when locks alone don't work, they don't whine about it, they instead get alarm systems. Same thing applies to your computers.
Why can't the punishment fit the crime? If the hacker defaces a website, the death penalty is a bit ridiculous... but if some kids in your neighborhood knock over some stop signs, and people are killed as a result (if the hack knocks out emergency services, or crashes planes) those kids would go to jail for manslaughter or something similar. Regardless of intent or blah blah blah, if you do something dumb that gets people killed why not death if enough people are killed?
In the US, the official State Religion is Mammon: the golden calf that pissed off Moses so much.
Here, nothing is more important than money. Not love, not respect, not the truth, not freedon (freedom...hah! thate's a nice hallucination, suckers), not the environment, not HUMAN LIFE.
The CEOs get off the hook because they are the High Priests of our worship of mammon, and in fact were doing GOOD by enriching themselves at the expense of the poor and middle class, just as our State Religion demands!
So in our society, a sasser type worm warrants "death or worse" while, of course, Microsoft's "engineering" the OS to be worm-friendly so they can keep getting your money from "upgrades" is a service to their little golden cow.
Moo!
-mcgrew
the same as the generic knife manufacturer a murder trial in which the victim was stabbed.
Jaschan's crime exacted financial damage on the world. The convicted Enron executives exacted financial damage on the world.
Computers are tools. Even though many find them mysterious, computers are not mystical or enchanted or creations of witchcraft. They're tools.
A crime is a crime. Using a computer to commit a crime shouldn't significantly alter the punishment of the crime any more than, say, using an automobile, telephone, or sledgehammer to commit that crime. Virtual crimes shoud carry a penalty similar to the real thing.
This is a boring sig
Wow, I thought China's prescription of the death penalty for cyber crimes (along with pimping, stealing gas, selling bad food) is absolutely laughable. Not any more.
During Bush's 6-year term as governor of Texas, 152 death-row executions were carried out. (The only death sentence commuted was that of self-confessed serial killer Henry Lee Lucas - somehow I see an irony there.) While I'm sure most of those people were evil and guilty as hell, it's hard to believe that a handful were innocent, in light of statistics (yeah, I know, "statistics") that show 7% of executed people are innocent. And especially given that a lot of the cases were hardly given the time of day by Bush and his kill-happy assistant Gonzales (now White House counsel).
The exeuction of even one innocent person is a despicable tragedy for which there are no words. Put another way: suppose you were that person. And for those who believe in God (e.g. Bush et. al.) the guilty will get their just reward anyway, right?
"virus infestatons are fairly minor"
Excuse me? I used to work in a factory and the sasser worm caused several of the safety systems to go offline. About 2000 workers had to be evacuated immediately. I would not call putting peoples' lives at risk minor.
Today the consequences of prosecution are a slap on the wrist and a job offer at Securepoint.
Sure the death penalty is out of line, but you can agree with me that it would likely be effective as a deterrent. So let's ratchet up the penalties now, and keep cranking up the risk factor until we see a big decrease in antisocial behavior.
(Oh yeah -- same treatment for spammers.)
IMHO, the only time the death penalty is warranted is when the criminal killed someone. Hackers, and worse yet identity thieves, deserve something pretty bad but not as bad as death. Let them serve "a year and a day" in a federal "pound me in the ass" prison where they become some bad man's girlfriend. And most importantly, make it known ahead of time that if you get caught cracking or stealing people's identities, that's where you're going to go. Period. End of story. "How do you like them apples, Chester?"
Let's face it, computer crime isn't restricted to only users within the United States. US computers could become infected from a virus written by someone in Russia or China. How do we enforce this law then? They would have to be expedited and tried here, and I doubt that would happen.
Secondly, in order to give someone the death pentalty more than likely they would be need to be tried as an adult. Say "Zero Cool" writes a virus that wipes out half the nations computers, but he is only 12 years old. How then, John Q. Law, do you enforce live in prison or death for this?
The real problem with digital rights and computer crime is that you are taking away boundaries between countries and the crime doesn't have to be commited in the physical location. This makes it extremely difficult to see the who, what, when, where of the crime and even more difficult to punish them once we find that out.
International law will need to change before this could ever become a reality.
Be sure to remember the Programmers Prayer
then one has to make the crime fit the punishment !
People here in the UK advocate a life sentence for carrying a gun, what they fail to realise is that if I am on the verge of being caught by a cop with a gun in my pocket then it is worth the risk shooting him, after all life in prison is the most I will get either way.
Lets say the suggestion works and computer break ins dwindle towards zero. Vendors will become complacent and holes will open. Those that decide to take the risk to enter through them had better make sure that the payoff is worth the risk.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
The simple fact of the matter is that hackers generally don't need to be very brilliant to pull off events which can cost companies millions. A mediocre hacker can spend a few hours of effort one evening and cost society "billions" with some viral construct or other. This level of asymmetry in effort vs damage done is because of the lack of solid security employed by individuals, corporations, infrastructure companies, and the software vendors that sell crap to all three.
The right frame of mind for considering the solution to this problem is to ask yourself: "If I'm responsible for something worth millions or billions of dollars, is it not my duty to make sure that it is better protected?". The good hackers out there are just making points - making fun of the insecure nature of things if you will. They're simultaneously laughing at you, exploiting you, and trying to show you why you should be worried if a person with *really* bad intentions went after you electronically. They're sending you a wake-up call, and you've failed to answer for decades now.
Think about it. If some little punk can cause so much pain, imagine what happens when some foreign punk in the employ of a competing nation gets paid to cause pain. It's our job to design for this so that it's not so easy, and we consistently fail. Software vendors, users, companies, policy-makers - all of us.
It's like setting a priceless painting in the middle of the street, watching it get run over and destroyed, and then trying to sue the driver for maliciously causing you to lose millions. Sure the driver did the damage, sure he could've just changed lanes and not done so, but what the hell were you thinking putting a priceless peice of art in the middle of the street to begin with??
11*43+456^2
Here is my line of thought. I am a hacker/cracker. I know they are on to me. I am pretty sure some of the things that I've noticed are not due to random chance. The man is closing in. Now I have the death penalty in my head as well as more normal prison penalties. The death penalty may just be the extra variable that pushes me over the edga and makes me learn how to use a gun, and start dabbling in explosives. Then one day I crack, and I go out in a blaze of glory taking thounsands of people who just happen to live near my house along for the ride into whatever the afterlife is. I think this is just adding a nice cool circulation of clean O2 into already cindering charcol. Please correct me if I am completely wrong. Or mod me up if you think that you never know, until it already happened.....
Really? Why not the same as a auto manufacturer who's defect in a car contributed to an accident? Perhaps car makers should include a EULA that absolves them of all liability too.
Finkployd
This is a case of treating the symptom, not the cause.
This is the same thing that may happen to any monoculture, namely that if one is vulnerable to something, all are, and this may ruin a whole crop.
Now you may deal with this either by killing all the bugs with pesticides and treating against disceases with penicillin, but this does not work well since resistance show up.
It would be better to have more diversity so that for any given issue only a part of the total population is vulnerable. Since the defacto world is Windows, it must be pressed upon Microsoft that their programs are more diversified.
Different compilation options for different versions and languages meaning that a russian computer is basically different from a german one, and differnet machine code is needed to exploit this.
Of course it is also possible to just use another operating system but that is for most purposes a theorectial option (like when you _NEED_ 100% Office compatability, or Outlook meetings).
--
Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen "...and...Tubular Bells!"
I am totally for the death penalty, not even just for murder.
Rape, child abuse, drunk driving, kill them all, we don't need those vermin around.
I like the idea of solving a problem for all time, you kill the offender and your risk of reoffending becomes zero.
However I can't support the death penalty today because it is impractical. We can't guarantee we caught and convict the right person, and it's too expensive. In our quest to limit executing the innocent we spend more than simply jailing them forever.
For those two reasons I am against implementing it, although in theory it's a good idea.
.. unless you're implying that MS is creating these viruses?
Your logic states that the virus author should be held immune, and the person (people) who perpetuate it should be the ones being punished, no?
Much like murder, whether you kill 1 person or twenty the punishment is based on how horrible the worse one is, not on how many you killed.
I've had a similar idea for putting an end to all the big dollar white collar crime in coorporations. You figure it out like this. Take the amount stollen say $5 billion and divide it by the average livespan in the US and the average wage. So stealling that amount of money would be equivalent to "murdering" 31 people and so all those Enron execs would be the death penalty or life in prison for stealing that much time away from society.
Of course if we applied this theory to law for all things that "steal" our time away. Then slashdot editors would be before the world court for crimes against humanity for just one month's worth a dupe articles.
Well if hackers are going to get the death penalty for crashing machines and causing problems, then its only fair for Microsoft to receive the same.
This Tierney guy says that his article is based on an article by Steven Landsburg, an Economics Professor at the University of Rochester.
The original article (by Landsburg himself) is a bit more detailed, and can be found on Slate here:
http://slate.msn.com/id/2101297/
Because there is a legal concept of basic, minimal responsibility. If you don't want people walking in your house, you leave the door closed. You don't have to lock it or go to any other extreme. An open door is an invitation for people to just walk right in...either to rob you, or to check and see if everyone is ok. The latter is sometimes used by police as an excuse to enter private property.
Rockafeller Center in NYC is generally thought of as a public place, but it isn't. 364 days a year, anyone who wants to can walk around it however they like. [At least] One day a year, they cordon it off and prohit the public from entering. It is an assertion on the owners' part that it is still private property, that the public is allowed there by their good graces, and that they will not allow the public to have the "right" to be there. (See Easement by Prescription.)
You have to have at least a minimally explicit assertion that you want privacy. (To prevent people 'just walking in'. People who then go on to rob you are, of course, then committing robbery.)
It seems to me like the USA is the place in the world where violence is actually encouraged. Only love is forbidden, or at least, physical expressions of it, i said love not sex.
On television we see countless deaths from tv stations opening to the closing at night. Solving murders and justifying murder or rationnalizing it are the single most common subjects and the one that sell the most. Make two childs kiss on tv and complaints are beyond numerous.
Porn produced in the US is mostly about guys making girl barf on their dick with throatjobs, its max hardcore, its always something freaky, its has to be a fatass, a old lady, a girl that looks like she's 16 years old, gangbangs... The american sexuality is beyond anal retention they don't even know how to express love or pleasure anymore if it doesn't come with some form of pain or humiliation or domination. Two adult making love on tv is forbiden or in more liberal state frowned upon, i mean what if a child sees that? However rapes are often pictured sometimes in gruesome details (think csi) and its alright for the public. Love, just love in its simplest from isn't even seen anymore, it's always about making the apology of people cheating, guys falling in love with their girlfriend's mother, always something dysfunctionnal and the apology that comes with it. Don't you think that this alone is an indication of a very sick society?
You wonder why a proposition has been made to submit hackers to death penalty? I wouldn't be surprised if I were you, this is the solution they actually use for every problem they have, they actually salivate at the idea of finally having a new reason to kill even more people...
I'm affraid of them, very affraid and i actually believe that at this point we have no chance of seeing things getting better, we'll have to come down to the fact that they are the number 1 danger in the world, a danger to freedom, a danger to security and the number one danger to the environment. Realize we'll have to defend ourselves if we are to survive, i don't know how we'll do this but its obvious the UN isn't doing its job (it was created to prevent countrys like the actual US to actually exist), it failed the world, and world leader are too scary to get balls and take action so we let them destroy everything they want to and say that we can't jump to conclusion, they have concentration camp, they torture people, killed over 100,000 civilians in Irak alone, rapes and violence is common in their detention system, how much more will we need?
I thinks its up to us, the people to actually do something because no one else will.
Today its the hacker that gets killed tomorow it will be the pirate and the next day its your turn... realise it. No other nation, not a single one, has as much blood on their hand, not even close, than the americans, they are the single worst danger humanity faces now.
The guy's being satirical, as in "don't take him at face value". Pretty funny, actually.
not so anymore. not in the united states. the very nature of poverty has changed fundamentally.
I grew up in a welfare hotel in Harlem, here in New York. In the 90s, as a teen, I had a computer. So did a good number of my friends. Granted, most of us were in an accelerated academic program, so most of my friends were geeks, but we for the most part had computer systems.
Kids now in my old neighborhood definitely have computers, and penetration is significant as computers are cheap. Local community leaders have impressed on the population the importance of computer literacy and parents have followed suit.
And Harlem is as poor as a lot of places in this country.
More importantly, having a computer and an internet connection is immediate distraction from poverty. When I was a kid, and to this day, cable penetration was very high, especially given that we had the second lowest per capita income in the city. It's the same reason drugs flourish in poor communities. When you're poor, you pay a premium for distraction. Computers these days are a relatively cheap distraction.
and so you understand, I remember times when my computer was new and our refrigerator was empty. I can imagine it not being different now for some kids in Harlem and other poor places in the country.
un burrito me trampeó.
the hit and run guy gets to wash curtains upstate under the watchful eye of Tiny, his short-tempered, amply muscled roomie
I am going to have to take issue with this comment and the thinking behind it. While you don't mention it, implicit in the above quote is that one aspect of incarceration ought to be forcible rape of inmates by other inmates. This is something joked about all too often, and it is hardly a laughing matter.
Inmates, as wretched as they may seem to the general public, are still human beings and ought to be afforded some level protection such that they don't have to fear for their lives while they are a ward of the State. By putting people in jail, in a sense they take guardianship of them. To allow (and that's the word that describes what goes on) inmate on inmate rape to occur is a complete shirking of the State's responsibilities to its prison population.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
Punishment should always fit the crime... I wouldn't consider the death penalty as a serious proposal.
I've always thought that non-physical attacks on computer systems should be equated under the law to equally destructive physical attacks (defacement, theft, etc...) Easier said than done, but I can see no other way to be fair.
My sig sucks.
So the the penalty of breaking into a system or writing a worm is harsher than if you had raped someone?
I think we need re-examine things a bit here people.
Hi
That's the question... Do you see that people in America is less violent than in other parts of the world? Does punishements in some middle-east countrys like lapidation, and so, make people a better person?
Does cruel punishements makes mankind to improve? or just allows people to act more like unciviliced and act like fools demanding blood?
I don't think that death penalty or strong punishements or tortures help to stop crimes, they make them more violent, and related to this article... is it comparable to kill someone to break his computer? There is no valid comparision, they are several magnitude orders different...
May be some kind of social tasks would be a good punishments, but we have not to forget that mostly computer damages caused by viruses are due to lack of formation from the user side, or weak protection from the business one...
Should I demmand gas company because the fire I use to cook is hot and I burn myself if I put my hand over it? I should keep myself away from fire to avoid harming myself...
If I kept my house's door open... who should I blame for having my tv, stereo, and so stolen?
It's my work and responsability to kept my computers safe and virus away... I don't think it's about creating virus, it's about blaming someone else for you not having care on what's your business "engine".
Regards
Pablo Iranzo Gomez (https://iranzo.github.io/)
I for one, would not go to a hospital that relied on networked equipment that runs Windows.
I can just envision the Bush administration coming up with wild accusations that Iran (or whomever, take your pick) is guilty of state-sponsored hacking, developing weapons of mass P2P, and harboring modders of game consoles as a pretext to invasion.
And we don't have to stop there. Let's do the spammers too. They are the ones who profit. And the DDOS cartels; death to them too.
Lazy sysadmins who fail to patch their servers promptly: they're costing industry millions. They gotta die.
Who else? Howabout billionaires who aggressivley market insecure operating systems? It's all their fault, after all. Sayonara, Billy-Boy,
And as long as we're motivated by financial loss, let's have people who download illegal MP3 files. Get 'em up against the wall! Offering movies over BitTorrent? Off with yer head! Run Warez? Bye-bye! Say "Hi" to Bill for me...
What else can we do? Employee sickness costs billions to industry. Let's have the death penalty for catching a cold! It doesn't just serve as an incentive - it improves the gene pool as well!
How about criticsing the government? I'll bet millions are spent on spinning the facts every time some ungrateful fool goes and blows the whistle. Let's string 'em up today!
Think you're clever writing open source software do you? you're costing illegal software monopolies money with every line code. Don't think you've escaped our notice.
Oh, and let's include mindless trolls who write idiot stories for major newspapers, and the brain damaged editors who dignify such claptrap by printing it. Let's off them as well. I can't think of a good reason why, but in amidst all this bloodshed, who the hell's going to notice?
+++ SARCASM OFF
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Simply implement the law. Then forge an attack which traces back to John Tierney.
Simply put, this proposal won't get rid of the problem. Instead, it will merely elevate hacking to new heights.
Sadly, I'm sure there are some so-caled hackers who would love to see this implemented so that it could be abused.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
-- Not everything is for sale. Remember what happened to Gizmo?
Life is hard.
Its harder if your stupid.
Let the punishment fit the crime, let them live.
If the operating system and software were secure in the first place, we wouldn't have such a big problem with 'hackers'. Why are people crying for harsh penalties for 'hackers,' but not holding companies like Microsoft accountable for their buggy, insecure software?
Should the punishment for releasing a virus be tough? I don't think so. I think that it is a pretty benign "crime". It is crucial that we keep a sense of proportion when discussing the sentencing stage of justice.
Considering both the money lost by business and disruptions to things like air travel, I'd say it's far from "benign," and definitely a crime. Death penalty? Hell yeah. But something harsher than a few months' worth of suspended sentence was in order on this one, IMO.
Kids, creating computer viruses has VERY real consequences, and should most assuredly be a crime, and the kind that involves actual prison sentences...the kind where you really go to prison (the length of these sentences should, of course, be determined largely by both the damage caused and possible damage caused, within reason).
But yeah, this guy is an asshat for even bringing up the idea of the death penalty in this case.
That article made me sick to my stomach, this guy is a total scumbag.
I'm apologize for the above. It wasn't meant to be offensive.
I've never been convicted of anything, but I did do a couple of weeks on Rikers here in New York when I was 19 cause my family couldn't make bail after an arrest. I was in PC, but it was communicated to me how crazy it was to be in gen pop.
Again, apologies.
un burrito me trampeó.
The article was satire, dumbass. Get a functional brain cell, OK?
I disagree with your characterization of 'poor'. If poverty was starvation and/or homelessness, then almost nobody in America would be poor. Our poor people have cable TV and air conditioning, and are often morbidly obese. My point is, I think poor is a relative term, and people are 'poor' only by comparision to some group of people. Even the head chief caveman would've been 'poor' by your definition. What do you think?
The Christian in me says it's wrong, but the corrections officer in me says, 'I love to make a grown man piss himself.'
" As benign as the crime may seem to you, it does cost billions of dollars to corporations. "
So do Hurricanes and oil prices rising.
Corporations are looking for as much legislation as they can to protect them against life. They want the feds to insure them against hurricanes. They want special government action to cover rising oil prices, and they want the death penalty for virus writers.
Poor babies. Maybe if they built their businsses and infrastructure a little tougher they could weather the storm.
If I was a major shareholder in a corporation and I lost billions because of the Sasser worm, I would look to fire the CEO, CFO, and CIO because these threats are real, understood and obvious and they didn't properly prepare for them.
They did the equivalent of building grass huts in the winter in Alaska, then they sing the blues when winter hits.
"... it is conceivable that people may die as a result of a virus in hospitals ... "
It is also conceivable that people may die because of cuts to various medical programs in the US. Does this mean that polititians should be charged with manslaughter if people die due to cuts in healthcare spending? What if people die because of laws and regulations that prohibit Americans from buying prescribed medication from a less expensive pharmacy in Canada? Should hospital administrators be charged with manslaughter if they use vulnerable software in a position where a computer virus would cause a person's death? Where does the criminal liability stop?
You see this could all be a conspiracy by RIAA. Once it is made law that hacker costing a company money is punishable by death RIAA could argue that you not buying 5 new cd's a month is costing them money and therefore a national minimum cd purchase limit should be enforceable by death.
The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum. - O'Toole's Corollary
Why not the same as a auto manufacturer who's defect in a car contributed to an accident
You mean viruses are written by accident, as a result of microsofts actions?
Wow.
I hate MS as much as the next slashdotter, but really, the people responsible for viruses are the people who write them.
Mods do your worst.
"I realise this is not a very popular opinion but it's the truth, and there for needs to be said" -Bill Hicks
The law, prission, jail was not created to punish people... quite the contrary, it was created so people would rethink about their acts, it's sort of rehab. We must stop acting like cavemans.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
I would prefer if sentences for hackers were more inline with the penalties for other professional whose actions impact people.
If a doctor screws a patient (intentionally) and lands the patient in a wheel chair or dead he at most goes to jail and does his time.
If a lawyer screws a client, and his client goes to jail for life, at most the lawyer gets jail.
If a CEO screws his employees (or even gets them killed on the job), or screws his shareholders (including fixed income retirees), he usually gets off scott free, and gets a new gig making more money. Has anyone see the new book 'Is you Boss a Psychopath'.
If someone dies because vital hospital equipment was insecure, Microsoft and the system admin should be responsible for manslaughter.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
So exactly how much is a human worth, in dollars and cents? The sasser worm didn't kill anyone but it may have knocked a fraction of a percentage point off of someone's bottom line. It doesn't matter what dollar figure you come up with because people will begin to argue that figure down little by little over time. If a billion dollars gets someone the chair, then what about 990,000,000?
Personally, I feel that if you have billions of dollars to lose then you should take a look at computer security. If someone robs you then you'll never get it back so maybe you should try and keep hackers out in the first place. Killing someone won't bring that money back either.
No offense taken. Just wanted to make a point that I felt was often overlooked, and your post was the perfect opportunity.
Pretty benign, my ass. When I personally observe the thousands of hours of misery caused by some fucked-up punk's idea of entitlement "...well, they shouldn't have let me find an un-patched system...", they might not deserve to die, but they need to be held accountable for each and every one of those hours of misery. I know if I ever catch one in the act, unlikely as that would be, I would personally beat the piercings out of the little fuck- truly. If the law catches them first, they need to provide restitution for each and every hour lost.
That means years, my idealistic friend.
I don't see why its the hacker's fault for exploiting software....of course they did it, but if the code had been better written they wouldn't even have been able to hack.
Given all the silly court cases for people spilling McD coffee on themselves, I'm sure somebody could make a case that if M$ or said coding company had made a better product, he wouldn't have hacked it.
If talks of the penalty being death for hacking are underway, there should be an equal penalty for having poor quality software that is closed. That should be the price for going proprietary.
Despite all this, the only value we should put on human life is human life....in other words, the death penalty should only come to those who killed another (or maybe rape too). (On a side note with the death penalty, if everyone got the death penalty that murdered someone else, there'd be a lot less murdering as people would know they couldn't get away with it. Having inconsistent authority never gets the job done.)
This man is seriously morally depraved. Since when was it "ok" to decide who lives or dies based on their monetary value? By the same judgment we should also sentence elderly and disabled children to death. Really, John Tierney deserves the death sentence for encouraging such evil practices which could cause the death of relatively innocent individuals in the future.
Death to hackers, life-time imprisonment for developers, and a 30yr sentance for all AOL users.
Now thats a balanced justice system!
The only PT Boat Journal on the web: http://www.PT171.org
Microsoft should share responsibility, but so should the users and admins who don't patch their systems, don't use firewalls, and click on every stupid shiny link just to turn their mouse cursor into a smily face. Seriously, how sympathatic can you be to the user who does unsafe things. A kitchen knife is a generally safe tool, but if I insist on picking it up by the blade end just because it is easier and more convenient, I deserve some responsibilty when I get cut.
The punishment does fit the crime if you have the right set of values.
From the article:
In other words: If you measure good in dollars, killing hackers is God's work.
What disturbs me is that this reflects a larger trend in the U.S. towards a frightening kind of capitalist moralism: That money in fact is the only value. There's a utopian idea that the efficiency of unrestrained capitalism will make everyone's dreams come true (or at least the dreams of those who matter. Those others are "lazy," or "slobs," or generally "worthless." [I quote slashdot posts.])
The apparent fall of Communism has left us Americans with overconfidence in Capitalism as Truth, and too many of us are forgetting that democracy is built on higher civic values.
The Anarcho-Capitalists need to remember that corporate government - the organizational structure within a company - is just as much government as is civic government. It is also inherently authoritarian, a heirarchical militarisitic structure starting with the CEO, the five-star general, and ending with the mailroom clerk, the new Private with his face in the mud. Society is built on checks and balances, and a capable civic government is a vital check on the power of the corporate machine.
So you READ his bio and are still judging him as a computer professional? That's even more stupid.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
OK, I may have been a bit over-the-top, but drug dealers do get regularly released early, due in part to the overcrowding in our jails and prisons. And it's also a fact that the illegal drug trade can be very violent.
Here's a factoid for you. In California, the minimum penalty for killing a heron is (IIRC) 20 years in prison, while you can get off in 7 years after killing a random stranger on the street. Yep, in California, a bird's life is more valuable than yours.
"Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber" -- Plato
Then I know a few other folks who should be executed aswell...
No encryption can withstand the power of the Lucky Guess.
You just can't put a dollar value on human life. And it's not right to scare people into submission.
You know, on a global scale, how we define "poor" and "poverty" is kind of silly.
I have read that ~90% (seems high to me) of the world's population has never made a phone call. Probably a majority of people in the world have substandard food, water and shelter.
Yet in the western world, we define "poverty" as not being able to afford broad-band, or only having one game console, or only having basic cable.
Unless the parent(s)are total crack-heads, do any kids in the US REALLY go hungry? Call me a right wing fascist, but I find that hard to beleive. Food is cheap and plentiful here. You may not be able to afford steak, but most of the world lives on rice and beans, if they can get them.
We are SO spoiled.
20 odd replies & still no one can point to studies showing the deterrent effect. I've studied this in great depth - I'm a solicitor, post-grad in criminology. There ARE no reputable studies showing the deterrent effect.
You (the USA) have had the death penalty in many states for a number of years. So you tell me if that has worked for violence????
Yes it rids us of some idiots but there are another 10 million waiting inline. People have been killed fore their crimes for thousands of years, but crime still exists. And it always will....
40% Funny, 40% Insightful, 40% Informative, 40% Dolomite
$ != human life
'nuff said.
Beethoven's not playing in the background during the conditioning.
Punishment was what the old jail/justice systems were built on. They realized later on that instead of concentrating on punishment that they should concentrate on reforming the person. This seems to work much better.
Also hacking is a crime against property not a person(s) and there is no violence involved. A death sentence is rather extreme.
I'll begin spelling out the sentencing issue then get onto the humour.
Extrme Punishment
Really, I'm not kidding this is a first-class idea. After all extending sentences to the point of life has worked so well for us in the War on Drugs! Really, you may think I'm being sarcastic but I'm not.
Over the years we have steadily increased the minimum punishments available for certain crimes on the general assumption that more fear for the criminals is better. This has reached an extreme in places like California whose 3-strikes law mandates that all triple felons (tax cheats and teenagers using the wacky weed included) go to jail For Life.
This benevolent program has blessed the state with a large and growing prison population that can make things like license plates, or just sit around and be a drain on the economy when they are no threat to anyone. It has also given California a large commercial prison system which cost the state untold dollars, and employs many fine and underpaid guards as well as passing large amounts of money off to contractors to build ever more large and dangerous prisons.
At present the state has found that by diverting at least drug addicts into treatment rather than the 3-strikes system they save as much as $300,000 per.
Moreover, despite ever-tougher sentencing there is no proof, in California, New York or anywhere else that these sentences have acted to reduce crime in any meaningful sense. One could argue that people should be afraid of the law and I will grant you that people are but there is no evidence that I have seen which proves (in a meaningful sense) that this changes the actions of criminals in any overall sense. Crime existed before, and it still exists.
As to the death penalty, despite normative arguments to the contrary there is no hard evidence that it has deterred even one criminal. States that use it have as much or more crime than those that don't. Similarly, states that have abandonded it (Illinois) have seen no attendent growth in crime. One could argue that this is a fluke I suppose but one cannot argue that it is positive evidence for the penalty.
At best the death penalty gives us a "Cathartic Release" as one author put it. But as Illinois' last governor noted that catharsis is not worth the lives of innocent people who are executed. And make no mistake, innocent people sometimes do get sent to jail.
So yeah, in light of the staggering evidence that meting out unreasonable and excessive punishments does nothing to reduce crime but only costs us unreasonable amounts of money and, probably, gets in the way of real solutions to our problems, I think that we should dive headfirst onto that rock.
Humour
The real purpose of the column, I suspect, was not to advocate the death penalty (but you never know) I suspect that it was really his attempt to make humour out of the situation (smelly socks) and to complain that the Germans aren't punishing their crackers enough. This is, as I see it, basically a joke. The problem is that at the core of the joke is the idea that more extreme sentencing is needed.
While the cathartic joy of knowing that the latest Sasser guy is sent to AOL's Helldesk for life is there that relly won't help anyone but AOL.
Personally I favor the idea of community service (perhaps more than 30 hours perhaps not). I want to see someone who causes such destruction help others in a meaningful way. I want to see them giving free computer classes to children in public schools, or helping libraries to setup their systems (under supervision) or help build something of value.
The bottom line is that there are two ways to think about crime and punishment. The first is to seek catharsis, to salve the basic desires for vengance or some public demonstration of retribution. This view favors things like the death penalty and lends itself to the state of affairs we have now, ever increasing prison terms, ever increasing pri
The benefits of executing a hacker would be greater, he argues, because the social costs of hacking are estimated to be so much higher: $50 billion per year. Deterring a mere one-fifth of 1 percent of those crimes - one in 500 hackers - would save society $100 million. And Professor Landsburg believes that a lot more than one in 500 hackers would be deterred by the sight of a colleague on death row.
... as in "If we could just get one in five hundred burglars off the street, we could get rid of one in five hundred door locks", with a corresponding savings
Silly analogy
To the young impressionable kids in the audience, let this be a lesson to you:
If you're thinking about hacking computers, don't, it's not worth it, just rape some nuns instead.
Think of the economy.
Thank you.
The first rule of USENET is you do not talk about USENET.
That is so screwed up it's not even funny. REPEAT Sex Offenders don't get landed in prison for life even, and yet they want to kill hackers.
if the dollar amount of a $billion+ company's lost sales and time is to be weighed against a human life, even in a half-baked hypothetical, i think we should consider another side to the discussion. how about an examination of the "social costs" of irresponsible coperations? could we find enough dollars worth of third-word exploitation, or irreperable environmental damage to string up an executive or two?
My prediction is that hacking and virus's are a product of the incredibly fast ubiquity of computers and technology, and our complete lack to fully handle them properly yet. In 25 years expect computers to be largely hack/virus proof, once software has evolved to the point beyond "just try to get it to work".
The first rule of USENET is you do not talk about USENET.
That's! I tell these people to go blow a hole in their head!
Why in some ones name do we have to keep increasing the punishment? I have an idea-freaking protect yo' shit!
Now, if you own a bank-leave the vault open, higher a rent-a-cop, and advertise that you have "easy access accounts" Ya' think you might get robbed? What if you claim to your insurance agent that you don't know about security because it is this new age idea of thinking and you cannot afford to better secure yourself?
You will always have crooks and thieves, even hackers-but for crying out loud educate yourself and spend a little more money and man power on you computer system.
Oh yeah-freaking pay your people better so they won't fall into the whole SE game.
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
Are you just being even more ridiculously hysterical than those calling for over-harsh punishments for hackers? Do you have any documented examples that you can quote to us of murderous, drug-pushing thugs walking the day after they are arrested. (I presume that by "murderous" you mean that they have committed murder rather than that they merely don't accord with your particular version of "normality".)
I can think of a few. OJ Simpson comes to mind, Tommy Blake is another. What about that basketball player... can't remember his name that shot his limo driver with a shotgun.
People with money can get away easy.
Someone dieing in a hopsital from a computer virus? How did you get the plot to next week's Law and Order?
Child molesters can be rehabilitated and reintroduced to society!
The death penalty is reserved for hackers and other people who subvert the mainstream media.
In the give-and-take between Society and Private Enterprise, clearly the latter is gaining more and more power, to the point where their stooges in adademia and suggest absolutely insane penalties.
Corporatism is becoming TOTALITARIAN.
As an insightful, very funny and I'm sure interesting person on Slashdot once said --
"Capitol punishment makes the state into a murderer. Imprisonment makes the state into a gay dungeon-master"
Crunch!
rather than kill the people who know how.
the only permanence in existence, is the impermanence of existence.
I agree with you that we're spoiled.
But perspective is a bitch. As a kid, you don't create the conditions, you deal with them. And as a kid, I remember distinctly going hungry.
In regards to crackheads, my best friend's mom was an actual crackhead. Mine was an illegal immigrant, so she couldn't work for much of my childhood... or worked sparingly. We'd both be hungry and we'd steal Utz brand potato chips from the bodega on the corner often on a summer night to get through to the next day. hypoglycemic headaches are a bitch when you're a kid. I remember them clearly.
In Harlem now, I can imagine that there are kids like me and my friend... just dealing with conditions that are placed upon them.
un burrito me trampeó.
Personally, I'm in favor of applying the death penalty to any criminal who has shown himself (or herself) to be a complete sociopath. If someone habitually does stuff that is self-serving and is unrepentant, society is better off without them.
I think we should start with those a**holes on the freeway who cut you off.
Or maybe we should just leave it up to the people. Let them vote on who lives and who dies. After all, they've shown their collective wisdom by electing wise leaders to run our country. Why not let them dole out the death penalty directly, as well?
Serving your airship needs since 1995.
What a sick, sick old man.
And somebody like him is allowed to write articles in a major newspaper?
He does nothing than quoting an equally sick study about the monetary value of killing people and whining about his stupid habit of formating his harddisk every other day.
That's just sad.
Will they print my article about how we could get rid of our budget deficit by executing some 10000 (or 100000 depending where you live) people per year.
Considering the ammount of agro Bill Gates caused with Microsoft Software for business. The lack of productivity and costs inflicted on business due to do substantandard software and forced upgrades Bill Gates does deserve to be on the death row!
Here's the problem. Design a system that is completely succeptable to malicious people, and be shocked when somewhere, among the 6 billion people out there, one is malicious. Here are your two solutions....
1) Make the system less succeptable to the darker aspects of human nature.
2) Just take out your fury on the guy who installed seti at home on a work computer.
In the physical world, this argument doesn't even pass the laugh test. Lets say there's a military base, but it has no fence around it. When children wander in and screw with things (perhaps causing serious damage), they are shot. That's hardly a solution. Put up a fence so some five year old doesn't wander in and drive a tank on the freeway, then maybe talk about giving more severe punishments to organized and competent attackers.
Here's another example. At Columbia a few years ago, an elevator in one of the dorms plunged several floors, though fortunately nobody was hurt. They had to repair the elevator. Let's assume that the cost of this came out to $100,000. Columbia blamed the students for jumping up and down in the elevator, nobody knows if those claims are true. In the end, it doesn't matter. An elevator is a moving piece of floor, if jumping on a piece of floor endangers you and causes damage to the building, it's the designer's fault, not yours. If you try to steal $100,000 from a liquor store you'd be shot, should you be shot for jumping in an elevator? No, because reasonable precautions would have prevented that. Save severe punishments for serious malicious attacks that threaten human life and for which there is very little that can be done. If you can build a fence, or a decent elevator, then just start with that, and worry about your bloodthirst later.
err yeah, and gun manufacturers are responsible for the people they kill.
sysadmin responsible maybe... but microsoft is just like the maker of bittorrent. they just make the tool, the consequences of using it lies in the one using it, not the one producing it.
The contrast between urban poor and rural is also kind of striking; rural poor don't bother with any of the 'distractions' - they are too busy actually out working in a field somewhere to grow food, repair their house, etc. Rural poor actually make it a point to try and not have to depend on the government to get them out of dire straits - a marked difference from urban poor (observe: red counties vs. blue counties). In fact, sometimes it's hard to define what rural poor really is: I've known some people who by most measures were dirt poor, but they: owned a piece of property, had a house, had enough food to eat, and had enough running water and resources to not be stricken by disease, and enough surplus to have free time to go on nice trips around their area (the Appalachians). And these folks were not uneducated either. The big difference is that they didn't worry about gadgets, television, the latest fashions, whatever. They were content with what they had, and they had enough to not live a life of hardship. Yes, they had to work, but were they poor? In some ways I think they are richer than I am.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
... people who write perpetually vulnerable software, like Microsoft? How about the death penalty for stupid pointy-haired bosses and businesses that continue to use perpetually vulnerable software? How about the death penalty for stupid sysadmins who don't patch their perpetually vulnerable software and make the fast spread of viruses possible in the first place?
I propose that the following groups of individuals should be executed for costing society billions due to their existence in extension to the ones stated in the article.
1. Cripples.
2. Elderlies.
3. Mentally retarded.
4. Blind.
5. Deaf.
6. Those on life support.
7. Welfare mothers.
8. Children of welfare mothers.
9. Homeless.
10. Smokers.
11. Drug addicts.
12. Fundamentalists.
13. AIDS/HIV carriers.
14. Veterans with disabilities and PTSD.
15. Unwanted orphans.
16. The very poor.
And for the sake of advancing the general societal welfare for the contributing member, the following solutions should be used to maximize the benefit to the general society.
1. For Menial labors in dangerous industries, to reduce the risk on those contributors of society.
2. To be converted to food for either human consumptions or food for pets.
3. For general purpose recreation.
4. Various other purpose where expendable individuals are preferable.
In US, you can easily buy enough major firearms to wipe out your neighbourhood but a few little fireworks are banned.
Except rather than the NYT, we have Slate (an article written by PhD economist Steven Landsberg) writing this same article several months ago. My comment about the logic of executing worm writers...
Here's an idea. How about they don't make viruses in the first place, then they don't need to worry about the punishment. Creating a virus is a very deliberate, ill-intentioned act. It's not like accidentally running over a dog, or stealing a loaf of bread when you're starving (I'd be willing to debate the ethics of punishment in those cases).
I'd be fine with this penalty, and I'd hope all those would-be virus writers out there are smart enough that it would never have to be used.
Concerning Richard Reid, the shoe bomber:
In an exclusive poll I once conducted among fellow passengers, I found that 80 percent favored forcing Mr. Reid to sit next to the metal detector, helping small children put their sneakers back on.
I know it was intended as a joke punishment, but 80% of people on a plane WANT a man caught in the act of attempting to blow up a plane with a shoe around the shoes of children, so if by chance he was able to get more explosives he'd have the perfect opertunity to create lots of potential shoebombers who don't even know it.
Exactly how does one judge the "rehabilitation potential" of a criminal? By the severity of his or her crime?
I've yet, also, to see any published literature to that effect. While I don't doubt that there has been some severe imbalance in anyone who can kill, say, dozens of people, I do doubt that there is some tie to the crime committed and the capacity for "rehabilitation", whatever that entails.
I also feel that, although you're right (people killed never re-enter society), using that measure to judge the effectiveness of the death penalty is... plain silly. By that measure, anything which does what it does is effective. The death penalty also has lots of collateral damage, killing those not guilty (which you bring up, but don't propose a reasonable alternative to, since it still happens) and killing those who are in fact rehabilitated (even though they were deemed "unrehabilitated" in the first place, there's no way to go back and stop it from happening again). Furthermore, even though you might think it impossible to love someone on death row, these people do have families, most of which haven't totally disowned them, and the death is another death with implications of grief and guilt.
So, right, although it's successful at removing people from society, it still has things it doesn't succeed at.
. . . of a democracy degenerated by the infilitration of capitalism into government is demonstrated by the mere idea of the acceptability of the death penalty for a property crime.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
Heck, we wouldn't be able to put many virus writers to death, we would be too busy slaying lawyers.
That is a capital offense! The punishment will be administered by that great big SUV coming up behind you at 90 MPH!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Here are some comparisons: In the physical world if we leave our house or car unlocked, most insurance companies will not cover our lossess Punishing the crim9inal hackers with death sentence.. as they are operating on a belief framework that does not value that particvular concept.. ANd certainly sentencing the MS programmers to death for insecure programming decisions and code will not solve theproblem as most desktop users keep their OS installationas past 5 to 8 years.. Certainly, if MS went back and issued new patches for win98, winME, WInSE, and etc it might make a dent.. But MS has already implied its not their reposnibility or financial obligationn to do this.. IS MS right? Or do the consumers have some right sin expecting their computer OS to be more secure than MS has offered?
Fred Grott(aka shareme) http://mobilebytes.wordpress.com
Don't worry, you'll probably get away with crucifixion.
There is no reset button in life; however, there are bonus levels.
If the vendor pays for the damage caused by their faulty product, the quality of the said products will increase overnight.
The reason Microsoft has hordes of money is because they didn't pay their beta testers (customers and virus writers) the going price for testing.
You bring up a very good point. One that I believe many people are beginning to lose sight of. It is not the act, in and of itself, that must be punished, but rather the effects of the act. This is a more general attitude which I believe should be followed. Also, one must consider the motivation behind the act. For instance, if one means to kill a bunch of people in a hospital by means of a computer virus, then a higher charge is in order. But if it just happened to be passed on to the hospital by some unfortunate chain of events, we are looking at something like reckless endangerment.
By the way, I am not a lawyer... this is just my opinion.
This comes from the same group (NYT) people whom jump all over the government for JAILING TERRORISTS and, god forbid, putting child rapists to death.
I'm sorry to hear that their computer may crash because of a security hole, but man don't they have anything better to do?
You're correct IMO.
The death penalty does not prevent murder, the crime stats don't show reduced murder rates in states with the death penalty.
One could argue inherent differences between states causes the murder rates.
Since there is no reduction in crime with the death penalty, the additional cost of executing innocents is unacceptable.
If there was no risk, I say kill them, not for any larger social purpose other than I prefer not to have murderers/rapists etc exist.
It's not that I want to kill them, it's just that I'd like them to be not alive anymore.
i didn't state that i had cable (you can't string cable into welfare hotels), merely that there was deep cable penetration in Harlem at the time and continues to be.
and getting a computer was a sacrifice my mom made because I had some technical aptitude. In exchange, there were some times when there was no food. This is very true.
I agree that urban poverty and rural poverty are two different things.
un burrito me trampeó.
In the "competitive" world a crap OS would die on the vines.
Write a crap OS, fine, no one will use it.
BUT the major computer suppiles keep shoving crap down the consumers throat.
Don't blame Microsoft.
Blame Mr. Dell & company for not offering an alternative to Microsoft for consumers.
and don't give me the blah blah blah about (non-consumer) Linux servers
If only I had mod points - the parent post states succinctly something that I was always amazed at. That the "poor" pay a premium for distraction. I never understood why the people with the least disposable income seem to "squander" it on lottery tickets, drugs, flashy jewelry, overprice automobile accessories, etc. But the parent post summed it up well, these things all give you a momentary jolt from your painful circumstances. I can see the same parallels with the "poor" kids of decades ago seeking escape in libraries. Would we begrudge a child ten paperback books or a bargain basement Dell pc?
While I grant that the death penalty is a bit silly, I'm really tired of how white-collar crimes are treated like cute little misdemeaners. It's an area where our system is woefully unfair: some poor teen gets bored and robs a store; he gets hard time. OTOH, a bored rich teen in college releases a virus that causes millions of dollars in damage; he gets a stern talking to and then is lionized on slashdot for his fight against the system.
This is the culture that leads to CEOs wrecking the lives of hundreds of people and getting a few years in country-club prison.
-Jeff
Please learn the difference between a dissenting opinion and a troll before you moderate.
They should put Hackers on helpdesks as a punishment.
With no smoking breaks and a minimal ration of caffeïne and no slashdot!
I feel that would be too harsh though. Noone deserves that.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
This idea is old. The NYT guy may have come up with it on his own, but it has been stated before. Even here on slashdot . The other article is better written. If you are believer in straight utilitarian economics it makes sense. If something else (arbitrary or collective morality etc) it is rediculous. Half tongue in cheek Steven Landsburg is a utilitarian economist.
Dupe me once, shame on you. Dupe me twice, shame on me. Dupe me everyday, this must be slashdot.
While the fairly constant releases of virus, worms, and other malware are extremely annoying, they do serve the purpose of building up software's "immune system". If there were no hackers writing this stuff, there would be no incentive for Microsoft or others to patch loopholes in their code. That would leave us wide open for a massive attack by a hostile power who could "batch up" enough exploits to cripple all networked computers for weeks or months.
A life is worth a set amount of money, if someone does more damage than that we have to kill off family members too.
Death to parents who let their children become exploited by molesters.
You make a good point. The crime is what the virus does, not the fact that it's been created. So in some cases misdemeanor vandalism is exactly what the writer should be charged for, in other cases the crime is more serious. 2600 makes this point often, society can't start making "hacking" a crime, if it should be illegal then there are already laws that apply to it.
RIAA and the MPAA, putting the "F U" in "fair use".
So you don't go to hospitals?
Well, I was going to post a rant on how these the person writing this, and the academic cited in the headline were calling for the death penalty when far greater crimes against humanity are going unpunished than wasting peoples time and money cleaning virus and deleting spam. But my problem with it goes much deeper. The academic in the article seems to be confused with the terms business and society. He states that hackers do more damage to society, per hacker, than murderers, monetarily. He uses this to say it is more logical to give the death penalty to hackers. In most of the statistics I've seen regarding spam and viruses they usually pertain to businesses, not to society. Since he's using the amount of monetary damage inflicted as a means of determining whether someone should be put to death it would seem quite logical by this reasoning to put several of the board members of Enron to death. They after all stole billions of people's pensions and precipitated a massive drop in the markets and various other large scale effects. The stock market dropped more after Enron than it did after 9/11.
I believe the academic wanted to make a point that perhaps harsher penalties are warranted, but the two crimes he chooses are so different that his argument looses much of it's meaning. He chooses murder, the taking of a life, which capitol punishment has not shown to be a deterrent of, which he compares to an action that is sometimes an immature prank by a teenager or a means criminally disseminating unwanted advertisements or illegally obtaining financial information for the purpose of fraud. I didn't know the two had reached a level where they were comparable in harm to society. If he wanted to bring up another crime to compare it to he should have chosen corporate fraud. It is more similar in it's effect, and it more measurable in it's effect. I seems he just used murder to make it sound more sensational, and to garner more attention.
That's where I have a problem with this academic. He's trying to gain attention for the problem he's studying (and possibly himself), but ends up framing all of society in monetary terms, devaluing life, and everything else society entails in the process. It is not very smart to devalue the thing you are trying to protect in trying to make a point. But this is just more of the monetizing of life which is now so prevalent in this corporate dominated culture.
Murder's price derives from it's effect on the family of the victim, it's effect on the surrounding area, even the effect on the perpetrators family, and I'm not going to try and quantify the cost of a human life here. Areas with high murder rates also can become seriously depressed and impoverished, sometimes extending to effects on entire regions. There are of course monetary costs involving incarceration and court costs, but to bring down human life to level of spam is insulting at best, and shows the weakness of his argument when referring to costs to 'society'.
Here is where I realized I agree somewhat with the author's proposition of what he refers to as 'something worse than death'. While I don't agree with the worse than death portion, I do agree that the punishment should involve undoing or at least repairing some of the damage that was inflicted in the crime. It just doesn't make sense to lock someone up for years on end, encuring yet more financial cost to the government and taxpayers, when a more appropriate form of punishment would be a long term of some sort of community service. It would benefit both society and the individual much more than simple encarceration. As for deterrents, that's anyone's guess.
It also occurred to me in writing this that perhaps the academic's true intent was to make point that would shock people and hence stimulate debate, sort of like Ward Churchil. If that is the case then I might not have a problem with this, but I doubt many people will think that far into this.
I apologize for any bad editing, I've been writing this in between labeling, folding, stuffing and posting 200+ envelopes. Now that is a punishment worse than death...
Drawn and quartered?
Sent to Abu Ghraib? Gitmo?
Forced to submit to interviews by Rosie O'Donnell?
Wait! I know! Has to donate all his money to the OSDL! (Including his stock laundering "Foundation")
Oh, yeah, a fate worse than death for Bill! No money!
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
ACHTUNG! Das computermachine ist nicht fuer gefingerpoken und mittengrabben. Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfen.
How about the death penalty for software authors who refuse to even try to make their OS secure?
What? Redmond? What have they...oh, I see. You don't think they'd buy it.
A large Pep. Pizza, a box of Ho-Hos and a can of Jolt cola.
Well, there are families here that go hungry and it's due to systematic injustice (distribution problems) in our economic system, but you're totally right - those are not the kind of people who get hurt by the Sasser worm.
Fully half of the world lives on $2/day but these are not the folks who's computer productivity were hurt by the latest internet worm. I have a hard time believing that somebody should die on account of somebody else who is rich enough to own a sweet computer losing some billable working hours.
World Changing - News for Humans, Stuff about our planet
What if death is just a doorway to paradise. Society could be sending hackers to a place with 777 virgins for each one. 'Course, I don't think the sex of the virgins need be specified.
I drank what? -- Socrates
Sure, if they'll also impose a death penalty for white-collar crime. It's not like any script kiddie has done more damage than the folks at Enron.
Alternatively, we could just give the kiddies a tiny fine (say, 1% of the value in loss they caused, similar to embezzlement) then 2 years in minimum security at Club Fed, then probation.
After all, if it's not a crime to cook the books, it can't be a crime to make it harder to read the books.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
It's about perspective.
Virus writters WASTE EFFORT to DESTROY SOCIETY.
That's really unbelievably bad, though it's true most of them are just messing with code because they aren't sure it'll work it's still a pretty terrible thing to do.
Fraud is just a change in perspective about the value of other people, in relation to the perpetrators own value of course.
Think of it like bombing people for no reason vs bombing them in a war.
The law does account for these things, recently the perspective of the individual has become more feared as society takes on some pretty ugly shapes.
Thus the ignorance or political motivation of Virus writters is now ignored and they can be punished as though they wrote virii out of hate.
There are two types of poverty:
Absolute Poverty: The inability to live off you income, afford food etc.
Relative Poverty: Those earning under 25% of the median income of a country.
If you don't put on a seatbelt and get into a crash and are injured, don't you take some responsibility by not wearing your seatbelt?
Maybe just a little? Maybe a lot?
The almighty buck can't be stopped.
When will enough people realize there are better things than profit?
"On the other hand, it is conceivable that people may die as a result of a virus in hospitals, for example."
If this were the case, the hospital in question should be held accountable for Running an OS (i.e. Windows) that specifically claims not to be used for mission-critical systems.
So it's not conceivable, and if it is, you shouldn't (just) be going after the virus writer.
--On the other hand, it is conceivable that people may die as a result of a virus in hospitals, for example.--
Please explain what you mean by this? Is this a comptuer virus or something like AIDS? Why would a computer system in the hospital that is this mission critical be connected to the internet in the first place?
While I agree that it's immoral to produce worms and viruses that cause indiscriminate damage, introducing laws like this will not make the Windows environment any safer. For every hacker in the US that this law may deter, there are many others abroad who will take their place. The United States may have borders, but the Internet does not. Isn't it about time that Microsoft produced a better operating system? Then every Windows user on the planet would not only be safer from teenage hackers, but also from criminals and terrorists.
When I read:
b bles
The author suggests commuting the idea of a death sentence into a lifetime of servitude doing viral cleanup.
It made me think of the original Star Trek and the guy who had to pick up all the tribbles on the space station for the next 17.9 or do 20 years in prison. I wonder if that's where he got the idea.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trouble_with_Tri
Making them read Slashdot and each and every article would be punishment.
http://xs4.xs.to/pics/04481/p556222.gif
The authoritarian view is that the law is absolute. No infraction is acceptable and the importance of the law always trumps the importance of the individual.
In this case, the concept of an "unjust law" is meaningless. If the law says I can cause you harm, then I can do it. If the law requires you do something that is harmful or evil to you, then you must do it. If you disobey or complain, it's you, not the law who are wrong. The law is never wrong.
In the context of this particular discussion, collective punishment becomes significant. The idea is that some particular group of people, as a whole, is perceived to be bad for society. (again, avoiding the oh so tempting inflammatory examples!). When an individual member of that class is caught breaking the law, they are held accountable for the perceived harm caused by the entire class.
The absolutist view appeals to our sense of righteousness. Holding one idea and never under any circumstances questioning that idea gives us a sense of surety. (there's a word for that; can you name it?).The promise is that with perfect compliance we will have peace and safety. Give us, your leaders absoulte powers and provide those who we will point out for you these extreme penalties and we promise you safety, security, peace, and quiet.
What is delivered, however, is never perfect compliance. So we feel moral outrage. We were lied to! We know what's right, and it's the law. So, it must be the violator who is wrong. Obedience is an absolute.
The penalty for disobedience becomes retribution, not justice. The motive for this penalty is moral outrage, not concern for society. In this context, the harshest possible penalty is perfectly reasonable. And, as morally outraged people, we dissociate ourselves from the person we penalize. They are not like us. We can do anything we like to them. Our judgement will never be applied similarly to us because they are wrong and we are right.
The pragmatic view is that society can tolerate a certain amount of non-compliance from its individuals.
This non-compliance, beyond being simply tolerated, is valued and honored with terms like "civil disobedience" and "conscientious objection". When the law is no longer absolute, the term "unjust law" has meaning.
The idea here is that a violation of the law is a discrepancy between the perpetrator and the law. Maybe the perpetrator is wrong. Maybe the law is wrong.
Here, the justification for any penalty is the good of society. Do we punish this person for what he did? For what he might have done? For what he might do in the future? These are decisions that we have to make now--judgements, not application of an absolute forumla.
When we make these judgements, we must also realize that the person we are judging could be one of us. That person is, actually, one of us. The disobedient member of society is no longer a moral outcast, and that means that whatever penalty we pass on him could be applied to us. Maybe we do choose to penalize the individual. Maybe he has harmed us. But it's not quite so easy to dismiss our frustration by beating up on a guilty person.
This mindset considerably devalues obedience for the sake of obedience. In this view, law provides that if a violator causes harm he is punished. But, typically, if the harm is less significant, even if the law has been broken, the penalty is similarly light.
The cost to individual freedom is taken into account when laws are written. It is possible for the lawmaker to say "it costs more of our individual freedom than the value we get by controlling this behaviour." The law then provides some incentive for obedience, but disobedience is expected and largely tolerated.
The cost of this view is that the individuals, being placed
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
1. the death penalty should be abolished everywhere
2. moving a few bits from place a to place b should not be penalized by the death penalty
that's just ridiculous.
How many billions in corporate profits is a human life worth? Are we now assigning a dollar amount to human life? "I'm sorry - you did more damage than you are worth - you will be executed."
I support the death penalty - but not as a coporate weapon.
...those polititions just want to up their frags.
I love random hex numbers! Just like this one, 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0.
Yes, kids in the US really go hungry without their parents being total crack-heads.
And yes, the average standard of living in the US is absurdly high compared to most of the world.
But . . . but . . . I'm BLACK!
To create a login-not-required link to NYT, go to http://nytimes.blogspace.com/genlink, paste the URL of the page you want to access, and you get the "archive link" of the article.
Unless the parent(s)are total crack-heads, do any kids in the US REALLY go hungry?
Yes, yes they do. Not many do, but some extreme cases do. There are a lot parents who you might call "total crack-heads." My sister works as a teacher at an inner city school, and she sees a lot of this sort of thing. Some kids only get a school lunch as a reasonable meal.
In the projects, there are two essentials -- a car and cable. Properly feeding and clothing your kids is secondary. It's not surprising given that most "parents" in the projects are stupid kids who got pregnant at an early age and never really learned how to fend for themselves. These are people who have no job skills and no initiative to improve themselves since they see every other pathetic loser around them as the status quo. They have no role models other than the flashy celebrities on the TV living hedonistically for little hard work (making music or playing games). As long as they're having fun and looking cool to their peers, everything's good.
The kids (most of whom weren't wanted when the mother got pregnant) are treated as an burdensome obligation in many cases. They're taken care of just as well as any other unwanted chore is -- that is, shoved off on a grandparent or even another child. My sister has seen a six year old left at home alone to take care of a two year old. (Poor girl got put in a foster home where the foster parents didn't care about her either and just wanted to spend the welfare check for taking her in. I digress.)
We are SO spoiled.
Exactly. This is why this sort of thing happens. If the parents honestly had to work to survive and didn't have their own parents to fall back on, I think these kids would be a little better cared for. For the most part, parents in the poor neighborhoods DO feed their kids, but the cheap crap they feed them isn't healthy for them. This is why obesity is on the rise fastest in the poorest areas of the nation. How much does a good healthy meal with vegetables cost vs. McDonald's. You do the math.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I don't think John Tierney takes this article seriously. He plays with the reader's opinion on Death Penalty, that regardless if you think it's a good or bad thing, it does not fit for hackers.
Read the article carefully. John never writes that D *is* the answer. It's all written to make all those bad jokes at the end of the article about using Win95.
However the article is written badly. You never shall make jokes about serious things like the Deatch Penalty.
No, definitively not a brilliant piece of work. He must have had a bad day writing that.
Sure, death to virus creators -- right after corporations stop externalizing major costs to us, via low taxes or tax breaks, subsidies, environmental polution, political interference, faulty products, etc., etc.
Corporations are not people. IMO they have no rights (as they evidently have no social responsibility) and therefore should not count when considering damages. They exist to make money by any means so it's their job to defend themselves.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
I hate to burst your bubble, but depending on the government has nothing to do with red vs. blue counties. It's come down to social and religous (self rightous?) values. An awful lot of those red counties your refer to as "make it a point to try and not have to depend on the goverment" receive an awful lot of subsidies from the goverment and wouldn't be able to survive with their lifestyle without them. Anywhere you see a farmer, you see a welfare recipient (through farming subsidies).
As far as the difference between rural and urban poor, you're going to have a mix of hard working (working poor) and lazy asses wherever you go.
If you don't believe me just take a look at your local Whole Foods Market, or as I call it Whole Paycheck Market, and compare it with the stuff that you could get in a foodbank.
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
Have you ever felt that these numbers are typically highly overinflated? What are they based on? As an IT professional, I know that in the companies that I've worked with, other legal types of malware tend to pose a significantly higher cost. Especially in terms of manpower.
-Turkey
The government obviously can not sort it out, letting god sort it out sounds like a good alternative when lives are affected.
Incidentally, I think that farm subsidies are actually keeping the farmers at the "bottom" of the economy when they should really be at the top - they are, after all, the real pillars of a functioning society: without food not much else matters.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
This guy is pretty much saying that an unlocked car isn't the problem but that thiefs are. I say they're both a part of the problem.
He's also saying that we shouldn't remedy the unlocked car problem but instead allow for harsher sentences if someone steals one car too many. I wish it were this simple. Detering someone from doing something doesn't go hand in hand with the harshness of the penalty. The most effective way to stop people from doing bad things is to catch them every time. If you cannot do that then measures like the one this guy advances seem acceptable to unreasonable people.
I'm not counting 2nd offenses committed behind bars, but that's what maximum-security prisons are there to prevent.
The day that shareholders are personally liable for illegal acts committed by the corporations they support, is the day that a harsher penalties (I don't support capital punishment period) for hackers will get my support.
What's fair is fair.
You know, as a Tyco employee, it kinda burns me to see Tyco lumped in with the 'worst of the worst'. Unlike Enron and Worldcom, which were shutdown as a result by the Feds and removed from the NYSE, Tyco was never removed, and is still a living company.
Tyco did have a CEO, CFO, and Chief Counsel who did willingly break the rules, and Tyco took them to court (as an aside, Tyco demanded not only what they took, but the total cost of all the fraudulent programs and ALL salaries paid since they were hired).
Tyco has done a lot of work to turn themselves around. Sorry for the rant, but I had to get that off my chest.
That would be cruel and unusual punsihment...
Over harsh punishment for computer crimes is a bad idea.
1) It's too easy to make someone else look guilty. If you like the girlfriend of the guy in the next cubicle, buy a virus from your local friendly illegal substances dealer and make it appear that it was originated by the guy in the next cubicle. Then offer your most 'deepest' condolences to his newly-available girlfriend.
2) The hackers/virus specialists aren't the cause of the problem. The problem is poorly designed and written operating systems. Killing people who develop applications for the OS isn't going to help fix the OS.
3) The courts can't differenciate those who develop rogue code for 'national security' regardless of the nation from those who write it for amusement or corporate interests.
The best way to deal with virus writers is to make them liable to civil lawsuits for the damage that they cause. Straightforward tort law. Any 17-year-old hacker who realizes that he is going to have to write database front-ends in Visual Basic for the next thirty years to pay off the damage his cool virus has done will reconsider releasing it.
Also remind business leaders that using proprietary operating systems exposes them to underground attack because there isn't an open feedback loop where thousands of qualified people are constantly examining the OS source for flaws.
This "journalist" did just that.
The article is pure flamebait.
Someone who can make an outraged (outraged!) post about an article based on a Slashdot writeup might not deserve so much respect either....
The journalist you're scorning (John Tierney) was very clearly NOT advocating the death penalty. He discussed an interesting report made by an analyst putting things in perspective -- i.e., that if you look at the penalties purely from the standpoint of saving society money, a death penalty for serious "hacker" crimes is much more logical than the death penalty for murder. Then he dismissed this as (rather obviously) impractical:
This is overkill. What about script kiddies? Do we kill them, too? Many of us went through a "hacker" stage, and have become better IT folks for it.
If this doesn't work we should try eating babies.
They'd just script it...
Select from tblFriends where interesting >= 4;
If you fail to pay for your parking metre, you should be executed on the spot. Where is Judge Dred when we need him?
No it's not. People who kill multiple others get consecutive sentences. For example the Green River Killer, Gary Ridgeway, was sentenced to 48 consecutive life sentences. The only reason he didn't get the death penalty was due to a deal with the prosecution to find more of his victems.
I agree.
go do a billion dollars of damage with a hammer to physical machines across the world.
if sasser shuts down a company for a day, and that company loses X dollars from that day, the guy is responsible for it. yeah, someone ELSE coulda made that hammer, sure, but they DIDN'T. HE DID. it's his fault, he broke shit, he's gonna pay.
Now that we have that outta the way, how do we address his payment? I think he shoud be responsible in the same way as if he had done a billion dollars of physical damage- say he smashed his car into the front of a warehouse while it was empty, it caught fire and burned to the ground, doing 1 Bil in damages.
what would his punishment be? make him pay it back? he can't. This wasn't just an assult on an individual, this was an assult on many people- the community. how do you handle a situation where someone assults the community? you exile them.
seems to me that a mitnik-type punishment should be in order. Ban him from the intarweb.
*shrug* just a thought
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First of all, the human rights declaration of Europe says, there is no reason for death-penalty at all, the right to live is untouchable (the European consequences from the NAZI-regime). For most Europeans, death-penalty is a barbarian way to get rid of social, criminal, race and competition problems. The state is no better than the offender (vengeance is more important than justice), it doesn't change the mind of criminals (USA with death-penalty has the highest murder-rate of all industrialised countries) and if the trial is wrong, you can't reverse it (there are hundreds of examples in the USA).
On the other hand, if producers of computer viruses would be responsible by death-penalty, why wouldn't be weapon-producers (or NRA) and presidents who start a war?
This article is definitely written by a man, who stands at the right side of the power. Such a law would finally declare that there is no "justice for all", only "justice for money".
This is an excellent point about the racist hypocrisy where it is OK to generalize the rich as white but bad to generalize convicts as black. Why is any such generalization pursued by anyone with a bit of sense?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
"If there is truely no hope of release, they have nothing to lose."
Not everyone serving a life term or on death row is truly guilty.
Also:
Some people who are doing life are 3-time losers for minor felonies. Should they also be put to death because they have "no hope of release?" I don't think so.
For more perspective on this, and to see some of the subjects of his past columns, see here.
If you come upon some kid who checked^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hhacked into a school website and checked his acceptance status without even being aware of what he's doing, then it's not likely he'll seek out further trouble. A minor punishment is sufficient to deter him.
Deter him from making an honest mistake? Get real. I'm familiar with that case. Looking at a website that someone puts up by mistake is not a crime and there should be no punishment for it.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Is there any other case where we allow the Death Penalty just because of monetary damage? Consider if someone done similar damage through a sophisticated campaign of libel, or if someone had somehow managed to somehow steal that kind of money. Would we consider the death penalty in either of those cases?
---
"I hate quotations." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Generated by SlashdotRndSig via GreaseMonkey
Why is it that when you believe something it's an opinion, but when I believe something it's a manifesto?
Not voted, tried. Tried for getting a hummer in the Oval Office - probably not the death penalty. Tried for the Loss of 1500 lives over a false security claim of WMD, while a known combatant successfully developed WMD(nuclear) without intervention - getting warmer.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Of course nearly everyone agrees that the death penalty is not an appropriate punishment for hacking. What would be appropriate, IMHO, is something like 5-10 years in prison (possibly more depending on the amount of damage caused) with no access to computers or any technology while incarcerated. By the time they get out, operating systems, hardware, and software technologies will likely have changed so much that the former hackers won't have the knowledge necessary to create new viruses ... at least not for a long time.
So, pricing your cancer drug at $100,000 per year is manslaughter too, right?
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/12/business/12canc
Lets leave all this BS on the table for a second. It seems to me that politicians are responsible for making the game such that society is the winner. If they let a company price its drugs at obscene rates, and yet require it to be covered (and don't punish the companies for letting people die), then you've effectively created a wonderful monopoly, while simultaniously claiming to use the free market. Here's a hint, markets don't work when the alternatives are "pay us whatever we ask, or die".
Similarly, these crimes weren't perpetrated by a single man, it required the willing negligence of thousands, perhaps millions, of people to bring them about. If you can charge the hacker with manslaughter, then you can charge Microsoft and the Hospital that chose their software too. Those people were dead as fried chicken from the moment the hospital bought microsoft, for it was certain that someone was going to turn out to be more sinner than saint eventually.
The only logical approach to security is to require ALL players to take reasonable action to protect the system and themselves. Then, if the system is carefully designed and deployed, and yet it comes under careful and concerted attack, then you have actual resources to track down the offenders, rather than just sweeping through colleges looking for delinquents. It's hard to bust someone for trespassing if you don't have a fence around your property. This columnist would support shooting someone who steps on your property, even if it's totally unmarked and unprotected. This is totally unacceptable in any sane legal framework. Maybe if you have a fence to keep out the neighborhood kids, but some punk jumps it anyway, well then maybe, but even that is stretching the limits of belief.
Deter him in the way to make him realize that it was a mistake and that he shouldn't do it next time, given that he understands the situation. I'm not saying take away their acceptance. I'm saying tell them that it violated the university's privacy and maybe get one of those condescending elongated speeches. Frankly, someone telling you that you did something wrong qualifies as punishment, too. (In psychological terms, at least.)
- shazow
Someone who can stick a price on human life, or argument for improving the economy by killing people deserves no respect from me.
It must be awfully comfortable being in a position where one doesn't have to make decisions involving human life.
You think the speed limit should be 5 mph? After all, by raising it to, say, 55mph, we are trading the risk of human death for economic convenience. Well, someone has to make that decision.
Maybe all commercial flight must be stopped immediately. I know it's "economically convenient" for business people to be able to make trips, create jobs, etc. But one of these days, a plane will crash into someone's house and kill the occupants. No amount of economic gains is worth that "price", right? Of course not!
The list of examples is endless.
Did you ever do something in which you risked your life? (For example, drive a car!) Guess what. When you did that, you implicitly put an upper bound on the worth of your life; you said that it was worth taking the risk, in exchange for some convenience.
Blanket statements that "you can't put a price on life" sound nice, but are simply wrong. The proof is in everyday living.
M.G.
Provided we can also hang mediocre journalists (and politicians).
Then I am all for it.
I had flashbacks from your post.
new york city has the summer lunch program. any kid can go to a public school and get a free lunch in the summer. it was burdensome on my mom in the summer as she had to feed us three times a day instead of one. so we ate at school the whole summer. it was a good program too, because if I correctly recall, they continued it even after summer school ended. It would be late summer and all the really poor kids would stream into the empty lunchroom around lunchtime, and they'd feed us.
un burrito me trampeó.
Not if you skip over the dupes ;)
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
I think the death penalty for the man responsible for the virus epidemic is too harsh, but perhaps some monetary damages that are sufficient for him to notice would deter him from pulling the same kind of monkey-business with browsers and active content again.
"I'm sorry Mr. Tierney, but we've found that some truly brilliant people who will contribute far more to the economy than a single smarmy journalist are in need of some organ transplants. And, well, according to cost-benefit analysis..."
Good societies are not just about increasing economic value.If your theory is different from practice, then your theory is wrong.
most small and medium-sized companies don't have the manpower, financial resources (hardware, licensing, etc.), and sometimes even work space to run a proper test lab. I do the best I can as a consultant (I have a proper lab), but I can only go so far simulating each customer's setup - again, financial constraints come into play. The problem is, these companies are proportionally affected by downtime in the same manner (or more so) than larger organizations.
.Net registered objects) and difficult-to-control boot process that allow their servers and workstations to enter that BSOD-on-boot state that makes you throw up your hands and reinstall (it's difficult in most cases to determine whether you'll spend more time debugging or reinstalling - so you take the 'safe and known' approach and reinstall). As other posters have mentioned, you don't have this problem with Linux or *BSD - the functionality is entirely transparent, and orders of magnitude less complex to boot (ha ha).
I blame most of this on Microsoft - they have the servers with a horribly undocumented mass of insanely complex internals (registry keys, shared dlls, OLE / COM / DCOM /
So, you are correct in that it's the company's responsibility to make sure things are patched, and running a test lab is an excellent and highly reccommended approach for those with the resources, but unfortunalty most organizations (at least in the US, small-medium sized companies outnumber large companies by several orders of mangnitude) are stuck with several compromises they must balance in this area.
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
The USA death penalty, as much as I advocate them, does have a strong State litmus test throughout its member of the union.
.... after .....PCs.
What if the hacking resulting in a failure of a mass transportation system resulting in large amount of casualties. Does the hacker deserve it? Me definitely think so.
But just to cause commerce glitches, minor or major; not strong enough of a litmus test.
Now, how about those chain-gangs of the white-collar variety? We can put them to work re-installing PCs after PCs after PCs
It's a shame your opinion is not even closely related to the actual laws. In most (if not all) democracies, corprations are people in the eyes of the law.
Childhood stories, or: Growing up Poor.
I remember walking to the store. In a Minnesota winter. Drag the sled to the bank, and wait inside the night dropoff area to warm up. Drag the sled to the store. Buy what food you can afford. Go back, again waiting at the bank to warm up.
Yes, my mother had a car. The same car for most of my childhood. It didn't always run -- there was a year or two it didn't run.
I remember not having enough food at the end of the month. That sucked. Most of the time we ate well though -- dehydrated milk, beans, etc.
People used to think that my younger sister was anorexic, due to the fact that she never ate out. The reason was more simple -- she never had money.
(I loved school breakfest and school lunch programs. FOOD!)
I remember getting dressed in front of the stove when the fuel oil ran out. And sleeping under heavy coats. That also sucked.
I remember having cable early in my childhood, but not later. To this day, my mother doesn't have cable. I bought my first computer (a 286 back when 286s were obsolete by 386s and 486s). My next computer, a few years later, was a 386 dumpsterdived from the college. [I was lucky enough to have plenty of experience on the school library's Apples -- which is where I first learned to program.]
Excluding poverty, my mother was an excellent parent. I don't think I'd trade my childhood for any other's kid (being hungry for a day or two or being cold for a weekend isn't a big problem. Having a disfunctional family is.)
My siblings, due to college and hard work, are doing well in life. A poor kid that's willing to apply him or herself can go far in the US. I suppose its a measure of success -- out of all my siblings that were dirt poor growing up, we are almost all middle-class now.
I wouldn't want to grow up poor in any other part of the world. The US has many advantages for its poor people. But I wouldn't talk about how the poor are so lucky -- going without food for a few days sucks. Being in a house where the temperature has dropped to the average January temperature in Minnesota sucks.
Both Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs would be dead, who commited fraud with a blue box
Taco: In A.D. 2011, war was beginning. ....
Judge: What happen ?
Hax0r: Somebody set up us the arrest.
Jury: We get signal.
Judge: What !
Jury: Main prosecutor turn on.
Judge: It's you !!
Big Business: How are you gentlemen !!
Big Business: All your viruses are belong to us.
Big Business: Frustration through lost profits.
Big Business: You are on the way to death penalty.
Judge: What you say !!
Big Business: You have no chance to survive make your time.
Big Business: Ha Ha Ha Ha
Jury: Judge !!
Judge: Take off every 'Zig'!!
Judge: You know what you doing.
Judge: Move 'Zig'.
Judge: For great justice.
"Really? Why not the same as a auto manufacturer who's defect in a car contributed to an accident? Perhaps car makers should include a EULA that absolves them of all liability too."
GM's Montanta platform had a poor design that caused it to be particularly vulnerable to front-end collisions. It was not a specific design flaw, simply a poor overall design that produced an unsafe vehicle.
Under US law, this is not illegal. GM's Montana passed US crash tests, and because there was no specific flaw that could be addressed, there was nothing that GM could be sued over.
So, no, car manufacturers really aren't liable unless there is a specific issue that causes accidents.
not necessarily true. Mcdonald's has had a $1 menu in Harlem since I was a kid. $2.14 would get you a double cheeseburger and fries. I know because I ate that all through high school. White Castle's damn near gave those burgers away. 6 burgers - 2 bucks... and that was in the mid 90s.
all of these fast food places scale their prices for the communities they serve.
you could probably produce a cheaper meal, but you'd still have to buy ingredients in sufficient quantity to produce per meal savings.
then we'd have to agree upon what qualifies as a healthy meal. If we're talking ramen noodles or something like that, then it can probably be done.
un burrito me trampeó.
Well, first of all, we hack off one of their fingers, then we hack their thumbs, then we hack off the rest of their fingers, then we hack off their arms and legs, and if they still want to bite our legs off.... wait, I think that has already been used.
They're insisting on harsher penalties for hackers?
What about corporate crime? what about Enron?
How about executing the executives we misplace our financial trust in?
Let's look at what happens:
A businessman owns a machine and hires computer administrators to build that system to do only as he instructs it to do. Through the fault of the administrator and the body of information that has been put into the computer, the computer is susceptible to certain requests. If a user requests certain information in certain ways, the computer will give out information or behave in a way that the administrators that created it did not intend and the businessmen who own it do not want.
Rape is a fundamentally flawed analogy here because there is no agency or consciousness in the device that is resisting as it is being hacked; the hacker "owns" the machine, to use the revealing slang, and it is executing his will instead of the owners'.
You want a real analogy?
A man has a daughter and hires nannys to raise that child to do only as he wishes. Through the fault of the nanny or the culture as a whole, the girl grows up susceptible to certain propositions. If one of her peers phrases a proposition to have sex or do drugs in a certain way, she will consent against the intentions of those who raised her and her parents.
Sensationalist analogies like the parent always try to make hackers look like rapists or murderers or terrorists or something; just like raising children, it's always the bad parents who are looking for someone to demonize or blame.
But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most... and that is the indifference of good men.
It sure spiked a lot during the 1990s. By a very large amount. There were ceremonies involving the commemoration of just some of the murders from this time.
"You've been listening to too much right-wing agitprop."
How is there a left-wing or right-wing advantage in reporting or mispreporting murder statistics.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Similarly I think that Kevin Mitnick's punishment of tech restriction was fitting (though not necessarily the prison term). The criminal, for lack of a better word, is reformed (no more crime), and can continue to be productive to society (to some extent).
Back to the article, the writer generalizes "hackers" to be basement dwelling teens whose lives revolve around video games. He says that death row will scare the a good many into submission. How exactly will imposing a lasting example of oppression reduce feelings of teen angst against "the man"?
I think a better solution might be to bring back indentured servitude. Send the teen to MS and make him work off his debt to society by finding holes and reporting them to the engineers on the Windows dev team. Make sure he's paid minimum wage minus premiums and interest for his debt of servitude. Keep him at or below the poverty line. No computers outside of his one task of finding the bugs. Non-compete (don't let him use those skills anywhere else). Hell, make it a lifetime obligation. I'm sure the eventual boredom will certainly be "worse than death".
---k--
</stupid>
If people like doing something, they are going to continue to do it, regardless of how "strong" any particular law is.
The way to get someone to stop doing something is not by imposing penalties, it's by creating rewards for doing something different. IMHO, strong laws imply a weakness of society to create balanced, energetic and happy people, who have no need to do wrong. It's much simplier to blame a person for something "wrong" with them then figuring out what causes the need in the first place.
I don't fully agree with the article, but consider this:
If some genius built a bomb that destroys only structures and buildings, but never hurts people, and decides to set it off in downtown New York for whatever non-sensical reason (fun? fame? just 'cause he could?), what does he deserve as a penalty?
Do we want that to happen? And how could we prevent that from happening when knowledge for mass destruction is becoming easier and easier to come by? Pipe bombs and anarchist's cookbooks, anyone?
...I am proof that intelligent beings are not always intelligent...
There was a film about a similar weapon, "The Nude Bomb" (title of film, name of weapon and perhaps an accurate critical description).
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081249/
It is but a minor matter to change such a bomb so it obliterates other materials besides clothing.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Over time, prisons became run-down and overcrowded. Conditions worsened. The situation boiled over, several times - perhaps the most dramatic was the Strangeways rooftop protest. At about this time, you again see an increase in crime and violence that matches the deterioration of the penal system.
The only obvious conclusion is that deterrence and punishment, per se, have no value in themselves. The idea, then, that by making these worse for hackers we can eliminate "cybercrime" is absurd. We have absolutely no evidence to back such a claim, and quite a lot of evidence that it is very unlikely to work.
So, what would I propose? I would suggest giving those who carry out such crime some therapy on the off-chance that the talent is being misused because of emotional dysfunction. I would also suggest education, to convert the talent into a marketable skill. Combined, these would still be cheaper than a US-style execution and even if only that 0.02% he talked of could be turned into high-grade talent, the country would actually turn a profit on the whole deal.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Forget hackers, suicide bombers do more damage. They should face the death penalty. That'll deter them.
K.
or in the case of CEOs, costing thousands of ppl their jobs and pensions. this is a lot worse than writing a virus, IMHO. esp since the virus writer isn't draining the funds from others into their own accounts.
A bunch of companies that are too stupid to use secure computers? Come on now... While releasing a worm like sasser is definitely wrong, this clown's suggested punishment is way out of line. Frankly a lot of the burden should be on these alleged victims who knowingly continue to take no security procautions at all. Who was hurt? Who died? Who's happiness was ruined? So some businesses are out some money. May the perpetrator pay, but those businesses also have to take responsibility for their own neglect. Sasser did not impact me in the least, but then I do not run any software made by Microsoft because they refuse to take security seriously.
Yeah, just go kill everybody. That way nobody'll be around to commit crime anymore.
I don't agree with the death penalty at all, but one thing that is absolutely out of the question in the west is the death penalty for non-murder crimes, you just don't do that. Seriously what kind of message is that? Killing is ok as long as you only kill people who have killed others? - and now killing is ok as long as you only kill people who have caused very very expensive damage? The idea is absurd.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Ok, say someone hits me intentionally, obviously they are at fault. However, what happens when my air bag does not go off like it is supposed to, or my seat belt breaks. Or perhaps the car just explodes. Now imagine Ford knew about these faults but decided against fixing them, or decided to fix them only with in next years model of car and tell everyone to upgrade if they want a product that is not broken.
Look no matter how you slice it, there really is no perfect analogy, the point I am trying to make is that MS has to share some of the blame here. They wrote the software that made what used to be an urban legend about email viruses a reality, they designed their operating systems so that everyone runs as root and to not run as root limits your ability to run applications (even many of their applications). They designed an RPC endpoint mapper with buffer overruns that allowed worms to hijack the system, and made it so this endpoint mapper could not be turned off, and had to always listen on all eth devices. They have such an abysmal security record that almost nobody in the security industry takes them seriously, and many enterprises have been trying to migrate from them for years on their security track record alone. Legally they have no responsibility, they absolve themselves of that in the EULA, but it would be nice if the tech media held them accountable for the vast number of flaws in their OS and apps that are exploited. Hell, how many exist in IE alone that have been unpatched for years. Last time I checked it was around 20 or so. Writing viruses should not be acceptable, but neither should their actions (or lack thereof) in the eyes of the world.
Finkployd
Of course, arson is more likely to kill people, but many people don't realize how many lives depend on the world economy. Every million dollars wasted in the US may be a starving child in the third world.
This is something joked about all too often, and it is hardly a laughing matter.
Oh bullshit. I love the idea of virus writers and spammers getting raped in prison. They've annoyed millions of people--what the fuck's wrong with a little karmic payback?
The only question should be:
Extra Crispy or Original Recipe?
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
First of all, who are the morons who keep buying this software that keeps on being infiltrated and infected? How many times do you have to burn your hand before you stop touching the fucking stove?
Secondly, how about we start punishing the executives who cost normal people collectively billions of dollars of their investments and often times retirement? Is it only a crime when you cost a corporation money and not an individual?
Lastly, the criminal justice system, trial by jury specifically, has been PROVEN way too flawed to take someone's life for any crime. Take a look at the exoneration rates. Whether or not the death penalty is appropriate for the crime is meaningless if you cannot accurately determine the guilty from the innocent in the first place. Obviously throwing punishment out the window is out of the question but lets stick to punishments we can renige on.
If the hacking or cracking results in death or is terrorism (e.g. shutting down hospital systems or nuclear power station infrastructure), the haxor should face the musketry, no less. In a few years many people will be killed by on-line attacks against infocomms infrastructure, because our lives depend more and more on it.
BTW, I am sorry the Sven Jaschan guy wasn't from Iran. He would get a "suspended" sentence in a very different way there. They do it in public with a big crane so the rest of the people can smarten up.
Many companies make money at the misfortune of others. If there was no such thing as a virus, Symantec and Trend would not be in business. If the "pirating" of MP3's wasnt so wide scale do you think as many people would be interested in an iPod? It is all relative. One mans misfortune is another mans gain. It just sucks to be on the misfortune side :P
sorry, to say this, but who wishes death penalty (it doesn't matter in which form or why), is really mentally retarded.
We have already passed the year 2000 and one of the richest nations (usa) has yet death penalties!!!
They are yet in the middle ages!!!
You ask why?
Then ask yourself: What do you win with death penalties? what? You know that! Nothing!
Perhaps some psychological selfsatisfaction. Wow, superb, that was it all?
What about making them do social work on society instead of killing a person? (perhaps also for lifetime)
This is good for society and helps society. And it has also a the same side effect as death penalty. It gives you also selfsatifaction knowing the person meant to death has know to work for society without having chances to earn much money or having success.
And perhaps the person begins to love his social work. Would this not be more selfsatisfying knowing you turned a "bad" person to a "good" person?
I am really tired of such dumb discussions. Everyone knows death penalty is NO solution.
Politicians use that only to make the popultian fear, the same as in the middle ages.
I hope many people get more reasonable.
PS: sorry for not being native speaker, but I hope you understand my text.
Sorry I was refering to them being more violent and dangerous if they have nothing to lose, not that they should be executed.
I want to see an assortment of punishment applied to most of our political people, and I want to see Bernie in jail and ass-raped every day, as well as those Enron people. There's just no excuse for assholeism. Assholes need to be removed from our society.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
A life for a life.
Nothing short of killing someone should warrent the death penalty, if that.
Innocent people die in surgery, too. No one goes around claiming surgery is bad because it kills a very small amount of people and helps a great deal.
If the death penalty really did help people more than it hurt people, it wouldn't be so bad. I mean, it would be possible to stomach the one innocent fatality if a thousand would-be murderers were dissuaded from murdering by the threat of death. But that isn't the case.
Simply saying "innocents die" isn't really fair, because lots of innocents die from lots of things we do as a culture. "Innocents die for no reason" is the part most of us can't stand.
Corporations are people in so far as they have rights but usually they are not legally required to have many responsibilities. Seems pretty shadey to me. How often do you see corporations go to jail for bad behavior or sent off to kill the commies? If they have no social responsibility they deserve no benefits. Let them sink or swim as they best can.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
C) A five-year ban on using computers.
...
E) Something worse [than death]
Seems like E is redundant for the population in question. And, by the way, I buy this assertion completely:
Hackers are the Internet equivalent of Richard Reid,
This is indisputably true. And having your network DOS'd is also the Internet equivalent of having your body blown to bits over the Atlantic. For that matter being forced to concede in chess is the gaming equivalent of having your country forced into unconditional surrender.
Where we get into trouble is figuring because situations are analagous they must then be equally serious.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
What the hacker/cracker does should decide the consequences, not what method was used.
If some 14 yearold creates a virus that erases billions of dollars from a server, then he should be tried as if he had walked into a bank and torched the vault.
If a terrorist uses a computer virus to crash planes, then he should be tried for murder.
Its not complicated folks, its WHAT you are doing, not HOW you are doing it.
Remember folks, slashdot doesn't have a -1 "disagree" moderation!
RIAA's own virus
tcboo
The western world is ale to define "poverty" much less strictly than other countries for a number of reasons.
For starters, even people with no job and literally zero incone often have amassed quite a few nice things - because we've got so many lines of credit available. Everything from "payday loan" places to pawn shops to credit cards to home equity loans. (If you've got a half-way decent home you received in a will when someone in your family died, you've got a ticket to a pretty good-sized loan right there!) And can't pay the payments afterwards? Well, put aside about $800 and you can easily get a bankruptcy lawyer to write it all off. A little careful planning before and during the process, and you'll probably end up keeping all that stuff you bought on the defaulted loan, too.
I really don't think many, if any, of these mechanisms exist in many poorer nations?
We also have a system of government that's willing to give people quite a bit of "basic necessities" if they're willing to do a baseline minimal amount of work in return. I live in a relatively "poor" neighborhood myself, and I constantly see where my neighbors own just about all of the same things I do - despite the fact I worked in relatively good-paying I.T. and computer type jobs, while most of them worked at places like Waffle House, Steak and Shake, or doing housekeeping. How's it possible? Well, consider SBC gives them heavily subsidized DSL service as long as their income is below a certain point... Consider govt. will pay for their car repairs if their vehicles don't pass state inspection, as long as their income is below a certain point... Consider the food stamps and daycare assistance programs, free or subsidized health insurance, assistance programs for those who can't pay their utilitiy bills, section 8 housing (the house next door to the one I bought is rented out section 8 right now), and so on. If they take full advantage of all of these, it pretty well makes up the full difference between our incomes.
In fact, I think we're rapidly headed towards a United States with no "middle class", except in name only - for just this reason.
First, the writer assumes that the death penalty or more serious punishments, such as serving a life sentence in a maximum security prison, do deter crime. One argument, I know, against the death penalty is that there is no relationship, or even correlation, between the crimes that the death penalty punishes and crime. Second, the writer assumes that Landsburg is correct. If, say, a majority of economists disagree with him, this removes perhaps the most important part of his reasoning and, therefore, his conclusion that the death penalty is necessary. Third, if you're going to harshly punish hacking, should other white collar crimes also be considered? Why, for instance, should Martha Stewart or, possibly, Ken Lay be treated differently? Isn't insider-trading and manipulating a corporation's accounting system to falsely show profits, at least as harmful, as hacking?
spyware/adware makers be cheaper and more cost effective than killing a murderer? Anyone have a link?
I must say, I don't know if the author of this article has ever tried to write any satire before. If so he needs to work on it. But anyway...
I would suggest that anyone taking his op-ed seriously needs to read Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal. It's a fantastic piece about dealing with 18th Century England's population/poverty/crime problems by eating the poor. It also is not The Idiot's Guide to GTK+ or some such book.
I rarely like to deal in such absolute terms, but I think given the fact that death is suggested, it's justified. Death should never be seen as appropriate punishment for lost profits, income, income potential, or any other purely monetary idea. Anyone who would subscribe to the ideal that the severity of the punishment should fit the crime would certainly agree.
In 2000 Micro$oft paid ZERO Federal taxes.
For the last FIVE years before Enron becoame defunct it also paid ZERO Federal taxes.
Boeing corporation, in 2003 paid ZERO federal taxes as well.
That's right - YOU paid more federal tax a few years ago then fricking M$, Boeing or Enron.
You want to save society some cash?
How about we start knocking off a few corporate monopolists before we start on the script kiddies?
----- In Your Cubicle No One Can Hear You Scream...
Computer damage almost always translates to dollar figures - and no amount of money is worth an intelligent life. It's amusing to me that these are the same people who are pro-life because they don't believe in taking an innocent life... Especially considering the way viruses sometimes spread incidentally, how can we place all of the blame squarely on the shoulders of the virus writer? Aren't the companies who SELL the bug-infested software at least partially to blame? I think our priorities are a little messed up. Desktop computer usage has become so simple for mundane tasks that people underestimate the importance of properly learning to use their computers. Then they start to depend on them for business. The poor fool who puts infected or porous software on his computer and does not bother to update it or investigate its security flaws needs to take at least a little responsibility for his possession. You can equip a car with seat belts, but the law says you HAVE to wear them. Why not pass a law that requires people to lock down their computers, or else not bitch about getting screwed. If you did everything you could and you were STILL wiped clean - that's a different story? Perhaps we need a new arm of the insurance industry (*smacks own face*) - one that insures people against security breaches, but requires them to take certain precautions. That all said, I agree that there should be crimes and penalties for people who write malicious code - but when you accept for a second that code does exactly what it's told to do - and realize that data doesn't care about itself - how do we separate people who write "malicious" code from a keyboard manufacturer who puts a "delete" key on his keyboard? Do we start going after companies that make it very easy to delete a lot of data at once? How do we define "good code" vs "bad code"? Is intent really all that matters? Then do we arrest people who write code with malicious intent before they release it? If intent is the crime, then we run into thought-crime and the possibility to arrest someone who begins to plan a virus on paper without ever even writing the code. If we go to that extreme, who do we say is allowed to write proof of concept code and is allowed to find fixes? The lines begin to blur - and while I agree and accept that someone needs to take responsibility somewhere along the way, I think it all goes back to software manufacturers simply writing better code. If we demand more, we will find that we get more. Passing the buck and threatening lives has got to be the dumbest solution.
So, if I "liberate" some merchandise from a store, where there is no store clerk "actively resisting" my theft, then the store clerk is as guilty as I am? If I steal some coffee for example (and to quote from an old l0pht advisory; "Remember, coffee WANTS to be free!"), then because I am "owning" the coffee, and making the coffee do something that the store owner didn't want it to do (namely, leave, without being paid for), then the store owner is somehow to blame for this?
In any crime, there is a transgressor and a victim, and the transgressor is at fault. If you break into a computer, or a house, or a store, and you steal something, or break something, or erase something, you've just committed a crime, regardless of how you want to justify it to yourself. If you write a program or build a robot to do these things, you're still the stimulus for the crime, and you're still at fault, end of story.
Now, if you write a program which causes damage unintentionally, then the line becomes a bit fuzzier, but if your program is committing electronic trespass, it's already committing a crime, and any damage that results is therefore the result of a criminal act.
Personally, I think we should just use our existing standards in doling out punishment. Let's see, someone specifically and intentionally caused serious damage to a number of companies in the area of billions of dollars.. hrm...
I know!
Let's let him stay home for a few years while we "work up a case", then run him through a lengthy trial that results in about 6 months of minimum security and community service, with time off to see his kids after all, since we can't have the children of criminals miss their daddy during a holiday! Oh, and when he gets out of Camp [Insert name of something harmless, like Stay-Puft Marshmellow Man], let's give him a book deal for a few million dollars, and then send him out on tour, perhaps giving lectures about computer security and ethics!
Hrm, on second thought, we only do that to criminals in America if they've profitted enormously through their mischief.
Those kooky CEO's!
I think that it would much more beneficial to go after the software vendors that unleash buggy software on everybody. All of these virii and worms are a result of substandard design of the software.
So, as the precedent setting act, I propose castrating all of Microsoft's executive board, starting with Bill Gates. That will show them!
I remember reading Moore's Utopia a while ago, and one of the more interesting ideas in it went something like this:
If all crimes, regardless of severity, were punished equally, there would be no incentive not to commit more serious crimes.
In other words, if a "hacker" knows the death penalty is the consequence, what's to stop them from using deadly force in their defense? Murder usually equals the death sentence, and since death is already a given for being a hacker, there is no loss for choosing to kill.
For getting a reaction, I commend the author. I commend them in the same way I'd commend John C. Dvorak. Well done, good troll, but your opinion is ultimately moronic.
viruses are great. really! they ensure survival of the fittest in software. software darwinism. ;)
Capitalism causes more headaches and problems for me and my friends than anything hackers do.
Why not kill all these businessmen who are destroying Earth and want to kill all the persons who are making problems to them ? Enough is enough
Yes, he's to blame, and he is going to have to give you millions once you spill the stolen coffee on your lap and sue him.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
On the other hand, it is conceivable that people may die as a result of a virus in hospitals, for example.
:-) Now, if any danm hospital administrator is using an x86 machine on ANY critical systems, he/she should be taken out and shot(figuratively speaking of course). The gov't should step in and not allow these machines to be used for this purpose any more than they should allow defective cars on the road or spoiled meat to be served in a restaurant. Critical systems should be certified the way aircraft are certified to be airworthy.
Most people die in hospitals from bacterial infections, not viral
What?
Way to far into the territory of non-equal punishment for an equal crime. Why don't we just kill everyone who commits a crime? The death penalty is necessary, but a property crime is a property crime, just because we let law enforcement shoot civilians for suspicion of a property drime does not mean we should let the courts kill us for it.
What about the companies themselves who let these incidents happen, the companies like Microshaft, suck, shit, sack of weasels take it in the ass if it is their software that causes this situation to happen so frequently in the first place? How about secure first, performance after for the banking system? Yeah right, that would cost money, and some kid from who cares where hacking away genius-style isn't worth snot anyways, jsut ask a Chinese Government Abortion Doctor about the value of a child, any child.
That stupid damage number is a joke.
Billions , yeah right. The same baked air billions as the trade markets generate ever nanosecond. BS BS BS.
Anyway, Any company that is sjitty enough to allow such large damages from a simple script kiddy deserves to go out of bussiness.
The mear fact that people are even considering this an option shows mankind is simply to sick to survive.
retep.
No, the irony is not lost on me.
What John Tierney (and Steven E. Landsburg, who he cites) have missed is that script kiddies, while obnoxious and moderately costly to society, also provide a valuable benefit. By creating an environment where leaving a security hole open has tangible consequences, they provide a real impetus for making sure those holes get fixed, and soon. This makes it a lot harder for a real terrorist to do actual damage.
If you really did impose the death penalty for these small-time vandals, it would certainly get rid of most of them, but it would also let people get lazy and stop updating their operating system and anti-virus software. And that would be much, much worse because the first smart and motivated malicious hacker to come along would have the run of most of the Internet. We would be replacing a swarm of minor pests with a few evildoers who are willing to risk death to achieve their goals.
Script kiddies are like the common cold. They're annoying and they cost you some productivity but they also exercise your immune system so it will be able to stop the real threats.
No. A single virus can cause *billions of dollars* of damage. Do you have any clue how many lives that screws up, how much lost productivity that is, how many hours of peoples' lives are wasted, how many pepole end up losing sleep, getting ulcers, and so forth? Stocks drop. Old people lose their retirements. The list goes on practically forever.
I don't know if or when the death penalty should be invoked, but I have absolutely no problem with sentencing criminals such as the Sasser worm writer to a lifetime of extremely hard, onerous labor. Or to spend the rest of their lives in public stocks. I can think of several lifetime penalties that would be excellent, even though they don't begin to repay the debt (it's impossible).
This has nothing to do with people who merely hack into systems to see if they can. This is about property damage on a colossal scale, and wasted lives.
Now frankly, I think you could make the same case against certain government agencies, but that's another thread.
And if Americans are allowed to buy prescription drugs for cheaper from Canada should the lawmakers who changed the law be charged for the deaths of people 10 years down the road for medicines that were never researched because the drug companies could no longer make the profits that allowed them to spend billions of dollars per year in research?
In that case I guess they're damned if you do damned if you dont.
Phil
the article reminds me of how in Dante's "Inferno" thieves are placed in a lower circle of hell than murderers.
when religion is no longer the opiate of the masses, governments will resort to real opiates.
"In many ways our justice system makes victims out of the perpetrators of crimes when the punishment is way out of proportion to the actual crime committed. When that happens, the justice system is perpetrating an injustice on the person found guilty in court."
When that happens the justice system is no longer a justice system at all but merely a means of oppression. But worse, it exercises oppression not only over those "convicted of crime" (which itself would have little meaning in an unjust system), but also all people who must live under the yoke of oppression and the threat of being unjustly victimized.
No one has a right to their *own* opinion. They have a right to the TRUTH.
Haven't the civilized world already abolished the death penalty? Is this Saudi Arabia and China we are talking about?
CEO: It seems that some funds are missing, what happens? ...so, THAT is what that button was for! Silly me!
CFO: I can't fathom how this happened!
Financial analyst (after a few months): The CFO diverted the funds in an offshore account in the Bermudas.
CFO:
CEO: It is clear to me that this fraud was non-intentional.
You're not old until regret takes the place of your dreams.
To some, computer problems are the modern day equivalent of cows whose udders have dried up. Victims want something to blame, some witch to burn. Some victims don't want to take responsibility for their inactions (or actions) that may have contributed to their misfortunes. Some want others to take responsibility, and then "guarantee" that responsibility by being allowed to lynch whomever is handy.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
It really is extremely telling that this article is from the USA. Why is it that in america, a lot of people seem to value money above life? Not just human life, but they actually value money above the life around; "Oh, honey the dog's ill. It'll cost $300 to fix. Or $30 to have him euthanised" "Fuck that, I could get a new computer for that. Put him down" Is that really all that unrealistic a statement? You cannot out a value on human life either. Life is sacred. Money is merely a little bit of paper with a naff picture on it. Big business' losing $x million means nothing to me. They don't matter compared to a human life. I despise murderers and rapists because they do not hold human life sacred. I despise people like the goverment of Texas, because they are exactly the same. Killing people because you're pissed at them, or because they caused you, through your own stupidity to lose money is NOT a good, right or allowable thing. That's what Al Quaeda and other terrorist groups do. Al Quaeda are pissed at the USA for destroying the holiness of their sacred lands (mainly Saudi). So they go and kill a lot of americans in the hope it will deter the USA from staying in the middle east. Just like the government of texas are pissed at people breaking the law, so they murder people, in the hopes it will deter people from murdering each other. Despicable. In the end, this idea is sick on many levels. I found it utterly disgusting that a government should want to execute anyone. I found it even worse that they'd do it for money, or because that person has caused people, through their own abject stupidity, to lose money. I hate hackers, they're a damned pain in the arse, don't get me wrong. But they don't sicken me, like scum who would suggest the execution of people based on the fact that others lost money (again, via their own total stupidity) . Mind you, I know that windows is inherently insecure, and so I installed a different OS. It was SUSE, I now run Mac OS X. I know that windows is insecure, because there are over 150,000 unique virii for it. Anyone who doesn't see it coming therefore is fucking stupid. Anyways, at the end of the day, I'll leave the probably 3 people who read this, and have read this far with an american saying (that's actual american, not euro-american): "Only when the last tree has been felled, and the last river polluted, will white men realise that you cannot eat money, and that you cannot drink oil."
The truth shall always be free: Boris Floricic is Tron.
on one hand - true. "hackers" cause companies to lose time and money on IT maintenance. :-)
on the other hand - antivirus and anti-spyware companies are raking it in, so the vicious clusterfuck of making money continues
--- sig moved for great justice.
McDonalds is more expensive, if you don't value your time.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
Sounds to me like this asshole properly failed to secure his computer, got hit with a virus, and now wants to go on a government-sanctioned killing rampage against everyone he believes is the source of his irritation.
Hey, if we aren't going to dick around why not just make ALL 'serious' crimes punishable by death? And while we're at it, let's harvest the organs of these evil lawbreakers and use them to save the lives of countless upright citizens! I think Niven had something to say about that....
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
If large companies / corporations have so much trouble with systems breaking down and hackers, I have a simple solution. Hire competent people. Not some suckup, short skirt, or relative. Part of the problem is that computers and their data contain information. Having someone smart handling this stuff, makes it more difficult to manipulate this data. Then of course another problem is that somebody smart handling the IT will probably be more intellignet then the polically correct boob that hires them. And we should all know that no boss likes any worker smarter then them "To succeed in this world, one must appear like a fool and be wise"- Montesque
Seriously - when will the gov't begin applying the death penalty to companies like Enron that run rampant over their employees?
A fine amounting to a minimal percentage of a companies revenues isn't a deterrent. A company worryng that they will be shut down and their assests seized might start behaving.
What about the 34,000,000 US homeless people?
Its a bit ironic that they are willing to consider the death sentence for hackers, but not willing to consider switching to another operating system.
You know, on a global scale, how we define "poor" and "poverty" is kind of silly. ...
Yet in the western world, we define "poverty" as not being able to afford broad-band, or only having one game console, or only having basic cable.
Waaay offtopic, but lets play.
Poor, rich, poverty, money, and all of that are manmade objects. They are not real in "the real world". I would bet that a motivated homeless person eating out of trashcans here in the US can probably eat better than a majority of the people in the "3rd" or "4th" world countries.
Poor, rich, and all that is relative. Being at the bottom of any list is not desirable. I used to think the same thing, that the US people don't know poverty, but if you've ever had the pleasure of really knowing a poor person, wow. They are different, and at the bottom for a reason.
If you can't afford broadband and other junk, you are not as skilled and successful as other people comparatively, so your respect and dignity goes down in comparison of those people. Its that simple.
Also, a trick to remember is that poor is a state of mind, its not a level of the amount of money you have. If I were to rob Bill Gates, the richest man in the world, and leave him pennyless, I doubt he would instantly become "poor". On the inverse, I don't consider people with no money by choice poor. Take Jesus or Mother Theresa as examples. To my knowledge neither of these people had cash, but they are not poor icons, nor are they ever considered poor.
Remember, poor people suck, just ask Kenny.
Basically, the technology of farming in the US vastly outcompetes everything else, with the cost of shipping accounted for. In a perfectly rational world, we shouldn't need to give farmers subsidies -- they're already doing a fantastic job producing.
As I understand it from anti-subsidy rhetoric, farming subsidies basically pay farmers not to plant, and send the excesses we still have onto foreign markets. Farming subsidies take many forms, from price floors and strategic reserves to ten dollar vouchers to a local farmer's market.
You're right that the efficiency of farmer's dictates how much labor we can spend on luxury goods, but I don't think anyone will be moving to the top by reducing their subsidies. I'm not sure what moving them to the top means, but if it's simply a matter of market cap (a number that represents the value of the company and it's future earnings), then farming can never compete with software. The software industry manages a 30 percent margin average. That means on average, a company that invests its money in improvements sees a return on investment in about three years, four if you count for inflation and opportunity costs of something like Treasury bonds. In contrast, everybody needs food, and we don't want to see people starving. While there is no price ceiling on computer operating systems, nessecities like food and rent are regulated carefully.
But I guess in a sense farmers are at the "top," they've got Congress moving on their behalf, in spite of overtures at the WTO on reducing farm subsidies.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
How much does a good healthy meal with vegetables cost vs. McDonald's. You do the math.
Less. They didn't do the math. Ground beef is about $3/pound. Actually, most food is around $3/pound. McDonalds is $4/meal and much less than a total pound of food.
Go tell somebody you know that you are a hacker (most of us are in the old sense of the word). They'll just look at you like 'Get the hell away from me you fuckin' thief/rapist/murderer.
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
sounds like a very dark age kind of reaction to me.
"its a hacker, burn him on the stake!"
(nad yes, im using the medias version of hacker)
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
How much does a good healthy meal with vegetables cost vs. McDonald's. You do the math. In the UK, a McDonalds meal is £2-3 IIRC (I never eat there). I can easily cook a healthy nutritious meal with high-quality ingredients for £1.50 a head - and the more people to feed, the cheaper it gets. So for a large poor family (like mine used to be) McDonalds is (relatively) expensive.
Pirate Party UK
The last thing we need is more tack-on charges, like "using a computer in comission of a felony."
I agree. Severe penalties should be awarded for such breaches of security. But why do you want to punish the hacker? It is his nature to commit such deeds. Yeah... rapists should be punished... and ok... hackers ought to be too. But quite frankly, it is impractical to take the approach of reprimanding the hacker and therefore assuming that security is ensured. The real problem is we have a huge amount of systems out there running very insecure operating systems. I will not name them, but the list is obvious. Consider a prison. You got bars... you got cells. There are criminals being held... assumably they are guilty, and these guys, by their very nature, do bad things, as do hackers, for whatever reason. But if these inmates were to "breach" security by breaking out (analagous to a hacker breaking into a secure system) and then going out and killing someone (analagous to a hacker stealing data or destroying data), who is the bigger criminal here... the criminal who is pre-determined to be a criminal by his very nature, or the flaming jack-a** that designed the prison (analagous to insecure system)? If you buy a canoe and go out into a lake and the damn things starts to leak and let the water in, are you going to drain the lake and beat up the water, or find the idiot who made the canoe and punish him somehow? I expect some interesting responses to my perspective. Regards.
Jeebus, where did you come up with that number? More than one in ten Americans are homeless?
A quick Google gave me a total of about 600,000.
Send them to the Phantom Zone. In the meantime, mandatory, parole free jail one year of jail time in a maximum security prison. If they can survive that, well good for 'em.
... than a lamb. Wasn't that a saying back in times when you could be hung for minor crimes?
If they are going to kill you anyway then don't just release a virus to do a little bit of mischief, cause some deaths. In fact cause a LOT of deaths. Able to hack into a nuclear power plant? Go for it, see how far it'll blow. Enough people will think like that to make the suggestion very dangerous.
How can anyone rationally suggest this when law envorcement and the general public have no idea what "hacking" is anyway? I once told someone I worked (programmed) on crypto stuff ... and had to explain for the next 10 minutes that in fact it WAS legal. Gees! And these are the "peers" that would judge me?
Bitter and proud of it.
Slightly offtopic, but never mind:
I disagree with your last point - good healthy meals don't really cost that much, and if you buy your stuff cleverly, less than McDonald's, certainly on a yearly basis. I live in the Netherlands so I can't speak for the US, but right here, vegetables are dirt cheap.
The real issue is how much people care about food, which turns out to be a lot less than they care about a house, a car, a computer and a television. Therefore, they are willing to compromise.
Furthermore, making good, healthy meals, takes a lot more time than driving to McDonalds. Poorer families might not have the luxury of having one of the parents at home making a good meal. So instead, they order a pizza or drive to the McDrive.
Then I thought a bit harder, and realised it was probably my fence. My responsibility to keep it up, if I wanted them not to wander in.
Same with computers. Microsoft's EULA is clear, as is the GPL. Don't know about Apple. "Use at your own risk".
It's your own fault if you use a computer and get taken advantage of. You can learn, it may take time, you may not be bright enough to understand, you may not like what you find out. Maybe you figure you should have bought a different brand of computer; IBM S/390 is rumoured to be pretty bulletproof.
Thanks for doing the google search for me. I was thinking, "Shit, that's bigger than the population of many states."
It actually sounds close to the number of families that don't own homes in the US (renters), but that figure was from a while ago.
Network Security: It always comes down to a big guy with a gun.
To borrow a line from Douglas Adams; I think that Professor Landsburg should be sent back in time on a prehistoric planet and be told to evolve into a more sensible life form. Death for hacking?!? WTF?! Get some prespective, death for hacking is rather extreme. Yes, hacking inconveniences everyone but considering that most of what it does is temporarily limit our access to the frills that our society has wrapped it's self in.
Here's new reality TV for you: Professor Landsburg living in a hut somewhere, fending off the land for awhile. He would quickly learn that all the technological trappings that we've wrapped ourself in is just frills and the basics of food, water, shelter, companionship and occasional medical care are all you "need" and that everything else is just conveniences. Many people in the world don't have access to those conveniences; many more don't even have access to the basic needs. There is a reason why many of us in the computer community use the abbreviation IRL online!
*It's not what you can do for the Dark Side but what the Dark Side can do for you!*
Hello!? I believe the parent post is intended to mean classes of persons, not absolute poverty. But apparently everybody seemed to miss that.
You might as well argue that the CEO of (name the company of your favorite corporate scam) is not rich because Bill Gates is rich (assuming Microsoft is not the company named).
Well, well, well. And they said all the communists told us back in the days was lies. The Soviets, our Big Brothers, told us once that without them, the imperialist USA would deploy its tanks everywhere and destroy all freedoms. In Soviet Russia, freedom destroys you?
No, seriously, capital punishment for what? We all remember how entering a URL could get you labelled as a hacker. That should teach them naughty students! Oh, see, grandma is byuing a mod chip for her little grandson's playstation. Ahrr the crazed hax0rs, we gotta get 'em! They're terrorists, ruining our democracy!
In the meantime, all we can do is run around shouting "Come See The Violence Inherent In The System! Help, Help, I'm Being Repressed!". And what would the results be? You guessed: None.
According to my calculations, 98.23% of those are not homeless. However, it must be awfully crowded in your head.
Who is going to make that measurement - you, a judge, the President? Who decides that one person (you, me, whoever) is worth less than one or ten or a million other people? What criteria determine the value of that life?
I consider my life more important than yours, in fact even my cat has more value than you (to me anyway, as I don't know you and probably never will - don't take it personally). With that said, I consider all life sacred, and would be very upset if I had to choose life or death between you and my cat.
The only person who owns a life is oneself (assuming we keep Your Deity Of Choice out of the matter), which means only one person has the right to choose to make a sacrifice such as "If I choose death, millions of cancer victims will live".
-- Pete.
Monochrome - Probably the UK's largest internet BBS
The author is missing other the main culprit in these crimes, Microsoft and ignorant users. It comes down to software being created that so inherently insecure that a teenage boy with basic programming skills could cause this type of mayhem. Also, where is the responsibility of corporations when it comes to understanding the software they use and what it's vulnerabilities are.
I actually think it's criminal for corporations that run businesses that our Country's stability depends on to not adequetly protect themselves. Give the CTOs the death penalty.
Sure I agree that the punishment for Sven was lite compared to the outcome of his actions. I don't think that he could have ever imagined that the results would have been so widespread. You would think that these IT departments could have defended themselves better, have understood the potential risks as well as had contingencies and backups for this kind of situation.
The author also fails to mention the "legal" spyware industry that I think is as much of a problem as hackers. I guess since they're in it for the money, that makes it ok.
Are you a lobbyist from the colostomy bag industry?
Me (Blog)
Then the article goes on to apply the same logic to a virus writer:
And I can't accept that, because I disagree with the premise: that I bear my proportionate share of that cost. I can't help it, but I still have this nagging sensation that I don't. Because in the end, one thing I know for sure is this: a victim worm/virus victim chooses to be a victim, and if you don't want to be a victim, you never will be.The catch is that I'm just thinking of victimhood as having my computer compromised. I'm casually ignoring the fact that when my bank's incompetent IT department decides to allow viruses to run on their machines, it means that they will charge me higher service charges. I conveniently ignore the fact that if a chile farmer decides to run whatever trojans that strangers email to him, the price of chile goes up.
I may not pay a proportionate share of the cost, but my decision to not run viruses, doesn't let me get off completely free, either. Even people who choose not to be direct victims, still end up being indirect victims.
But even still, not all my anger is directed at the virus writer. I just can't help but pinning some of the blame on the direct victims. I mean, if we executed all of them, we'd be just as safe as if we executed all the virus writers. ;-)
His conclusion:
But that just raises the question of whether virus protection is really unavailable in the marketplace. I'm not referring to McAfee's products, though, but rather, education and common sense.That scares me: are we really just writing off the possibility that some day people will learn to not run viruses? Have we given up? With murder, it makes sense to give up. Government can't insure you don't get murdered. If someone wants to kill me, there's not really much I can do about it (and still live a happy life), so deterrence is the only thing that protects me. I can't accept that viruses have to be like that too.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Read/study anything of use in criminiology and you will quickly learn that deterence (by example of punishment) has only a low and temporary effect on the prevalence of crime.
Yes, many will argue that the concept of incapacitation is in effect pure dterence and that death is the greatest of all incapacitation tactics, but killing someone is expensive, getting the death penalty to stick is arduous, and if it ever does stick, then it's years upon years later when the crime is no longer associated with the crime.
Solution? Strong, relative penalties, that juries will quickly agree to (in most cases, the judge determines the penalty, but his decision bottlenecks at the measurement of severity of crime by the jusry-- thus, the jury decides the penalty).
Crime: Hack a system and steal info that does $$ damage?
Penalty: Pay back the $$ and actual damages. Go to prison for 1 year to begin to work off the $$ and learn a little deterence. Leave prison, enter probation, have a lean put on all income to continue to pay off damages.
So our interdependence makes us slaves, because some men must work for other men. The root of all problems is economic, the state should build industry and divide the procedes equally so we can live without the hinderance of other men, so we can be left to pursue happiness. How else could we get everyone to cooperate? Natural cooperation leads to happiness, but by forcing cooperation through such absolute control of markets, can happiness be achieved?
In such a system who decides what professional roles we take? Why should I study to become a doctor and work tirelessly when I am getting paid just the same as the farmer that sits on his ass and doesn't even spend the effort to grow decent crops? Who goes to what school to study what, and who decides what range of material will be taught? Where are the incentives for the brilliant to pursue society's most urgent needs? Who will make sure resources get directed to the "best" public needs? Is there a set of "best" public needs? Can a singular government decide priorities better than people with cash in hand, ready to pay a premium for the most wanted products and services? Some innovations require more than a government salary to develop, and many require hard work that won't happend without additional reward.
On top of this, when you disallow markets they surface in the most insidious and corrupt ways, just look at Russia. When market structures are stricly enforced, not even executions can deter alternate ones from forming. Witness Stalin's massacres, a testament that humanely enforcing such a limited market is impossible, even with the strongest of deterrents. Worse yet, these ad-hoc markets are often corrupt, as competitive pressures go unregulated and get brutish, because of a lack of transparency and thus enforcement.
The problem with Marxism is that it complains of the alienation that competitive pressures and jealousy cause, but offers no better solution. It blames the game rather than the individual - ever hear the saying, "don't hate the playa! hate the game!"? It makes about as much sense as marixism or free market capitalism. If we are to be happy, some measure of moderation should exist in the game, so we can cooperate without trampling each other. Such moderation should involve regulations to ensure that people and the environment aren't being abused. Minimum wage comes to mind, but regulations should also allow for upward mobility, offering free or discount upper education to the poorest who show relative merit. Monopolies and regulations protecting business interests over public ones also need to be watched with care, so innovators can rise and claim their stake for better meeting public will.
Considering the deliberate nature of writing a virus, I'd think that a regulations protecting businesses should compensate them for damages caused, as much as the author can pay till bankrupcy. Intent should also be considered in punishment. If the virus results in a death, manslaughter or murder charges ought to be considered. That'll probably mean that losses on the virus writer's side will be minimal with respect to the loss incurred, but should be sufficiently devastating to act as a deterrent to others.
Finally, remember that the alternative to _choosing_ an employer in the game is having one's plays dictated by a less providing and unshakeable governmental oppressor.
"the effects of the act"
So if I kill a man and get 15 years, then his daughter murders herself b/c she has no father, do I get 30 years ?
that this article is actually an argument against the death penalty? Notice how the one on Slate begins...
"If we execute murderers, why don't we execute the people who write computer worms? It would probably be a better investment."
*IF* we execute murderers. I totally agree with him, as he's playing the devil's advocate. But, I am against the death penalty, because I think that killing is wrong. In discussions, I often advance arguments like these to demonstrate the absurdity in giving the system enough power to kill its citizens.
Aside question: what happened to the themes of forgiveness and redemption in our society?
When something terrible has happened, we are bombarded with images of victims demanding terrible punishments. In the theater the hero always kills the villain. Meanwhile, sentences continue to go up and up even for crimes of a nonviolent nature. This sentence inflation is a general result of the politics of fear.
The Christian Right, meantime, seems to have declined to a state of "two issue morality": abortion and gay marriage. Oppose both? You're a good person.
There are values being undermined here; and they are values I think Christians, Muslims and even secular humanists can agree on. The idea that a life is precious. That people can change. That we live in a world of hope.
You have a right to liberty, the sacrifice of a relatively small amount of safety (yes, you really are pretty much as safe as anyone has been in human history) to preserve freedom and the possibility redemption seems worth it to me.
Death penalty for hackers eh? Then how about death penalty for large scale corporate fraud and blatant anti-competitive behaviour? That costs ordinary people large amounts of money as well.
I am against the death penalty (for many reasons). However, if we do have it, it should be imposed for white collar corporate crime.
For example, it is a statistical certainty that people in California have died because of Enron screwing with the energy supply. Maybe it was a traffic accident, maybe it was a house fire because someone could not pay their inflated energy bill. Or maybe they suffocated because they tried to use a fire to heat their apartment
Although, as far as I know, there is no legal precedent for using statistics for felonies, you know that there are guys on death row for a lot flimsier evidence. Some of them have been let go because of the availability of DNA testing after they were convicted.
All the pro-death penalty arguments apply in this case. If deterrence works in the street, it should work for the boardroom.
I make this argument because it adds a different perspective to the death penalty debate. Basically it shows the class and race bias that lurks behind the pro-death penalty stance. It also reveals the intrinsic hypocrisy of the conservative viewpoint: why is it OK to execute a guy who used a gun in a holdup and kills one person and it's not OK to even charge a guy who steals billions, causing multiple people to die? Think about Vioxx...
Perhaps we can include hack reporters too!
Wonder if they would give Bill Gates the death penalty for hacking BASIC for microcomputers, or Steve Wozniac, the Woz for hacking the Apple.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Basically we have corporations _whining_ because they can't figure out how to hire the right folks to protect their networkers
Microsoft's negligence is just as much to blame as the crackers for debacles like Sasser. Of course the reason they continue to get away with having shitty security policies is because people keep placing the blame on end users rather than where it belongs.
By the author's own logic he should be clubbed in the head with a bat for making the thousands who read his morinic rant sick to thier stomach.
I can't stand behind the death penalty in any but the most extreme cases and I have to say that I find this ludicrous. I think a more appropriate punishment for major virus writers would be forcing them to use Windows 3.x while serving time in prison. Let the punishment fit the crime. Fuck up our computing experience and we'll fuck with yours. In fact, make them use a second machine that exclusively operates via Clippy the rest of the time.
Standing on the shoulders of giants.
"is this too harsh, even considering the billions in damage that is sometimes caused?" Since when can a person's life legally been measured by money? It's sick. Personally, I'd like to see the death penalty for developers (read: MS) who don't release patches for these viruses and harmful bugs as soon as possible. It's as much their fault for late patches as it is the people that make the tools to exploit them.
How far are you willing to carry this? Would a hundred or a thousand or a million guilty men going free still be worth the liberty of one innocent man?
If you let the guilty go free, many of them will prey on innocent people in the future. At some point, you will be causing far more suffering than you could possibly prevent. If such a policy were carried to its logical extreme, we would have to close our jails and courts, lest one innocent man among millions be convicted wrongly.
If we are to have a civil society, we have to accept the possibility of a tiny fraction of innocent people being convicted and punished for crimes they did not commit. We should make every reasonable effort to safeguard against this, but not paralyze ourselves with doubt. The perfect is the enemy of the good.
If we fail, and an innocent man is executed, well then, he died for his country.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
BTW, cancer is a symptom of cyanide vitamin deficiency. Have you been eating your buckwheat/lima beans/fruit seeds? Probably not. Anyway, pharm companies don't make any money off buckwheat and OTC vitamins vs chemo treatments. :)
In the case of Taxol BMS is making $Billions even though they didn't pay anything to come up with Taxol. Instead the NCI, National Cancer Institute, investigated and tested it paying around $50,000,000 in doing so. That was taxpayer dollars, so not only did taxpayers pay to develope Taxol they also have to pay BMS Billions more to treat cancer.
FalconShould there be a Law?
It's just as well that you hide behind the "Anonymous Coward" label as in my country it would constitute libel to accuse people of a crime that a court of law has found them innocent of. Having said that, I have to agree that the US legal system is not the best in the world.
I'm not familiar with all of these cases, but is it true to contend that OJ Simpson was a "murderous, drug-pushing thug" and didn't he have to go through the due process of law (however poor we think that process was) rather than "walking the day after they are arrested"? I think that most people would contend that OJ Simpson proved that money can buy justice in the US rather than what the grandparent suggests.
Something is happening here but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr Jones.
'Malware' that can be used to conglomerate zombie machines into botnets are obviously bad. However, worms that don't cause serious damage to data, regardless of whether they choke our networks and impose debts on companies, still have a good component; they force software companies to patch up the gaping holes in their software that would otherwise go unnoticed, and be exploited in targeted attacks with more malicious and costly consequences. Would you rather your bank lose a few thousand dollars due to 'freak virus activity' hampering their network, or one day lose all your money and not be able to do anything about it? Make the punishment fit the nature of the attack.
Invisible to moderators.
I wouldn't want him to be executed or put in prison. I would want him to take my job but pay his entire income to me so that I receive the same money for no work. After all, what's the point of my working if I can't even muster the energy to pay the bills? My job isn't that bad, but the thought of going to work really drains the energy out of me. Unfortunately, this punishment wouldn't work well with someone like Sven Jaschan, whose crimes had millions of victims, of which I was not one.
Sorry, I mean't 3,400,000...that's the top estimate anyway. The number of 30,000,000 are the ones below the poverty line.
Each time you see one of these viruses making a few victims, you read these incredible estimates of time and money lost, ranging in the billions of dollars usually.
How are these estimates computed ? Are they using some kind of RIAA/MPAA math ?
At any rate virus makers keep anti-virus companies in business, they help justify alternative OSes like OS/X and Linux and force Microsoft to be a little bit more serious about security. Viruses are only a small part of system security, so overall perhaps virus makers have a positive influence on software developers forcing them to write more robust software. Does that come into the wildy inflated estimates we constantly hear about ?
At any rate I'm having a hard time taking the article referenced seriously. The mere fact that one can read such drivel in the NYT is a bit of a worry for me. How about calling for a class action against Microsoft for being so careless in the way they wrote their software, paving the way for script kiddies to wreak some havoc? That might have some positive influence.
An economic loss should have a largely economic punishment. The death penalty should be reserved for traitors, rapists, and murderers.
In Noir, K.W. Jeter posits the case that a death penalty for copyright infringement is inevitable, as the crime is easy enough to commit without getting caught that the deterrent must be made exponentially more severe.
The war in Iraq has nothing to do with oil. The US would have been much more likely to get good deals on oil from Saddam than from a democratic Iraq. It is every bit part of the "War on Terror": Saddam was a major supporter and instigator of terrorism. It is all the same war. Canada did not participate out of ignorance of world affairs, and the dubious goals of a misguided leader in Ottawa, who wants to be seen as anti-US no matter what the consequences.
' In the end the war in Iraq was a very foolish thing to do'
It is very wise.
' The consequences for such actions have not begun to be felt. '
They have: democracy is breaking out elsewhere in the Middle East.
' In fact we are already seeing the consequences to this. China has been increasing its defence spending '
China is only doing this because it is hellbent on destroying Taiwan. As such, it is not "defence" spending. No country is threatening China.
Bush is anything but a warmonger. When you finally fight back after being attacked many times, you are not the warmonger. Iraq under Saddam was in a state of war, with Saddam killing large numbers of people inside and outside Iraq's borders. Bush has taken steps to end this.
In cases where the virus results in the loss of life - bringing down an airplane or resulting in the loss of power to a hospital for example. It must be proven however that whoever was responsible for the release the virus (not necessarily the author!) was aware of the possibility of this happening, but went through with it anyway.
That is a good example, I generalized a bit too much. That simply a strong case where he'll never ever get out of prison. In the end he still will only be punished once. ;) For such upstanding human beings such as himself they ought to put him in an ER and have them kill him and revive him 48 times in some extremely painfull wide awake lucid manner.
Speaking of dupes, wonder what Michael is up to nowadays.
http://xs4.xs.to/pics/04481/p556222.gif
> Howabout billionaires who aggressively market insecure operating systems?
I disagree with the death penalty in any form, but if we're going to punish people for these kinds of things, let's also look at whether companies knowingly release horribly insecure software.
After all, Ford was successfully sued for producing Pintos with dangerous gas tanks.
Sure, punish the person who set the fire, but also punish the companies that made the smoke alarms, fire extinguishers, and fireproof clothing if their products turn out to be useless (or flammable.)
$7M according to the article. That's probably how they estimated if the Irak invasion was a good investments or not. I can just imagine the US president saying "Well, a /democratized/ Irak can give us about x billions $ in contracts, so we can spend at least y soldiers life in trying to give Irak some liberties..." Seen anything wrong in such arguments? If we kill more people, will the price of individual life raised since the offers goes down? Can we really apply such kind of comptability methods to ethics and life (and sorry, I can't call this economy; economy has almost nothing to do with money; insurance, comptability, fiscality, management... yes. But for economy, money is just one factor, one of the most imprevisible one also).
Also, for me, punishing for a crime doesn't give the right to commit the same act, even on a criminal. A civilized society should be examplar to their own value. The value behind a death sentence system is one of vengeance, which is just an open door for personal vengeance and other personal appropriation of violence for "bringing up justice".
More than that, I don't think death penalty has never avoid someone of killing someone else. Murderers don't think "Is it worth than I risk death penalty if I get caught?" They either think they will never get caught or don't think at all. So long for the arguments about death sentence as an incitation for good behavior.
As for death sentence against a crime which only cost money... Well, bad management, bad legislation and corruption have made developped lost much more moneys to the profits of some individuals and, for most, no body get even sued against such behavior. $100M is far from a lot of money, especially compare to the amount of money those company spends in loosy investments and bad marketing. For me, there is far more money to gain by punishing those peoples instead of some "vermiscripters".
Fabien Niñoles - Debian Maintainer
a lot of hospital systems run on legacy unix.
I favor the death penalty-but I agree the higher issue:
Whatever society's stiffest penalty is, it should be applied to extreme corporate crime.
I honestly think that executing folks like Ken Lay, Fastrow and Bernie Ebbers would do wonders for the US.
You can get a computer from a dumpster for free if you are patient. Or you can ask various local businesses if they want you to get rid of their old computers for them when they upgrade. Or you can buy one from a flea market for pennies.
Please understand that computers, being a subject of rapid product evolution, become junk long before they cease to function, and therefore having one does not neccessarily imply having home or food.
Sure, the old Pentium can't run new 3D games, but it sure can run Linux. After that, it's just a matter of having the skills to create the worm and finding some place to inject it to the Internet - a public library, a netcafe, school, workplace...
You know, Microsoft could use this for propaganda - "Linux lets homeless people write worms and take over the world ! Defend yourselves, ban Open Source ! Think of the communistic anarchistic dicatatorship of hippies your children will have to live in without even IP to call their own if you don't !"
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
An open door means you weren't securing it, by a reasonable person's standards. Maybe you meant to allow people to walk in off the street and borrow your property indefinitely. That's a plausible, and even reasonable assumption to be made about your actions.
Securing your door with a lock (even a really cheap one) means you were clearly signaling that the property inside is private, and is not to be borrowed. And *breaking* that lock clearly establishes a person's intent to disregard your wishes. Whereas opening a closed door is not considered theft, I mean you walk into public offices all the time, why isn't that breaking and entering? Oh wait, because when they don't want you there, the close and lock the doors.
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
Gun manufacturers are responsible for the people they kill. Just like bakers, lawyers and bankers are responsible for the people they kill.
Good that you grasped this concept correctly :). Now you may want to hone your skills of literary expression somewhat.
I agree. Microsoft programs have no business getting anywhere near anyplace where trustworthiness is required. Whoever put them into a system whos failure might cost lives is either incompetent and should be fired or neglicent with other people's lives and should face court for it.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
To apply the situation to your analogy, theft does not enter the picture. We are not talking about someone physically removing property. We are talking about someone convincing an element of a computer system to act against the intentions of the designer. A better analogy would be if a person were able to convince a sales clerk to give them something for free. Immoral, certainly; fraudulent, perhaps, but theft it is not. In that situation, as in hacking, there are two at fault; the hacker for being dishonest, and the target computer for acquiescing. It differs from theft because in theft there is ONE person at fault, whereas here there are two. Salespeople certainly want to avoid having things stolen, but they can be manipulated into wanting to give you things for free.
People are always going to shake coke machines; you can try to persecute the exploitative side of human nature until you're blue in the face or you can just make a coke machine that can't be shaken. You can stomp your feet all you want and say "By the laws of this country you may not shake my coke machine!" all you want but if it is insecure it will be exploited. Better to pay the price now and have your systems withstand random bombardment than to shelter them; if vulnerabilities aren't costing companies money, they don't get fixed.
Look at it this way: trying to legislate against hacking attempts is like raising your children in a bubble; without the constant stimulus of daily bacterial attacks, your immune system cannot develop. The latest batch of worms are demonstrating that Windows is a fundamentally insecure operating system, and it's providing Microsoft with a financial incentive to make it more secure. Microsoft is paying its dues for years of insecure releases, and if you don't like paying the price along with them, then make the effort to patch and secure your own systems, or switch to something more secure.
You can take the high ground all you want, but running an unpatched Microsoft system on the web is like driving through Harlem with a confederate flag on your car; it's egregious oppression of your freedoms to be targeted as a result of your beliefs, true, but you should know better.
But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most... and that is the indifference of good men.
Death penalty for *SPAMMERS*!!!
I never get hacked. I get spammed to death (oddly enough)! Eventually (before the year's out), I'll just go offline for good and pretend there never was an Inet.
Astro
A classic case of "Security through Stupidity". But then again, the U.S. of the last six years has been "Everything, through Stupidity" through and through. Am surprised it came out of the New York Times though...
but so should the users and admins who don't patch their systems, don't use firewalls, and click on every stupid shiny link just to turn their mouse cursor into a smily face. Seriously, how sympathatic can you be to the user who does unsafe things.
Seriously, why do you think it's your job to fix cronic flaws in someone elses product?
This might come a little late, but your argument is a simple example of ignoring every economic factor in the situation. Firstly, urban poor families work *fucking damn hard*, and have to deal with rampant crime and drug use, not to mention poorly subsidized inner city schools. Also, the cost of living inside the city is several times that of living in a rural area. Several times.
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Not to imply anything, but your response does seem a little racist. You've romanticized the "red" state rural farm community over the racial and socioeconomic barriers on inner city, "blue" poor working class children.
And I'm not even going to pretend that there isn't subsantial racial barriers inside major cities, LET ALONE out in rural America. Sorry, but as a white male, *every single time* I have gone to a bar or restaurant just 10 miles outside of any major city limit, all I hear are racial slurs and epiphets, mainly towards blacks and hispanics. I know "secret-handshake" racism sure is trendy these days; to say one thing in public but hold other principles in action and private dialogue, hell, you might even believe you're not racist, but bullshit is bullshit.
I apolagize if this post seems a little hostile, but your point of view is an old and rather irritating restatement of the "rich man pontificating on the life of the noble poor white American farmer/soldier" while attacking the character in general of poor migrant families inside the city which he lives, who take out his trash, police the streets, cook his food, clean his house, deliver the mail, build his shops, run those shops, sell him goods, et cetera. I just don't see the jump from owning slaves and lynching to "noble, spiritual, land connected, and self reliant farmer".
And exactly how do the rural poor exhibit "self-reliance"? Last time I checked, not only were there substantial claims for food stamps and welfare from the rural "red" counties, but the majority of their public services are paid for by "blue" counties: http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2004/09/r
So, unless you mean that every rural county citizen, or farming citizen, does not rely on public schools, electricity, libraries, and running water, does not need federal regulation to keep giant corporations from screwing them out of profits so they can afford to buy their kids toys and maybe send them to college, not to mention pest control products that don't kill, physically harm, or mutate their children or themselves, and somehow find the ways or means to keep a car and farm equipment/machinery up to date, I do not believe I see where your stance really is.
That's way the hell more than Mitnick got.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
The article actually suggests that hackers should be forced to work a help desk for computer novices for 16 hours a day and use Windows 95 for the rest of their lives. Compare that with 25 years in Federal prison, dumbass.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent