Slashdot Mirror
Certified Ethical Hacker via Self Study
ddonzal writes "In his latest column for EH-Net, wireless hacking guru, Dan Hoffman, offers up his experience of attaining the CEH credential (Certified Ethical Hacker). Great read with fantastic advice for budding ethical hackers out there."
You could just as well create a course of "ethical business". Yeah, sure, you could teach the ethics of business. Whether people apply it or not is up to them. Not something that's under your control.
Don't get me wrong, teaching information is by default never wrong. Knowledge is power. Information is necessary to keep up the fight against the black hats. To abuse the quote from a different group, if information is outlawed, only outlaws will have it.
But I doubt that you can teach or even "certify" ethics. You have them, or your don't.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
>>There is a delusion regarding ethics that an unethical person cannot pretend to be ethical
>>effectively, that is, when given a question about ethics, they might want to lie, but then
>>they wouldn't know what lie is the "ethical" choice.
Probably a result of reading too much classical Greek philosophy. Socrates and Plato considered ethical truths to be self-evident, and as self-evident as other truths. As in, if someone explains to you the meaning of right action, your consciousness will become illuminated... akin to the process you go through when you read a beautiful mathematical proof for the first time. (There's no question that it's not true, you simply hadn't realized it before.) Etc., Etc. Socrates held it contradictory that someone could be a lover of knowledge and still commit evil (since evils hurt oneself, and nobody acting in one's self interest would intelligently want to hurt himself).
Of course, we can recognize now that people can quite easily not only choose unethical behavior, but also can reasonably emulate ethical behavior. An open source Quake Mod project I headed was "infiltrated" by a person who inserted cheat codes into his submissions so that he could be a dick and 0wn people inside of the game world. This was someone I had a reasonably large conversation with, etc.
Oh well. Quake is more manly than Pokemon in any event. =)
Except Socrates considered to be no truths self-evident except that he did not know any truths. If we assume that the early Platonic dialogues are accurate portrayals of Socrates (which a significant minority of scholars would dispute) then we have a picture of Socrates as a man who did not know what virtue is or if it could be taught and went around critically questioning everyone who claimed that it could be known and taught in order to find out.
You might have a better case for Plato, but Platonic ethics stems from Platonic idealism. That is to say that his ethcis doesn't come from nowhere, but from a philosophical system built on top of other ideas. Plato thought that his first prinicples were self-evident, therefore, his ethical system was not self-evident, but evident. It's truth depends not on the observer being able to see the truth of the matter for itself, but in the observer being able to demonstrate the truth of the ethical system from other principles which can be seen to be true.
But then Aristotle came along and offered a completely different basis for virtue, even if it had many of the same conclusions. And again, Aristotle's ethics was a derivative of his metaphysics. IF you subscribe to Aristotelan metaphysics, THEN you arrive at Aristotle's version of virtue ethics.
The problem here, IMO, doesn't stem from Greek philosophy so much as the human tendency to think ``my way or the highway!'' The field of ethics, even in Greek antiquity, was all about critical self examination. The tendency to assume that there is only one correct ethical system, aside from begging the question, is entirely opposed to critical self examination.
Absolutely agree!
Hacking is a scientific research and it is orthogonal to ethics. Only cracking, which is an activity, can be described as ethical or not.
Seems the exam's organizer ain't knowing what hacking means....
http://www.ieaa.org/~adrian/