Note: the "you" in this post is a general "you" and not a reference to the original poster or any other poster in this thread.
Whether it is $5/day or $18 million/day, the fact remains that people who hack other people's computers are violating others. There is no justification for that. Getting into an argument over exactly how much it costs takes away from that fact.
Here are the general reasons I here cracker dorks and script kiddies give for their asshole behavior:
I am doing them a service by exposing their vulnerability! Bullshit. If you wanted to do them a service, you would email the sys admin the hole being exploited. Breaking into their web site is, at best, a way of publically damaging the reputation of the web site in question as well as doing damage that can range from inconvenience to, yes, millions of dollars a day. It is very similar to breaking into your neighbours house and spray painting the walls because they forgot to lock the front door. Finally, it is very difficult to secure an NT or a UNIX machine. Punishing people because they are not the experts you think you are (but likely are not) is pathetic.
It's a company! And that makes it OK? I don't care if it is Microsoft, it is still just as wrong as doing it to an individual.
They did XXX (where XXX is some supposedly evil act). Again, so what? That does not make the act of breaking into a web site any more justified.
And, of course, the implied argument of this thread, "it doesn't cost them anything". It always costs them something. It may not be $18 million/day. It may be giving up a weekend after having worked a month without getting a weekend. It may not be anything you value at all. But it is certainly something valued by someone associated with the target site. And no one has any right to force that person to incur that cost.
The responses to your comments are exactly why Linux is unlikely ever to be well-suited as a desktop OS. Only a bunch of geeks with no idea that a computer is for getting *real work* done, not an end in itself, would think that being required to configure modelines is a good thing. Should you have the power to do it if you want to? Yes, but Linux should be minimally as simple t configure out of the box as Windows is. Generally, those screen resolutions are good enough for more real work.
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Note: the "you" in this post is a general "you" and not a reference to the original poster or any other poster in this thread.
Whether it is $5/day or $18 million/day, the fact remains that people who hack other people's computers are violating others. There is no justification for that. Getting into an argument over exactly how much it costs takes away from that fact.
Here are the general reasons I here cracker dorks and script kiddies give for their asshole behavior:
Bullshit. If you wanted to do them a service, you would email the sys admin the hole being exploited. Breaking into their web site is, at best, a way of publically damaging the reputation of the web site in question as well as doing damage that can range from inconvenience to, yes, millions of dollars a day. It is very similar to breaking into your neighbours house and spray painting the walls because they forgot to lock the front door. Finally, it is very difficult to secure an NT or a UNIX machine. Punishing people because they are not the experts you think you are (but likely are not) is pathetic.
And that makes it OK? I don't care if it is Microsoft, it is still just as wrong as doing it to an individual.
Again, so what? That does not make the act of breaking into a web site any more justified.
It always costs them something. It may not be $18 million/day. It may be giving up a weekend after having worked a month without getting a weekend. It may not be anything you value at all. But it is certainly something valued by someone associated with the target site. And no one has any right to force that person to incur that cost.
The responses to your comments are exactly why Linux is unlikely ever to be well-suited as a desktop OS. Only a bunch of geeks with no idea that a computer is for getting *real work* done, not an end in itself, would think that being required to configure modelines is a good thing. Should you have the power to do it if you want to? Yes, but Linux should be minimally as simple t configure out of the box as Windows is. Generally, those screen resolutions are good enough for more real work.
Script usage is very much a corner case. How about interactive ftp?
That is a frightening statement on their home page. Let's hope they do not honestly believe that.