It seems though Black Hats are described as "aggressive", they aren't particularly damaging; if you are a nobody, then you will be attacked and exploited quickly. However, lots of nobodies live without noticing this (?).
Certainly it's unsettling, but something wierd is going on if all these "malicious" people have lots of power and don't use it.
Makes me more friendly towards protocols that depend on goodwill for success. There's lots of stuff that is easier to do insecurely than securely, and sometimes this straddles feasible and infeasible.
It seems like there is a current, in this argument, of "Adobe's encryption was weak, therefore it is okay to break it".
However, this is fundamentally "might-makes-right", which is not good. The justification of Sklyarov's actions should be based on something else.
Possibly you can make a "shoddy craftsmanship" argument, that he was just pointing out a flaw. However, trying to make money off of the flaw is not justified.
Possibly you can make a "information wants to be free" argument, which is solid ideologically, but doesn't have much legal weight behind it.
I believe that the article on autism describes people who have problems 'seeing socially', as if we/they can't notice that someone is irritated at us/them until the non-geek is enraged. This doesn't seem to fit with my experience of geeks, both my friends and myself. Most of the people that I know are very socially perceptive, and the social 'problem', if I can call it that, is at the action end, rather than the perception end. Perhaps imagining one of those people from OSC's Homecoming series would be useful. (If you know what I'm talking about, you know who I'm talking about) Are geeks more like that socially-perceptive extreme, or the opposite, being socially-oblivious?
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It seems though Black Hats are described as "aggressive", they aren't particularly damaging; if you are a nobody, then you will be attacked and exploited quickly. However, lots of nobodies live without noticing this (?). Certainly it's unsettling, but something wierd is going on if all these "malicious" people have lots of power and don't use it. Makes me more friendly towards protocols that depend on goodwill for success. There's lots of stuff that is easier to do insecurely than securely, and sometimes this straddles feasible and infeasible.
It seems like there is a current, in this argument, of "Adobe's encryption was weak, therefore it is okay to break it". However, this is fundamentally "might-makes-right", which is not good. The justification of Sklyarov's actions should be based on something else. Possibly you can make a "shoddy craftsmanship" argument, that he was just pointing out a flaw. However, trying to make money off of the flaw is not justified. Possibly you can make a "information wants to be free" argument, which is solid ideologically, but doesn't have much legal weight behind it.
I believe that the article on autism describes people who have problems 'seeing socially', as if we/they can't notice that someone is irritated at us/them until the non-geek is enraged. This doesn't seem to fit with my experience of geeks, both my friends and myself. Most of the people that I know are very socially perceptive, and the social 'problem', if I can call it that, is at the action end, rather than the perception end. Perhaps imagining one of those people from OSC's Homecoming series would be useful. (If you know what I'm talking about, you know who I'm talking about) Are geeks more like that socially-perceptive extreme, or the opposite, being socially-oblivious?