Hacking Ethics - A Lecture
You are walking home on a summer evening.
The sun is shining and the streets are quiet.
You pass by a house
and notice the front door is swinging open.
Do you:
- (a) Ring the bell and tell them.
Or:
- (b) Piss in the hall.
Or:
- (c) Piss in the hall, then ring up your friends and tell them
to come round quick and piss in the hall before the occupant
notices their door is open.
Finding security holes in multi-user, shared systems
is no big deal.
It happens all the time.
The novelty will soon wear off.
In the early days of computing and the Internet,
exploiting security holes looked clever.
Now, however, it looks like (b).
So computers are novel to you?
Get over it.
Shared computers are no more novel than shared buildings.
The shared file system at DCU
You find that protections are incorrectly set,
and you can delete someone's project.
Do you:
Good rule:
When you are exploring,
don't ever type a command that would be destructive
if the system protection was flawed.
e.g. Don't see if you have permission to delete a file
by typing:
$ rm file
It might work! And then you're in trouble.
Remember reading can be an offense as well
as writing.
Most hackers attack the innocent
Contrary to the movies,
most virus writers and hackers don't attack
powerful corporations and the military.
They attack
random, innocent, harmless people.
Most hacking looks like this:
A trusts B.
B betrays that trust by attacking A.
Most virus writing looks like this:
Pick n people at random from the phone book.
Powerless, ordinary people just trying to get by.
And cause misery for them.
Give them lots of extra work, and perhaps serious pain, for no reason.
Attack hospitals, libraries, museums
and other public goods that you are lucky to have.
Find stressed, underfunded charities,
and cause extra meaningless work for them.
Delete people's sentimental messages from their lovers, and laugh at them.
Make small businesses,
people like your own parents,
go bankrupt, and mock them as you do so.
Most hackers and virus writers
destroy because they can't create.
- They can't actually create anything interesting,
any system that people want to use.
If you want to be a great hacker,
do something useful.
Stop attacking random harmless people
and get involved in the
fight for free speech on the Internet.
This is a serious fight, involving ordinary people with
technology defeating the efforts of governments, military
and powerful organisations
around the world to stifle free speech, discussion and thought.
Activists get involved in things like:
- Writing and distributing cryptography tools.
- Hosting, mirroring and publicising sites under attack
- dissident writings,
pro-democracy sites,
Amnesty country reports,
anti-Scientology web sites, etc.
- Finding out how to break or get around
censorship software.
- Sending direct email to China
(If you don't want to be spammed, then stop censoring them).
And otherwise working to break or get around China's
censorship software.
It's a serious business in a lot of the world.
People go to jail
for the freedom to speak and publish on the Internet.
Chinese state censorship
Virus writing
Hacking for free speech in totalitarian countries
- Cult of the Dead Cow
(and direct in)
finally stop vandalising
and get involved in free speech.
-
Their interest is in a form of Internet usable
in totalitarian countries.
The Internet may eventually bring freedom to the unfree world,
but perhaps it needs to be an even tougher Internet than the one we have.
Perhaps
p2p file sharing,
which has little legitimate use in the free world
where Web sites are allowed,
has a future in the unfree world
as their poor-man's equivalent of the Web.
(p2p advocates always fail to point out
that
having a document or piece of data available on p2p
is
worse
than having it permanently available on the Web,
and is only at best a necessary evil.)
