With Howard Dean the dems have formally graduated from "disarray" to "debacle", with "irretrievable disaster" just around the corner.
Posted on 07/12/2005 3:17:01 PM PDT by Crackingham
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 $100 million.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Hackers are not taking human lives and therefore are not seen as violent criminals despite the human cost of their crimes.
The sentence is a joke. 30 years is more like it.
I wonder if he has a new job hacking or working with codes and ciphers in the German intelligence community...
Sounds good to me. Kill em all, IBM and Dell can sort em out.
From a guy who clicked on a pic from a Google image search, Saturday and then spent the entire day and part of Sunday eliminating "about:blank" and two trojans that somehow waltzed right thru MS Firewall, Norton Internet Security, MS Spy Blocker and a router, trying to locate passwords, access my bank and send emails to my friends, I say; allow me to mete out the justice. A little islamic stoning party might just fit.
That's my vote.
How do you know lives are not lost? Almost every aspect of our society relies on computers working correctly. Try going to a hospital without computers. Try managing the potability of a water resources operation without computers. Try dialing 911 and then hangup. The computers will direct emergency response to your home.
Hackers should be caned, 100 strikes. Give them a year of rest in prison and do them again. Repeat this for life. Outsource this Job to Singapore of course. It's hard for me to believe that hackers have not tilted the balance in life and death decisions the wrong way.
I HATE when that happens! Especially in a corporate environment. Spyware- and virus-mongers should be put on the chain gang - digging ditches in southern Mississippi. In summer.
Micro$oft's firewall is crap. I installed XP SP2 the last time I reformatted, and I didn't really care for the firewall portion. You can't even use it to block individual ports! (Or at least no way that I could find.)
So I disabled that sucker and installed Zone Alarm Pro. It's more customizable and easier to configure. MUCH tighter program access control.
If some nasty bit of code somehow found its way into my machine, ZA would immediately let me know something hinkey was going on and where it was coming from. After that, it's just a matter of hunting down the wee beastie and killing it.
You might want to look into customizing the security settings on your router, if you haven't already.
"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."
Give Prof. Landsburg the Nobel Prize in Economics for sound Reasoning
I thought I was pretty secure, although port 80 is forwarded and so are a couple of others (remote desktop); however, I now firmly believe that IE is the problem. I have been using Firefox for months, no real problems, a couple of "cookie monster" attacks - easily picked up by Norton. But I had it set with 5 tabs and didn't want to wait for them to load so I clicked IE and bammo. I am removing IE from the tray so I am not even tempted to use it.
Honey. Fire ants. Tough love.
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