RE: [ISN] Disorder saves the day

From: mea culpa (jerichot_private)
Date: Wed Jul 01 1998 - 15:41:28 PDT

  • Next message: mea culpa: "[ISN] Who will win the crypto war?"

    Reply From: Trevor Gryffyn <tgryffynt_private>
    
    > Reply From: Anton J Aylward <antont_private>
    >
    > Let me see, this guy is claiming, well, if you were cut him up on the
    > highway its OK for him to take your car, after all its not
    > theft, its just
    > joyriding, denying you the use of your own property as a protest to
    > you behaving in a manner he disagrees with.
    
    While I dont like people romping through the systems I administer and while
    I dont condone the unauthorized access of services, I take great exception
    to this kind of analogy.
    
    A person gaining access to your computer and who is not there for malicious
    purposes probably isn't going to use up much of your system resources.  It's
    less like taking someone's car for a joyride than it is like using a couple
    of someone's multitude of season passes to a baseball game.  You have the
    potential of inconveniencing them by using up something that they plan on
    using (processor time, network connections, etc) but if they were using 100%
    of what they had then you wouldn't be able to use any of it anyway.  So
    there's obviously room for one more straggler to make use of the services,
    rightfully or not.
    
    And on the argument of 'theft of service'.  Unless the
    'hacker/cracker/whatever' is transferring unsightly amounts of data and
    sucking up a lot of your bandwidth, or putting you in another bandwidth
    consumption pricing bracket, then they're not using anything that you're not
    paying for anyway.  The only way this type of intrusion would be an
    inconvenience is if your system monitored connect time and charged the
    person logging in for their time.
    
    Again, I'm not condoning the unauthorized use of services, but it seems to
    be a major flaw in logic to say that you're outright taking something that
    the rightful owner(s)/user(s) cannot use until you give it back.
    
    > Yes, but if the CIA were to hack another government's site would this
    > be considered in the same light?   Do individual have special
    > privilege
    > in the law that corporate bodies or governmental organizations don't.
    > What would be a lawyer's take on this?
    
    I dont know what a lawyer's take on it would be, but yes..  government and
    corporations sometimes have special 'rights', for right or wrong, they do.
    
    What is war if not the organized murder of our "enemies" but does anyone get
    tried for murder?  No.  Because it's in "our country's best interest" or
    it's a matter of "national security" or for whatever executive reason they
    want to give.  Corporations aren't quite so free range as that, but they can
    still invoke statutes that are in place for them to "protect their best
    interests".  Again, I dont think it's always right, but it is the way things
    are.
    
    -Trevor Gryffyn
    Meetinghouse Technologies
    Annapolis, Maryland
    
    
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