When is Hacking OK? Billings MT

Posted by : James Mathewson 01/10/22 When is hacking OK? When it is a demonstration of peaceful civil disobedience or it serves a vital purpose in strengthening flawed security systems.

As with any new medium, it will take a long time before the Internet matures. Not only is the technology relatively young, but the rules and mores surrounding the use of the medium are in their infancy. In many cases, there is no consensus about those rules, and healthy debates rage about how people should conduct themselves on the Net. The two biggest areas of legal anarchy right now surround intellectual property and security. Netizens tend to see free content as their inalienable right, while those who profit from content see the new medium as a way to extend their control beyond what we have in other media. Many hackers liken their role to Robyn Hood, testing security systems and getting the attention of the community in order to help those they hack defend against malicious crackers. Where to draw the line between white hats and black hats is a matter of intense debate, even in the hacking community.

These two chaotic forces come together into one whirlwind in cases where software companies design encryption schemes to protect intellectual property. Two high-profile cases this year have intensified the debate. When Dimitry Sklyarov was arrested for cracking Adobe's code for its e-book reader software I was outraged. He was jailed for ...

Click here to read the rest of this article from Computer User