Originally Posted by c0nv3r9

This has absolutely no relation to morals.

Along the written thought process of the author, anyone that graced mp3.com back in the day was part of an evil hacker conspiracy to steal music and destroy the music industry? .. or everyone that visits thepiratebay is out to theft software?

Its called generalisation. Do it in respect to someone's nationality and you will get thrown on your ass for lack of journalistic tact. It is entirely possible that folks visiting sites on the Internet will use the information criminally; this is true for any site with informational content.. whether about guns, bombs, gerbils, bbq spicery, sexual positions or a healthy mix of all the above. The sites mentioned in the article actively discourage illegal usage of the knowledge and tools. The community surrounding those sites has sought for .. 4? 5? years to inform the public of security risks and solutions in assistance against those that would use the knowledge to cause them harm.

Ludicrous.

What defines 'sensitive information'? ping, traceroute, nmap, wget and thousands of other utilities are equally 'evil hacker tools'. Do we recess acknowledgement that they exist to avoid the misperception of a lazy local news hack? Maybe we should just tell visitors that WiFi is simply voodoo.. mystical spirits conjured to transfer electronic messages between porn viewers. That will certainly keep people from understanding what occurs when. Shit.. we should be targeting all HAMs for spreading their evil communications to the masses.

In the many years that I have traversed this forsaken technology.. equally as reader/writer/mod/admin/luser.. I can honostly report that the length of someones visit does not correlate to their intelligence or their ethic, nor does the quanitity of discussion. The suggestion that the administrative figures surrounding these forums could feasibly implement an algorithm for discerning this is simply misguided. You've obviously been on the 'reader/luser/' side of the pond for the duration.


In all this I think its quite interesting that the CoWF got dragged into things. Ethical usage of this information, discovery, and the tools/code involved.. simply has been the heart of its founding since blackwave turned it from a forum farce into something electrically tangible. I am not aware of a single publishing member within CoWF today that doesn't carry and convey that core ethic.