2 ms·

This article is the typical scare-mongering from fascist mindset. This article lacks a social expert and gets just a shallow analysis by an unqualified person

by alecco 18y ago

This article is the typical scare-mongering from fascist mindset. This article lacks a social expert and gets just a shallow analysis by an unqualified person who (to me) clearly has no clue for the reasons why a kid would turn into vandalism or scamming (not necessarily hacking.) Those kids probably feel excluded and most likely have parents who don't dedicate any time to them. Be it by indifference or because of modern times work schedules. TV is the worst possible option for a tutor/nanny.

tptacek 18y ago
And I think yours is a knee-jerk immature response to an issue you haven't thought carefully about, all the more irritating because you're closer to the issue than the reporter who wrote this article. Whether or not the reporter is making a value judgement on "hacking" --- and I didn't read one --- it's bringing up a real issue. Idiot teenagers are in fact a few clicks away from a felony conviction, and the Internet does in fact facilitate, encourage, and amplify behavior that is far more likely to get you in legal trouble online than offline. Believing that doesn't mean one needs to support substantive policy changes for how we "regulate the Internet"; it just means we're attentive to a new risk faced by modern stupid teenagers. Exemplars/evidence: * The stupid kid who hacked Palin's Yahoo mail account * The stupid kids who are getting themselves sued by the RIAA * The stupid kids who break into DoD computers for IRC bragging rights I was 17-18 not long ago, and it was nowhere nearly as easy for an 17 year old then to commit theft and fraud as it is today. It does bug me that the Internet is so "unreal" that a careless person could easily fuck things up in the real world by accident on it.
- alecco 18y ago
  I'm surprised you say that. More significant crime than hacking an email account or "pwning" a government computer is committed everyday by teenagers in at least an order of magnitude more. From drug dealing to happy slapping. And the later even though is related to Internet (filming and uploading the video), it is just an amplification of a very old tradition, bullying. Nothing new. Instead of increasing the sentences and applying broken-window policies (a new form of fascism), the social problem needs first understanding and then defining good policies (from family level to national level.)
  - tptacek 18y ago
    This is the same incredibly myopic belief I held until I was 19, when I got my first full-time sysadmin job. You have no idea how expensive it is for a company to lose a server root user to a teenager; it is, in the best case, several days of lost time. At a conservative FTE of $85k, a couple days of sysadmin time is over $1000. Do $1000 of damage to someone's house and see how the legal system treats you. That's the best case. I think it's you who doesn't understand the problem here. I stand by my assertion: it is worth considering that we have created a system that encourages dumb kids to incur thousands of dollars of civil liability and serious criminal liability.

by alecco 18y ago

tptacek 18y ago

And I think yours is a knee-jerk immature response to an issue you haven't thought carefully about, all the more irritating because you're closer to the issue than the reporter who wrote this article. Whether or not the reporter is making a value judgement on "hacking" --- and I didn't read one --- it's bringing up a real issue. Idiot teenagers are in fact a few clicks away from a felony conviction, and the Internet does in fact facilitate, encourage, and amplify behavior that is far more likely to get you in legal trouble online than offline. Believing that doesn't mean one needs to support substantive policy changes for how we "regulate the Internet"; it just means we're attentive to a new risk faced by modern stupid teenagers. Exemplars/evidence: * The stupid kid who hacked Palin's Yahoo mail account * The stupid kids who are getting themselves sued by the RIAA * The stupid kids who break into DoD computers for IRC bragging rights I was 17-18 not long ago, and it was nowhere nearly as easy for an 17 year old then to commit theft and fraud as it is today. It does bug me that the Internet is so "unreal" that a careless person could easily fuck things up in the real world by accident on it.

alecco 18y ago
I'm surprised you say that. More significant crime than hacking an email account or "pwning" a government computer is committed everyday by teenagers in at least an order of magnitude more. From drug dealing to happy slapping. And the later even though is related to Internet (filming and uploading the video), it is just an amplification of a very old tradition, bullying. Nothing new. Instead of increasing the sentences and applying broken-window policies (a new form of fascism), the social problem needs first understanding and then defining good policies (from family level to national level.)
- tptacek 18y ago
  This is the same incredibly myopic belief I held until I was 19, when I got my first full-time sysadmin job. You have no idea how expensive it is for a company to lose a server root user to a teenager; it is, in the best case, several days of lost time. At a conservative FTE of $85k, a couple days of sysadmin time is over $1000. Do $1000 of damage to someone's house and see how the legal system treats you. That's the best case. I think it's you who doesn't understand the problem here. I stand by my assertion: it is worth considering that we have created a system that encourages dumb kids to incur thousands of dollars of civil liability and serious criminal liability.