Female Arrested!!

[JMI]

While it is somewhat contradictory for those of us engaged in Reverse Engineering to attempt to claim a superior moral position on all things related to this subject, very few of us can be said to be actively engaged in seeking out and intentionally damaging other people's computer systems, data, or ability to communicate.

Those who act out of deliberate malice and with destructive intent deserve the severe punishment they recieve. Many American Indian peoples used to demonstrate their superior skills at fighting by "count coup" or simply "toughing" their "enemy" with a stick used for that purpose.

I would have no problem with a skilled "hacker" who was satisfied with simply gaining entry on another system and "counting coup" with some form of a pop message that advised of the success of their effort, without damaging the system or hijacking it for some other destructive purpose.

Eval is correct, however that viruii are, in many ways made possible through the arrogance of M$ and their bloated code, although people were "hacking" into, and do still hack into machines without M$ systems. His second point is also correct, that many make the work of hackers far to easy by failing to take even the most basic precautions. Those folks have to share much of the responsibility for the success of the virii distributors, but their fault would still be only ignorance or laziness, not malice.

Regards,