Death to Hackers!

[Undertoad]

People, none of these explanations is good enough. We are seeing an entirely new form of crime that has yet to be properly understood, let alone addressed.

I'm of the mind that if there is no harm proven, there's no crime. What we have here is harm on a different scale, where each individual harm is almost immeasurable and hardly prosecutable, but when added up it makes for a lot of harm. Nimda on one system is nothing at all; Nimda on 10 systems is an annoyance; Nimda on 10,000 systems ruins everyone's day.

File sharing also manages this. Each download of a song is a copyright violation, but a very small one. The combined violations of the entire world add up to a whole lot.

(Note that I make that statement as a big fan of such file sharing, and I think RIAA is still going about it the wrong way. But these ARE copyright violations.)

The same thing happens in the "real world" when, for example, a car pollutes the air. One car is no big deal and you'd really have to work to prosecute. 10,000 cars out of repair, going down the highway is another question entirely.

The same thing happens when the combined spreading of lawn care products or pesticides leads to polluted ground water.

As far as quailty admins correctly setting up systems go, I think that's a non-starter. I say that even as I'm kinda-sorta unemployed because people don't care to hire quality admins. A good sysadmin knows that his/her system is impossible to secure. If it's on the Internet, it's vulnerable - period. No sysadmin worth their salt would ever say something like "this system can't be broken into". The quality admin says "this system is so complex that its security cannot possibly be guaranteed by anyone". All you can do is configure as best you can, install every known patch, and keep a careful eye out.

And as much as I hate MS, the open source approach does require some crazy things of you every once in a while. I'm thinking of the time I was suddenly forced to understand ALL of sendmail in order to shut down relaying back in 1997. It meant digesting that 3" thick book in short order. People always say "It's your fault for running a crappy mail transport agent!" But come on. I mean let's be realistic.

I don't know the answer, but I'm thinking that there should be application of a distributed model for prosecution. I have no idea how this would fly, but if distributed solutions have led to all of the problems, let's look to distributed solutions for the answers.