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Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!harpo!eagle!mhuxt!mhuxi!mhuxa!houxm!hocda!spanky!ka
From: ka@spanky.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.followup
Subject: Re: ABC's Nightline and Software Piracy
Message-ID: <460@spanky.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 28-Aug-83 21:16:42 EDT
Article-I.D.: spanky.460
Posted: Sun Aug 28 21:16:42 1983
Date-Received: Tue, 30-Aug-83 01:07:18 EDT
References: <1925@tekecs.UUCP> <5148@cornell.UUCP>
Organization: Bell Labs, Holmdel, N. J.
Lines: 47


        Sounds like the Woz is operating at the same 12-year-old
        emotional level of most of the break-in-for-fun artists.
        Can you imagine the scene if people were breaking into
        houses just for fun, and some famous contractor comes on
        ABC and says, "Well, if people don't want their houses
        broken into, they should build them better."

        Trouble is, we just don't have any emotional ethics built
        into us (yet) about computer sabotage being naughty.

                                 David Wright

The analogy with breaking into a house of fun is a good one, but
look at how our society deals with this (as opposed to "breaking
and entering with intent to commit a felony," which generally
refers to a burgler who was caught before he had a change to
remove anything).  As I understand the legal aspect of the
situation, the person entering the house is guilty of
trespassing.  The fact that there is a law against trespassing
means that if someone enters your house and refuses to leave you
can call the police who will forcably remove him.  Actual
prosections for trespassing or uncommon.  If the person damaged
the house while breaking in to it, he could be prosecuted for
that, but as long as no damage was done, I don't see any legal
action being taken.

I would not suggest that people build better houses to keep
people out because that might be a major (and expensive)
undertaking, but I would suggest that people should lock their
doors.  In the area of computer security, I would suggest that
companies who don't want random people logging their computers
should put passwords on all logins on the machine.  (Using one
letter passwords or the password that appears on the distribution
tape with your operating system doesn't count.)  If a company
doesn't bother to do this, then I don't think it has any business
clogging up the court system prosecuting people who log into its
systems.  Once a computer is placed on a computer network,
preventing security violations may become unreasonably difficult.
However, I still don't consider using a few seconds of someone
else's computer system to be the sort of action that warrents a
criminal prosecution.  I expect that if we discovered that an
unauthorized person was logging into spanky we would be no more
likely to try to recover money for the "lost" cpu time than we
would be if somebody posted a particularly worthless article to
the net.  We would change the password and that would be that.
                                        Kenneth Almquist