Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cwjcc!hal!ncoast!allbery From: allbery@ncoast.UUCP (Brandon S. Allbery) Newsgroups: news.sysadmin Subject: Re: Being anti-moral (was Re: Getting Complacent) Message-ID: <13150@ncoast.UUCP> Date: 19 Nov 88 18:36:18 GMT References: <44439@beno.seismo.CSS.GOV> <16742@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <5366@medusa.cs.purdue.edu> <172@twwells.uucp> Reply-To: allbery@ncoast.UUCP (Brandon S. Allbery) Followup-To: news.sysadmin Organization: Cleveland Public Access UN*X, Cleveland, Oh Lines: 28 As quoted from <172@twwells.uucp> by bill@twwells.uucp (T. William Wells): +--------------- | [about Weemba] | Mr. Spafford, you have been most reasonable in this debate; don't you | think that it is a good idea to stop encouraging this ethical midget | to post? +--------------- Much as it may annoy you, Weemba has a good point to make about this whole thing. (I do admit that his language is, as usual, almost(?) enough to obscure the point he's trying to make.) In this particular case, the simple point is that ethics isn't enough. Go ahead and sue Morris, or Cornell, or whoever; but DON'T ASSUME THAT DOING SO WILL SOLVE ALL YOUR PROBLEMS. Ethics is important, if only to encourage sysadmins to do something about any security holes that come to their attention -- but it's by no means the ultimate solution. Kids who are looking for "kicks" don't give a d*mn about the law; as far as they'd be concerned, all that suing Morris would prove is that they should make d*mn sure they aren't caught. Promoting ethics is only useful when in conjunction with *real* security. ++Brandon -- Brandon S. Allbery, comp.sources.misc moderator and one admin of ncoast PA UN*X uunet!hal.cwru.edu!ncoast!allbery ncoast!allbery@hal.cwru.edu allberyb@skybridge.sdi.cwru.edu allbery@uunet.uu.net comp.sources.misc is moving off ncoast -- please do NOT send submissions direct Send comp.sources.misc submissions to comp-sources-misc@.