AVR-Chat

On Tue, 2005-08-02 at 09:16 -0700, Dennis Clark wrote:
> Hmph, I'm starting to see a reason for the invention of William
> Gibson's 
> "Black Ice", which is a killing attack on viral or hacking attempts.
> I 
> think a visit with baseball bats is indeed in order, but not to the 
> dweebs, hit 'em where it hurts, to their computers!  After we
> discover 
> all their handles and aliases of course.

   I understand and share the frsutration, and let's be honest, anger
all of you feel regarding these attacks.  Let us keep our perspective,
however.

   If we resort to what amounts to viliglantism, we are no better than
those about whom we are complaining.  There are a variety of reasons
this is true, but a few of the most important are:

1) we have no reasonable means of ensuring that the parties we retaliate
against are truly the guilt parties (one of the greatest weaknesses of
vigillantism).

2) we have no ethical authority upon which to base such counter-attacks.


  No.  If we are indeed going to take any action at all, it should be
one  of intensive investigation, identification of the guilty parties
the the extent possible, and contact with the ISPs of the guilty
parties, and with the parents (if they are minors), threatening them
with civil consequences if they fail to reign in their children's
behaviour.

   Most ISPs, when provided with substantial evidence of such abuses,
will not hesitate to rescind access to abusive users.

  While it may feel good emotionally to shout and make threats of
physical violence, it is uncivilized and counter-productive to do so in
public.,  It merely perpetuates the culture oif casual violence which
led to the attacks in the first place.


Tom Keller
aka avrFreak
aka CurlyEars