weemba@garnet.berkeley.edu (Obnoxious Math Grad Student) (11/08/88)
[I originally posted this in news.sysadmin (where this discussion should be), but it bears repeating here.] In article <5343@medusa.cs.purdue.edu>, spaf@cs (Gene Spafford) writes: >That attitude is completely reprehensible! That is the exact same >attitude that places the blame for a rape on the victim; I find it >morally repugnant. This response of yours is absolutely repulsive. Instead of discussing the issues, you want to make sure everyone thinks in terms of a non-is- sue. Perhaps there are readers out there who have been raped, and don't particularly relish your worthless comparison. Poor Spaf got scared shitless about his *COMPUTERS*? Awww... Real serious trauma there. My nose bleeds for you. Why don't you bring up the Holocaust? Call me just another USENET Nazi? >Consider an analogy: [lock analogy (the obvious one) omitted] What the HELL does that matter? Are you going to run around with your heads in the sand over and over again, yelling "ain't my fault our locks are all ten years out of date"? What does it take to wake you folks up? >We cannot depend on making our systems completely secure. To do so >would require that we disconnect them from each other. There will >always be bugs and flaws, but we try to cover that by creating a sense >of responsibility and social mores that say that breaking and cracking >are bad things to do. Ooooh. A sense of responsibility and social mores? So you can declaim from the moral high ground when ARPANET goes belly up three years from now? How about a sense of intelligence and security to go with it? > Now we have to demonstrate to the world that >this is the case, and we will back it up with legal action, or we'll >continue to risk having bored students and anti-social elements >cracking whatever we replace the systems with until there is no longer >any network. Yup. Gee. Fat lot of good that will do when the REAL NASTY VIRUS comes along within the next three years. You can wail all you want about how folks *shouldn't* do this, but guess what? You still have an INTERNET to run.... And this is true whether or RTM does or does not do any time. Think about it. This isn't just rhetoric. The INTERNET may depend on you actually DOING so. ucbvax!garnet!weemba Matthew P Wiener/Brahms Gang/Berkeley CA 94720