Wassercrats
Any good security consultant, police officer, government agent or member of the military will tell you, in order to defend yourself from theats you must understand two things; the attacker and the mode of attack. People who work in the security field train themselves to think like their "foes", so they can anticipate their moves. It only makes sense, how can you defend yourself if you dont know whats threating you? Stupidity and rampant fear results, after all mankind's greatest fear is the fear of the unknown (to sorta quote H.P. Lovecraft).
Also any encryption expert worth his salt will tell you that a closed system/algorithm is far less secure than an open system/algorithm. Most cryptographers spend as much time writing algorithms as they do trying to break them.
A book about hacking, no matter who publishes it, is just like any other bit of information. It can be used for good,.. and it can be used for evil. There is little doubt in my mind that this book was published with the "know your attacker" thought in mind, rather than "Learn to crack the IRS DBase in 24 hours".
This information is all valuable, and since information itself is an abstract concept and not a concious entity with a moral capacity of its own, its all about how you use it.
Think a bit before you post.
-stvn | [reply] |
Let's compare this philosophy to a guiding principle of mine.
Those with more information are better equipped than those with less information.
You seem to disagree, as if somehow some books should not be published, or should not be available to the public, and that if you had other options than them, you would use them instead, avoid said books. Okay -- you're saying that you'd intentionally remove information that you could use, because you have some sort of ethical problem with...what? Reading it? Other people knowing it?
There's no way for you to control the latter.
Regardless, let's move to another guiding principle of mine.
People, on the whole, left to their own devices, will choose to do constructive things rather than destructive things.
You seem to believe otherwise. You seem to think that one destructive act somehow outweighes thousands of constructive ones. I honestly don't think humankind could get anywhere without creating and producing being a better choice than destroying and nonproduction. We'd be living in caves. We'd be afraid of our shadows, and everyone else.
Which, I suppose, we are to a degree -- but the degree to which we, as a whole, produce and create is greater.
Believing these two things convinces me that there should be books about hackers, books with the word 'hackers' on the cover, etc., just as there should be books about terrorists, books about terrorism, etc. Not because of some notional concept of "harm" or "protection" or because I wish to see society fall -- it's because "harm" is irrelevant, the harm of not being informed is greater than any harm anyone can do me -- it's because "protection" is something I grant a nonsentient being, and I am sentient, and I don't need to be coddled -- it's because society requires information to proceed.
You say this is harmful, and you are, by everything I've ever believed in, wrong. That would be my well-informed opinion, in terms of being well-informed about what I believe.
Information causes action. Action, on the whole, is positive. Tell me why I should want to prevent X good things for less-than-X bad things.
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You are what you think.
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