Re: Re: Boycott O'Reilly

[Wassercrats]

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[chromatic]

The reason we publish security information is to help people be more secure. Sometimes that includes information that could help bad people do bad things.

My point is very simple.

It's naive to think that hiding information that could help people be safe will prevent danger.

That's why I publish articles on security, alerts on bugs and possible exploits in programs, and techniques for writing secure code.

Now I'm not naive enough to think that no one will use this information for harmful purposes — hey, some people spider Safari, bundle up books into PDF collections, and sell them — but I'm going to encourage people to do the right thing. I'm going to help them find the information they need to protect their information and equipment. If they choose to do bad things with it, that's their problem. Hopefully enough people will have learned and applied the lessons that the bad people won't do much damage.

You don't know what kind of disclaimers this book has. (Spidering Hacks has a big disclaimer that says "Do the right thing. Ask first. Be polite. Be smart.") You don't know what's in it. You haven't read any sample chapters. You're making wild accusations without facts. You're misinformed about the copyright issue and you're tilting at a windmill here.

Hey, that's your choice. Have at it.

If you want to be morally consistent, though, you should probably also boycott everything O'Reilly's ever touched. It's a long list, though, and it includes this site.

[davido]

But however you feel about this book, you're attacking the wrong group. O'Reilly didn't even publish it. It's simply available through their catalogue. It's also available from Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and Powells Books. If you boycot every bookseller that sells a book you disagree with, you have to abandon reading books.

Have you made any attempt to contact these booksellers, or the book's publisher to voice your disapproval, or is this simply a lot of hullabaloo over nothing, confined to the obscure corners of the Monastery? Though I consider the quest you're on to be misguided, that's secondary in significance to the fact that you're going about your protest in one of the least effective ways possible. Nobody outside of a few hundred Monasterians even care about a lone opinion expressed in some highly specialized website. If you're going to lead the siege against every bookseller that carries a book you disapprove of, at least do it in a way that gets some positively reinforced attention... and have the gumption to contact those groups you're protesting against so they'll know where you're coming from. Amazon.com probably doesn't read Perlmonks.