[WEB SECURITY] RE: How to stop hackers at the root cause

[jeremiah at inertialbit.net (Jeremiah Heller)]

an interesting point. if it were not socially unacceptable to perform ethnic cleansing it would still occur at the 
levels indicated in those examples. if it were not for the civil rights movement and the eventually wide-spread 
acceptance of the idea that discrimination based on superficial properties was bad, there would still be slavery. 
socially, groups clashed (and some still do) over their ideologies, which were used as a basis for logic and perceived 
sound-judgement. however the more we learn about the universe/world around us the more we understand how little we know 
and that any judgement can only be temporary, until more knowledge is gained.

is it more ideologically sound to feed ones family or to obey a law which would allow them to starve simply due to a 
lack of other economic stimuli? i'm not speaking from any hard data, but i doubt that many third-world countries have a 
high local market for security experts, web developers, graphic designers, etc. so what is a poor-third-worlder with an 
old hand-me-down PC and no job to do?

do security professionals really want to wipe hacking activity from the planet? sounds like poor job security to me.

the drive for survival seems key. i think that when the survival of many is perceived as threatened, then 'bad hacking' 
will be addressed on a scale which will contain it to the point that slavery is contained today... after all don't 
hackers simply 'enslave' other computers? j/k

until then it seems that educating people on how these things /work/ is the best strategy. eventually we will reach the 
point where firewalls and trojan-hunting are as common as changing your oil and painting a house.

first we should probably unravel the electron... and perhaps the biological effects of all of these radio waves 
bouncing around our tiny globe... don't get me wrong, i like my microwaves, they give me warm fuzzy feelings:)

On Apr 13, 2010, at 3:14 PM, Carl Vincent wrote:

> social acceptance is a horrible way to enforce change anyway.
>
> Japanese internment camps, the Holocaust, the cival rights wars of the
> American 40's, 50's, and 60's, the American "red scare", the "gay
> bashing" that goes on to this day.  All examples of large groups of
> people often doing things they don't agree with in order to "behave
> according to socially acceptable tenets".
>
> ... Sounds like bad juju in my book -_-
>
> Paul Schmehl wrote:
> > --On Monday, April 12, 2010 23:51:27 -0500 Matt Parsons
> > <mparsons1980 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > I have published a blog post on how I think we could potentially stop
> > > hackers
> > > in the next generation.  Please let me know what you think of it or if
> > > it has
> > > been done before.
> >
> > Essentially your argument is that education can solve the problem of
> > "bad" hacking.  While I certainly think education can help, I think
> > there will always be an element of society that is irredeemably "bad"
> > and cannot be gotten rid of (or corrected, if you will) through
> > education.  Even societal shunning, which makes bad behavior so socially
> > unacceptable that it must hide in the shadows, does not rid us of those
> > who refuse to behave according to acceptable tenets.