Love Bug Hacker as Hero

Kendall Clark kclark at ntlug.org
Fri May 12 16:23:23 PDT 2000



>>>>> "Doug" == Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> writes:

Doug> Carl Remick wrote:

Doug> Soft underbelly of Microsoft products, in this case. Which

Doug> are not yet, and may never be, identical to the Web (or web,

Doug> in LBO house style).

Bravo, Doug! This is exactly the point more 'commentators' should be making: it's largely the computing/technical monoculture that MS's monopoly has imposed -- plus their legendarily lax approach to security -- that's at least *as* responsibile as the 'hacker' (an offensive term, actually; people who break into sites are 'crackers'; hackers are people who build free software and give it away to anyone who wants to use it) who wrote the code.

I had to bite my tongue when I heard a business ethics (hah!) professor recently excoriating the "profoundly anti-social behavior that would lead someone to hurt strangers by writing" the Love worm. Well, that may be, but, again, why give MS a free pass?

Let's think about the obvious car analogy. Let's assume Ford has a monopoly on passenger autos. Let's say they don't give two-shits about quality. So their designs have major flaws that, say, make the cars easy to steal or explode when rear-ended by minor collisions.

In this case wouldn't we be *at least* equally pissed about Ford as we would be about the person who rear-ends us? Or the person who steals our car?

The willingness of the media to give MS a pass in almost every situation is disgusting; their willingness to give MS a pass in *this situation* (and similar ones in the past) is beyond the pall.

Best, Kendall Clark



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list