[ISN] Worse Than Death

[InfoSec News]

Forwarded from: Jason Scott <jason at textfiles.com>

Since I've been working on a bunch of research about how hackers have 
changed in perception in journalism over the years (watch out!) I heard 
about this article and thought that it'd make a good book-end: and here in 
2005, we are calling for the Death Penalty for hackers.

But we're not.

This article is just a big useless op-ed riff off of an already-existent 
article, itself a sort of summarization of a book the author has also 
written.

To wit: Tierney just remixes the work of Steven Landsburg, who he at least 
credits in this article. I would immediately shitcan the contents of the 
NY Times article and go back to the source:

http://slate.msn.com/id/2101297

This article, "Feed the Worms Who Write Worms to the Worms", 
cold-calculates the cost of hackers, the cost of murderers, the cost of 
their relative damage, the fact we execute murderers, and therefore draws 
the conclusion we should really execute hackers, if we look at things like 
the cost-benefit related to hacker damage.

it should be noted that Landsburg has a book out for sale called "Fair 
Play: What Your Child Can Teach You About Economics, Values, and the 
Meaning of Life".

Slate reviewed his book in this 1997 article:

http://archive.salon.com/books/sneaks/1997/12/23review.html

And that review contains the helpful line:

"Economists writing for general audiences are largely a gentlemanly, 
helpful lot, channeling ego into explaining ideas and concepts. Landsburg 
is the great exception, a breast-beating showoff as exhibitionistic and 
domineering as a bad actor. I read him with horror and exasperation. He's 
the Gary Oldman of popular-economics writers."

That is to say, Landsburg writes sensationalistic articles using economics 
as a jumping-off point to say outrageous things. End of story.

On Wed, 13 Jul 2005, InfoSec News wrote:

> http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/12/opinion/12tierney.html
>
> By JOHN TIERNEY
> tierney at nytimes.com
> July 12, 2005
>
> Last year a German teenager named Sven Jaschan released the Sasser
> worm, one of the costliest acts of sabotage in the history of the
> Internet. It crippled computers around the world, closing businesses,
> halting trains and grounding airplanes.
>
> [...]