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Is Stealing A Statue Like Hacking A Server?
from the questions-to-ponder dept
This might not seem like a tech-related story at first, but there's an interesting parallel. An art student in Chile apparently broke into a museum last week and stole a Rodin statue. However, he's been temporarily released after saying he only stole it to test the security at the museum. This sounds mighty familiar to stories of so-called "good samaritan hackers" who break into servers to point out security vulnerabilities. Of course, you could point out that the good samaritan who actually takes something once they've shown the security hole has gone a bit too far. Still, it does raise some issues about the limits of claiming you're a good samaritan. Otherwise, anyone caught performing any crime will simply claim they were pointing out the vulnerabilities involved.
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I don't think its the same
cracking a server isn't at all like physically stealing property. Neither the white-hat cracker, nor anything of his trespasses onto the 'victim's' property. He merely sends commands to the victim's machines who then commit the faults.
A better parallel is if you telephoned a company and tricked their secretary into sending you confidential information. Then, before she had a chance to mail it to you, you called back and told her you were only testing. While I'm sure the company would be mad at your little test, I don't think there would be the same legal repercussions as one would expect if you 'called' and pulled the same trick on one of their machines. Why?
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