A question of ethics

[Seraph Antaine]

Damned fine analogy, Jack. Still, though, I think we should stop alienating the hackers, and beat them up.

[JaNell]

Damned fine analogy, Jack. Still, though, I think we should stop alienating the hackers, and beat them up.

I'm in.

[iblis]

very rarely does any hardware damage stem from a virus, and if it does, its because the computer sucks and was going to die soon anyway.

There are a few ways to render a hard drive unbootable, unable to retain data, or both; and a portion of those are very simple to pull off. Simple enough that a script kid could just cut/paste the lines to do so, without ever knowing how it does what it does, which is of course how most script kiddies operate.

I personally can't understand that mindset; if I'm going to do something, malicious or benign, by golly I want to know how I'm doing it¹!

Thankfully, as often as not the kind of people who write these malicious code don't think about such things; that, or they lack the patience and/or intelligence to go poking around the manuals for such information.

¹ Not that I'd ever do anything malicious. I just like to know how. For about the same reason why I read the backs of cereal boxes; prior to reading, I didn't know what it said. Now I do.