[MLUG - DISCUSSION] Morals, Payroll, and rich bastards

["McNutt, Justin M." <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

> Depends who you take it from. With my personality traits I'd 
> always take
> money from the people with to much of it. I have a Robin Hood 
> complex so
> more than likely I'd take the money and give it away again to people I
> think need it more. Sure if you rob from the rich they punish the poor
> SOB's under them but if you keep giving the $$$ away to the 
> needy it gets
> redistributed in a much more fair manner than it otherwise would. Of
> course someone else might be likely to still the money and 
> just buy sports
> cars and big houses for themselves. :)

But then you have to start evaluating everything.  What if the rich person
uses his money to finance housing projects (and not the gouging ghetto slum
types)?  What if the poor folks are only poor because they won't get off
their lazy asses and go 
to work?  Those people exist just as often as the rich gluttons and the
impoverished victims of circumstance.

And even the rich bastards and the poor victims ought to be given the
opportunity to do something about it before swiping money from somebody.
Robin Hood justice is rarely justified (although sometimes, I must agree,
things need a little kick...).

> In my experience payroll doesn't need any help lossing 
> employees money --
> they're very good at it already.

Yeah, but nobody who needs to get paid appreciates the delay.

> I'm sure lots of people 
> would be really
> upset if their company database was down for a few days 
> forcing them to be
> paid to browse the Net and chat.

Not true.  Most (not all) people I know are interested in getting some work
done, partly because they enjoy what they do, and partly because they
realize that when the work doesn't get done, the company suffers.  A
suffering company lays people off.  A thriving company gives bonuses and pay
raises.

> About the worst none death event I can think of that'd be 
> pretty easy to
> do with a computer attack is forcing a company out of 
> business. I'm really
> surprised that threat alone isn't enough to interest companies in
> protecting themselves. A hacker breaking in and destorying your computers
> and leaking your customer data all over the Net in a very 
> public way could
> easily put small to medium companies under and majorly hurt even major
> companies. Yet you can still scan a lot of e-comm sites and 
> see databases
> wide open to attack or on the same machine as weak services. 
> I dare to say
> with a lil luck you could probably crack two or three 
> companies a day and
> get away (without being caught) with 1000's of credit cards.

Exactly.  While we probably agree that using the law to solve this problem
is about the dumbest, slowest, most worthless way of solving the problem,
the law does exist, and people will use it.  It is well known that given a
choice between a minor inconvenience (fixing the systems) and wide open
danger, people will always choose the danger.

> Nope it doesn't give me the right but I could do it anyway if 
> I wanted to
> be a prick. Luckily I'm to lazy to bother. It's more fun 
> watching other
> people do it on tv.

<grin>  And then you get to laugh at *both* sides.  :-)

> Ummm... flaming nun joke.. Holy Smoke?

LMAO!

> Umm my original question was if it was legal and I'm still 
> not entirely
> sure.. heard several different answers.. I'll just take it as 
> a maybe and
> go back to making nun jokes as I don't think we're actually 
> arguing or 
> discussing anything anymore really. :)

I'm 99.8% positive it's *technically* illegal (ask Greg Johnson for a truly
authoritative answer).  However I happen to know that most port scans aren't
back-tracked (or even noticed).  None of the scans *I've* done were ever
noticed that I know of...

--J
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