re: #42 ObserverArt

The problem with some of the younger hackers is they seem to see it all as a digital game and have no feel for what their gaming does to systems and people that do rely on them.

Is some of this type of behavior coming from people that were raised with very little discipline? I’m not going to put a whole generation in one lump, but for a long time there has been social concern there were too many children being raised with less strict methods, called winners in everything and in some cases abused by parents that might just not have cared about their kids at all.

I don’t see some of these cases as being criminal in the classic sense. Of course the outcome of their actions gets into criminality. But, were they criminals going in or just hackers seeing what they could pull off and then going…”cool!” There just seems to be some very naive thinking or total lack of thinking other than the game of getting in.

When I was a teenager, we used to do things like smashing rural mailboxes with baseball bats, throwing bottles at road signs, setting off M80s where they would cause the most consternation, etc. I knew some guys who taped an M80 to a hated teacher’s picture window, and at the time I thought it was funny. Of course when I got older and imagined what it must have been like for the teacher, I was ashamed to have ever thought it was even close to acceptable, let alone ‘cool’.

In other words, we did illegal, morally indefensible things because we wanted to see what we could get away with and to impress our friends. And we didn’t think about the consequences to the people we did them to.

By and large, we weren’t lacking discipline at home, nor were we abused. We were just young men who had reached the age of being able to do a lot of things without having reached the age where we thought much about whether we actually SHOULD do them.

If I had to guess, I’d say that mentality is what drives a lot of hacking. Then somebody offers a justification for it - you’re fighting against The Man, man! - and as long as nobody you know gets hurt or inconvenienced, any damage you’re doing remains abstract and distant.