On Fri, Feb 28, 2003 at 03:11:00PM -0600, Jack Bates quacked:
Should we outlaw a potentially beneficial practice due to its abuse by criminals?
Okay. What happens if you make a mistake and overload one of my devices costing my company money. I guarantee you, the law will look favorably on damages. That is the problem with probing. Sometimes the probe itself can be the damage. Programmers are human. Humans make mistakes. Programmers are perfect.
That wasn't the question. There are plenty of circumstances in which it's legal to do something once -- say, make a phone call to you and ask how you're doing -- and illegal to do it one hundred million times. You don't outlaw telephones because people can and have used them to harass other people, you outlaw the harassing behavior and make it subject to damages. ... which is exactly what you described. Probing can be knocking on your door, or it can be taking a sledgehammer to your garage. These are so quantitatively different that there is a qualitative shift between the behaviors. -Dave -- work: dga@lcs.mit.edu me: dga@pobox.com MIT Laboratory for Computer Science http://www.angio.net/ I do not accept unsolicited commercial email. Do not spam me.