we need bruce willis now more than ever

Ya know, nobody gets it. Its all played out like a movie script. A little cloak and daggar.

Its not cool. It is very serious. The welfare of our nation and perhaps the world depends on the safety of the net.

If a couple of thugs can ransom electricity, what are the possibilities of other governments doing the same?

When these thugs are cought and identified they should be sumarily put to death, in public and televised for the rest of them to know that this will no longer be tolerated.

Its time for the good people of the world to enjoy the freedoms they are due and take their place in society without fear and without having to hide everything they do. If we have to kill a few bad guys to insure our rights and protect the citizenary, so be it.

No one would think twice about cutting out a cancerous tumer or putting sulfer on an infected pustual. Why then grimace over the loss of a cancerous pox on society? It time to take off the kid gloves and put an end to it now!

The Internet was designed for the military by the military with your tax dollars. Now since civilians have made the Internet a public tool for communications and commerce, it is no longer of any use governmentally. The Internet should be cleared of any military or governmental use permanently; they should use solely the other options at their disposal.

The headline should read, "CIA Says Crackers Have Cut Power Grid".

This is exactly the kind of article which literally terrifies people when they hear the words "hack", "hacking" or "hackers".

There is an important difference between hacking and cracking, to quote the Webopedia.com definition of "crack":

"To break into a computer system. The term was coined in the mid-80s by hackers who wanted to differentiate themselves from individuals whose sole purpose is to sneak through security systems. Whereas crackers sole aim is to break into secure systems, hackers are more interested in gaining knowledge about computer systems and possibly using this knowledge for playful pranks. Although hackers still argue that there's a big difference between what they do and what crackers do, the mass media has failed to understand the distinction, so the two terms -- hack and crack -- are often used interchangeably."

Uneducated blundering in any endeavor or system, vulnerable or not, can cause damage or unintended consequences (from peak oil-and-energy to economics to global warming the modern human primate, generally speaking, is a "perfect" example of such incompetence).

I agree with you on the one hand, white, black or grey hats be damned, if someone commits a crime s/he has to face the consequences.

On the other hand, I think the majority of people are unnecessarily afraid of the word hackers and easily scared by its negative connotations borne of popular myth and media.

The headline in question, for example, makes it far too easy for the average person to equate hackers with terrorists.

I see nothing wrong with the attempt to clarify the distinctions between the good intentions and ethics of hackers and the criminality and immorality of crackers.

Regardless, you clearly have nothing to worry about because the distinctions in question are too deep for the shallows of the mainstream.

I'm a tech, too, but I make the hacker/cracker distinction because I believe ignorance -- in general and specifically in this case (as detailed in the article) -- poses a greater threat to our safety, security and democracy than do the mythical, media-driven archetypes of the evil hacker and omnipotent terrorist (too often packaged and promulgated as one in the same).

As I said, obviously, those who commit crimes should do time (providing the punishment fits the crime, a two way street that often travels one way in the wrong direction).

Articles like this one -- and the misconceptions and virulent, violent responses they tend to engender -- remind me of Richard Stallman's short piece, On Hacking (stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html):

"Yet when I say I am a hacker, people often think I am making a naughty admission, presenting myself specifically as a security breaker. How did this confusion develop?

"Around 1980, when the news media took notice of hackers, they fixated on one narrow aspect of real hacking: the security breaking which some hackers occasionally did. They ignored all the rest of hacking, and took the term to mean breaking security, no more and no less. The media have since spread that definition, disregarding our attempts to correct them. As a result, most people have a mistaken idea of what we hackers actually do and what we think.

"You can help correct the misunderstanding simply by making a distinction between security breaking and hacking—by using the term "cracking" for security breaking. The people who do it are "crackers". Some of them may also be hackers, just as some of them may be chess players or golfers; most of them are not."

Wake up, people: use a firewall, use standalone systems, AND avoid Microsoft Windows!