Rattle wrote:

4. Hackers aren't cool. Yes, please, lets return to the halycon days of 1989 when anyone who published vulnerability research ended up on an FBI watchlist and the unemployment rolls (clears throat, recent drama notwithstanding). Everything was much better then. And whats with this arguement that teaching yourself about system penetration is a patch dependent skill!? There are larger concepts that one learns through such a process that everyone involved in computer security needs to understand. How can you design hack proof security systems if you don't know the first thing about hacking?

I did read that one as a pure troll on semantics. He said that we should have the idea that "Good Engineering is Cool". In my eyes, good engineering and hacking are synonymous.

Yeah, but hacking is something that just like malt liquor, Joe Schmo on the street has shown that he has no self-control with, and will blithely tromp over everything in pursuit of selfish material gains. (We have laws, we have public service announcements, we have telethons, and the dumbasses still wrap their vehicles around unsuspecting flora on a nightly basis.)

Just like hard liquor and cigarettes, we need to start keeping it out of the sight of impressionable young (or just dumb) minds--they don't have the self control to keep from destroying themselves with it (and taking us down with them).

RE: The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security