Computer ethics Essay

Submitted By youngkye189
Words: 1273
Pages: 6

Computer crime has increased in resent years. The book gives several examples of past computer crimes. Before reading chapter 2 I thought that computer crimes only involved crimes that where associated with hacks. But I learned that a computer crime is a crime that involved a computer in any way. Even if it was just to close a bank account. This chapter gave me a good understanding of what a computer crime is, it also made me think how could I make some money. By reading this chapter I was surprised to learn that most computer crimes are committed by people that don’t have an extensive understanding of computers, but by opportunist. In one of the cases I read about, a group of hackers figured out a way to intrude into the bank system but didn’t do any damage to the bank. Then they tried to sell their knowledge to the bank and got arrested. It seemed unfair to me that for trying to help the bank they got arrested. In many cases the people accused of computer crime do it without know what they do. As in the example of the 8 year old boy that transferred 1,000,000 dollars to his account “by inserting a envelope with a cartoon of cereal in it and pressing 1 many times”. I thought the book made a good point in saying that most computer crimes are kept secret from the public by the victims especially banks so people won’t loose their trust in them. I think all people come to a point in their life that they have the opportunity to enrich them self illegally without getting caught and that’s where a descent and ethical person is reveled. Software theft is a very commune type of crime. Crimes that all off us commit, but don’t feel neither wrong in committing it nor will stop doing it for several reasons. Software companies charge unrealistically high for software packages. Users personally won’t be penalized for doing so. Nobody wants to pay for something they can get for free. But at the same time programmers want to be compensated for their work. To tell you the truth I don’t understand the point of software developers that want for all software to be free. If software was free, who will pay our salaries and who is going to work for free. Their point is that, if the source code would be free that programmers could improve existing programs, but who is going to work for free in improving those programs, I wouldn’t. Its easy to say for programmers like Stallman that are financially sponsored by others, that “software should be for free” he is getting paid, who is going to pay us? I agree with Pamela Samuelson “The existing system of patent laws is still the best vehicle for protecting software”. I agree with the opinion that hacking has changed in recent years. Before hacking used to be a demonstration of knowledge of a system or of making a statement that I’m smarter than most people. Most of those attacks where not malicious, now hackers have become malicious and most of them don’t demonstrate that they are smart nor demonstrate knowledge of a system. Most hacks are people that have nothing to do and go through the trashcans of corporations in hopes of finding manuals or passwords of systems or going to Tec fairs to peek over someone shoulder to see if they are dialing in into a remote system and try to get they password and username. I don’t agree with laws that punish hackers that do innocent penetrations into systems. I think that’s a god thing since those penetrations make the system operators aware of their vulnerability of attack by a malicious hacker. If no malicious penetrations wouldn’t be punished and companies would pay for finding loopholes in their systems the number of malicious attack would drastically descend. I agree with the point of view of IBM. I think that the best way of eliminating viruses is by educating programmers about the damage those viruses cause and that they are wrong and don’t demonstrate anything except the maliciousness and stupidity of they authors. It is amazing the amount of money spent each