

Alarm raised on teenage hackers - razorburn
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7690126.stm

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Dilpil
Any company that disqualifies you from a job for something you did when you
were 13 years old needs to seriously examine its HR processes.

~~~
hugh
OK, I'll be the jerk with the extreme example here:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_James_Bulger>

Happy to hire those guys?

~~~
tptacek
The problem isn't that it's an extreme example, it's that it's an irrelevant
example.

~~~
hugh
It's irrelevant to the real question here, but it's relevant to the assertion
that what you did at thirteen (or in this case, eleven) shouldn't be held
against you by employers.

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alecco
This article is the typical scare-mongering from fascist mindset.

This article lacks a social expert and gets just a shallow analysis by an
unqualified person who (to me) clearly has no clue for the reasons why a kid
would turn into vandalism or scamming (not necessarily hacking.)

Those kids probably feel excluded and most likely have parents who don't
dedicate any time to them. Be it by indifference or because of modern times
work schedules. TV is the worst possible option for a tutor/nanny.

~~~
tptacek
And I think yours is a knee-jerk immature response to an issue you haven't
thought carefully about, all the more irritating because you're closer to the
issue than the reporter who wrote this article.

Whether or not the reporter is making a value judgement on "hacking" --- and I
didn't read one --- it's bringing up a real issue. Idiot teenagers _are_ in
fact a few clicks away from a felony conviction, and the Internet _does_ in
fact facilitate, encourage, and amplify behavior that is far more likely to
get you in legal trouble online than offline.

Believing that doesn't mean one needs to support substantive policy changes
for how we "regulate the Internet"; it just means we're attentive to a new
risk faced by modern stupid teenagers.

Exemplars/evidence:

* The stupid kid who hacked Palin's Yahoo mail account

* The stupid kids who are getting themselves sued by the RIAA

* The stupid kids who break into DoD computers for IRC bragging rights

I was 17-18 not long ago, and it was nowhere nearly as easy for an 17 year old
then to commit theft and fraud as it is today. It does bug me that the
Internet is so "unreal" that a careless person could easily fuck things up in
the real world by accident on it.

~~~
alecco
I'm surprised you say that. More significant crime than hacking an email
account or "pwning" a government computer is committed everyday by teenagers
in at least an order of magnitude more. From drug dealing to happy slapping.
And the later even though is related to Internet (filming and uploading the
video), it is just an amplification of a very old tradition, bullying. Nothing
new.

Instead of increasing the sentences and applying broken-window policies (a new
form of fascism), the social problem needs first _understanding_ and then
defining good policies (from family level to national level.)

~~~
tptacek
This is the same incredibly myopic belief I held until I was 19, when I got my
first full-time sysadmin job. You have no idea how expensive it is for a
company to lose a server root user to a teenager; it is, in the best case,
several days of lost time. At a conservative FTE of $85k, a couple days of
sysadmin time is over $1000. Do $1000 of damage to someone's house and see how
the legal system treats you.

That's the _best_ case.

I think it's you who doesn't understand the problem here. I stand by my
assertion: it is worth considering that we have created a system that
encourages dumb kids to incur thousands of dollars of civil liability and
serious criminal liability.

------
markbao
... and that's why I'm a t. _entrepreneur_ instead.

