assignment2/a.tex

   1 %&a
   2 \begin{document}
   3 \maketitleru[authorstext={Author:},
   4         course={Philosophy and Ethics of Computer and Information Sciences}]
   5 \section{Grey Hat Cracking Should Be Legalized}\label{sec:grey}
   6 In the digital world the notion of property is significantly different than the
   7 notion of property in the real world. Property in the digital world can be
   8 interchanged, duplicated and changed without physical intervening. This means
   9 that property and ownership is much more a matter of trust and regulations than
  10 anything of material kind. By this definition the notion of \emph{going
  11 equipped} in the digital world is vastly different than in the physical world.
  12 One can go \emph{non-equipped} but having the tools within reach and the other
  13 way around. There is hardly a concept of distance in the digital world.
  14
  15 Grey hat hacking means black hat hacking with good intents. Grey hat hacking is
  16 not hacking for the sake of cracking but for the sake of improving the security
  17 and notifying the owner of the system. Often this is compared to breaking into
  18 a house and informing the owners on how to improve their door locks. However,
  19 with the aforementioned notion of property, this is not an analogous issue.
  20 Grey hat hacking, as is digital property is built around trust. Moreover, while
  21 the actions of a black and grey hat hacker look the same, a grey hat hacker
  22 will not misuse the system by for example planting back doors. To notice the
  23 difference between black and grey hat one has to know and master the
  24 techniques.
  25
  26 All of this means that there is an extremely thin line between grey and black
  27 hat hacking. Some might even argue that there is no difference. Allowing or
  28 even encouraging grey hat hacking leads to the classical slippery slope
  29 problem. The confusion arises from the fact that opinions might differ. Imagine
  30 a case where medical data has been compromised but the hacker did not look at
  31 the data. The stakeholders in the privacy of the data such as patients and
  32 doctors might view the deed as black hat. On the other hand, the hacker himself
  33 might view the case a grey hat because he informed the administrators and did
  34 not touch the data. Especially while the current view on hacking ever so much
  35 is changing it very quickly becomes a slippery slope.
  36
  37 The best solution at this point in time is in my opinion to tolerate, not
  38 actively chasing them, grey hat hackers and keep testing the boundaries using
  39 the court of law. In this way true grey hat hackers will possibly be bothered
  40 and not punished and true black hat hackers will be punished true the court of
  41 law. Society will change and with it the view on hacking. Police forces will
  42 have to acquire trained IT professionals to keep up the pace with the black hat
  43 hackers.
  44
  45 \section{Web Scrapers and Robot Denial Files}
  46 The current state of practise for \verb|robots.txt| files is that they are
  47 read, parsed and acted upon. However, accessing data that is explicitly denied
  48 by the \verb|robots.txt| file is not illegal in the current state of the
  49 internet. When information is placed on the web it is known that it is visible
  50 for everyone. When you do not want your information to be visible you can place
  51 it behind portals in such a way that only authorized visitors can see the
  52 content, and thus not robots. Regulating the content access and forcing the
  53 regulations requires a fundamental change in the way we view the internet. The
  54 internet can not be the anarchistic place anymore and requires laws and control
  55 over the content.
  56
  57 The current state of the internet does not require such an extension to the
  58 \verb|robots.txt| protocol. When you want information not to be seen by other
  59 you should not put it online. And if you do want to put it online you can hide
  60 behind a digital wall. Therefore I think the change would be bad and would not
  61 improve the internet as it is. When for example stores think they are scraped
  62 in a bad way (such as taxes, postage etc.) they can just improve their scraping
  63 interface. Web store aggregators just want to sell as much as possible and
  64 probably want to assist in improving the websites by using dedicated
  65 \emph{API}s for example.
  66
  67 Changing the internet to facilitate this behaviour has too many bad
  68 consequences. All traffic must be monitored to see whether it concerns a robot
  69 or a normal user. The openness and freeness of the internet will come to an end
  70 and is therefore not desirable.
  71
  72 \section{An Immune System for the Internet}
  73 This case is very much similar to the first case discussed in
  74 Section~\ref{sec:grey}. However, the nature of this discussion point is even
  75 more extreme. Patching systems through breaking in can be seen as grey hat
  76 hacking. The methods used are bedraggled but the consequences are positive.
  77 However, this matter is different from the previous ones in the sense that it
  78 proposes to allow such behaviour. This case proposes to encourage breaching
  79 systems to patch them.
  80
  81 From a purely consequentialists point of view there is nothing wrong with it.
  82 The victims machine will be patched and no harm is done besides walking into an
  83 already open door. However, from a deontological point of view this is wrong
  84 because you have to resort to inherently bad techniques such as breaching into
  85 systems and changing systems unauthorized.
  86
  87 The same problem as the similar discussion point arises which is the thin line
  88 between good and bad. The opinions on what is a well-patched system might
  89 change and there might even be a schism in the population on certain patches.
  90 Take for example the \emph{phone-home} patch that was introduced in
  91 \emph{Windows 7} that adds the similar \emph{phone-home} functionality to the
  92 system that is present in the successor \emph{Windows 10}. This functionality
  93 allows the system to call back to the servers of \emph{Microsoft} to send
  94 information such as statistics. Some user might deliberately ignore this patch
  95 because it infringes on their privacy. \emph{Microsoft} on the other hand will
  96 probably state that it is necessary to guarantee a good user experience and
  97 possibly even to guarantee safety. Obviously this example is arcane and
  98 artificial but similar problems may arise.
  99
 100 Therefore the solution to this problem is to disallow placing ``good'' malware
 101 on systems. Following the same principles as the previous case it might be
 102 legal to notify the users in some way of their unpatched systems. But again,
 103 this is a very thin line and has to be tested continuously via the court of
 104 law.
 105 \end{document}