Reading Log n26

Date: August 27th,2007
Title: Geeks vs. G-men
Link: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,991205-1,00.html

Vocabulary

1-g-men:an agent for the FBI.
2-rambunctious:difficult to control or handle; wildly boisterous: a rambunctious child.
3-retaliatory:to return like for like, esp. evil for evil: to retaliate for an injury.
4-cuff:to strike with the open hand; beat; buffet.
5-fed: Slang. a federal official or law-enforcement officer.
6-indict:(of a grand jury) to bring a formal accusation against, as a means of bringing to trial: The grand jury indicted him for murder.
7-tantrum:a violent demonstration of rage or frustration; a sudden burst of ill temper.
8-du jour:fashionable; current: environmentalism and other issues du jour.
9-shenanigans:mischief; prankishness: Halloween shenanigans.
10-phony:insincere or deceitful; affected or pretentious: a phony sales representative.

Summary

There has never been much love lost between geeks and G-men. But after a big software-piracy crackdown in 1990 generated more bad publicity than convictions, the feds have largely held their fire.In the past few weeks, meanwhile, things have got out of hand. The trouble began when a gH member named Eric Burns, who is suspected of hacking the White House home page, was indicted in Virginia on unrelated charges. In response, someone calling himself Israeli Ghost hit fbi.gov with a massive "denial of service" attack--a nasty form of info warfare in which a host site is flooded with requests (in this case, 600,000 per second) that paralyze it.
The hackers, as usual, say government webmasters have no one to blame but themselves; the notoriously sloppy security at gov websites has turned them into hacker magnets.Of course, that won't make much of a defense should the cybervandals ever find themselves in court. The FBI says it isn't planning any more arrests soon. In the meantime, expect more of this phony war: no charges, no collateral damage and a heck of a lot of posturing--on both sides.

Personal Reaction

This is a very interesting article, because we tend to think that this issue(hackers against the government)happens only in the movies.However,I don´t see the point in hacking and bothering the FBI;it seems so childish because hackers don´t achieve anything by doing it but to keep these institutions occupied.They won´t get anything by doing these,because the government is not so stupid to leave important things to be discovered in their websites.
I really think that these kinds of hackers are fools, because they have a vast knowledge on computers but they don´t know how to make a profit of it.