Slashdot today had a blurb regarding a German open source developer. He is forced to discontinue development of his project (a wireless network sniffer for MacOS) because recent laws in Germany would make it dangerous for him to continue participating. He is encouraging anyone who can to take copies of the source code while his site is still up, so that development can continue in another country.
This is another of a growing list of examples of politicians (thankfully not American this time) legislating things they apparently know nothing about. Making it illegal to develop or possess penetration software will do exactly nothing to curb the tide of tools appearing and being used by crackers. The law is unenforceable without direct access to everyone's hard drive; you're certainly not going to get that access from any criminal element, and hopefully not from any innocents tech-savvy enough to prevent it.
In an extension of, and even better example of, a common gun example, "once cracking tools are outlawed, only outlaws will have cracking tools." As long as these tools are being written (read: forever), it only makes sense to allow the good guys to examine them and figure out how they work, the better to defend against them. In the same vein, how am I to tell if I even CAN defend against a tool if I don't have the tool available to test against? How can I tell if my wireless network is as secure as I need, if I am not allowed to try to hack it myself? I personally have several Linux LiveCDs with a penetration-testing focus; those would apparently be illegal to possess in Germany, now. With modern America's propensity to follow the leader in legal matters, how long till this is implemented here?
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1 comment:
Hmmm.. do you think our house can be broken into easily? I think I'm going to test it with a sledge hammer to the back door.
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