Comment by thaumaturgy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thaumaturgy | Hacker News Reader

I like how nobody seems to be able to discuss their systems' compromise for a full paragraph anymore without using terms like, "illegal attack", "criminal act", "illegal cyberattack", etc.

I've been noticing a lot more language like that in recent years, whether the subject is Sony or Wikileaks or a government. I wonder if there's been a recent shift in the language used for this stuff, or if I've just become more sensitive to it recently?

edit: Hmm. Some preliminary digging through Google implies an increase in this kind of language recently. The number of search results for "illegal cyberattack" (unquoted search string) in news.google.com is 150 for 2011, 242 for 2010, 185 for 2008-2009 combined, 72 for 2007, and 55 for 2002-2004, and a number of the older results appear at first glance to be unrelated to actual hacks.

That's odd.

edit 2: Massaging the search terms a bit seems to yield proportional results. For example, compare the language in this article from 2007 (http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/story?id=3966047) against the language of similar articles today.

I know it's off-topic, but now I'm quite curious why around 2009 or 2010 everyone suddenly decided that they needed to emphasize the illegality or criminality of compromising systems?

Wild guess- Illegality makes them feel less responsible (or irresponsible), sort of like an Act Of God.

Agree. In cases like this, organizations will seize on any language or phrasing that implies "not our fault."

Of course just because something is illegal does not mean you shouldn't be trying to prevent it. See: money, banks, theft.

Without igniting a huge argument hinging on the (incorrect) notion that I think providers like PSN aren't responsible for the safety of their users data: we don't tend to focus stories about bank theft on the ineptitude of the banks. We tend to focus them on the criminals who commit the bank thefts.

On the flip side, banks tend to be at least somewhat competent. We don't know much about this particular hack, but some things are just embarrassing - plaintext passwords ;-), but also stuff like putting AT&T putting iPhone subscribers' data on publicly-accessible incrementing URLs (e.g. http://security.goatse.fr/hypocrites-and-pharisees - keep your salt shaker handy.)

This is similar to how organizations tend to use phrases such as "we regret..." as opposed to one's such as "we're sorry...". This way they have their PR move without actually admitting to any wrongdoing on their part. Sort of a semantically plausible deniability, I think.

They, and their users, are in fact the victims of a serious crime. Why analyze it further? Is there someone on HN who thinks Sony has no culpability for their own security failures?

Why analyze it further?

A lot of people on HN operate online services. Or are interested in data security and computer law. Or just like to analyze words and read between the lines.

Is there someone on HN who thinks Sony has no culpability for their own security failures?

I'm more interested in the degree to which Sony is owning up to their security failures.

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