Comment by sp0rk

7 hours ago

> I can’t help but feel there used to be honor among hackers. You didn’t go after your own. What kind of jerk would attack Arch Linux?

This has absolutely not ever been the case.

I think smaller "unimportant-ish" communities become larger and attract attention from a wider variety of people.

If 1:10,000 people is an axe murderer, when your community reaches 20,000 people... You have to create an axe-murderer-captcha.

It is, among most users, but it only takes a few abusing that for it to seem like there's none.

EDIT: Rereading, maybe it's that other kind of "hacker"...

> This has absolutely not ever been the case.

I think it was. Eg: on most russian warez forums in the 2000s, it was a bannable offense to crack russian-authored software.

  • I was just exaggerating for effect. Obviously I wouldn't seriously claim nobody ever did something, just that it wasn't what I would consider common behavior.

    That being said, I think the particular example you provided is kind of weak. It's my understanding that the behavior you speak of was driven primarily by the Russian government's unofficial policy of ignoring cybercrimes committed by their citizens so long as the targets were not domestic. They were ensuring their ability to continue operation by banning discussion of targeting Russians. This is how groups like the Russian Business Network have been able to flourish.