As always, the ideals of morals, freedom of speech, and giving of information is always something that must be challenged continually. After reading freak's posts I would agree that his intentions are obviously not for the greater good, or simple curiousity.

When the issue of morals comes into play, the decisons become that much harder depending on your own personal beliefs of course. I for one, believe that most people do intend for a good course of actions unless proven otherwise.

Put another way, you choose to connect yourself to the Internet. You choose to have a website up and running. You choose to take credit-card information. You choose to not have the necessary knowledge / personnel / skills / etc.

I do have to agree with this though. When you are on the internet, you have to accept the risks and responsibilities when operating within it. If you happen to make a poorly coded script, and you database ends up destroyed or stolen, then that is something you should have addressed first off. Anyone, even the basic user, will stress the importance of security online. When something of your own, or for another is created, you must indeed take the responsibility should something indeed go wrong.

Another possibility would be idle curiousity.

Curiousity keeps many new inventions, and languages alive. The thought of, "hey...I wonder what this does,". It's hard to distinguish between a person's actual intention, and growing curiousity. I will admit i've had curiousity of how to pick locks, make explosives, and hack into numerous systems to see if I can. But hey, it doesn't mean I am going to go break into someone's home, blow up a small building, or trash random people's systems. I just want to see if I can achieve the desired results of my curiousity in my own way.

Imagine if you were a hardware store employee, and someone in the store asked you what would be more useful to break a window, a brick or a sledge hammer -- you'd have no way to know why they wanted the information. You'd just answer them, and that would be the right thing to do -- unless they told you why they wanted it.

This is an interesting example. Anyone who has worked in a public area with computers, or tech support, has probably been asked how to hack a system. My own place of work has me in contact with tech support almost daily, and the question has come up. Nevermind the fact I would be in severe trouble from the management for answering such a question, but it really is a moral dilemma.

"Will this person just crack a system and let it be?"

or

"Will this person break into a small town hospital and damage medical files for kicks?"

You can never really know unless told. But when you do decide to answer a fellow monk's question, always keep in mind the content and damage that may be caused by the person. It never hurts to ask what it is being used for after all...

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