When The Techie Crowd Goes Overboard

from the acting-without-facts dept

Now, we've all seen the techie crowds get angry over issues, and start up their various angry email campaigns. Many times they have valid points (even if they often do go overboard in the way they express their opinions). However, sometimes, they simply have the facts wrong, as is now being discovered in the Brian West case. Here was a story of someone who was arrested for hacking into a competitor's website. The original story suggested that he just found the hole and told them to fix it - and was then arrested. The truth, however, was that he did a bit of digging before he alerted the company, and downloaded some proprietary software, a password file, and then started to modify the software for his own purposes. It certainly makes him appear slightly less like the "good samaritan" many people originally thought he was.