You created, and then fed, a huge pointless flamewar with this absurd bit about "death". That's trolling. We ban accounts that do that, so please don't do it again on this site.

> That road leads to prison/death, as it should.

As it should?

English isn't my first language and I really hope you aren't suggesting that the one who does unauthorized hacking should die.

I'm not exactly sure but I think he's implying that hacking in this way is the early part of a journey that, if it escalates into a pattern of more damaging criminal behaviour, would ultimately end in either prison or death. Still, not a terribly empathetic attitude.

EDIT: I assumed good faith, according to the Hacker News guidelines. Apparently in this case I was wrong. I just read the GP's second, more in-depth, comment further down: he's absolutely in favour of prison and thinks that in some cases death may be warranted.

Hackernews is soft on hacking crimes and I’m not. It’s as simple as that.

I am not any kind of hacker or even a terrible programmer. Just a noob. I am mostly a lurker here. I am not influenced by HN.

But I still don't understand how hacking is such a serious crime to be punished by death sentence.

In fact, there are very very few crimes which deserve death penalty.

There is a large gap between "we should be tougher on hacking crimes" and "hackers should be killed."

Do you maybe want to rephrase that last sentence? It looks like you just said unauthorized hackers deserve to die.

I too was shocked. Then I thought may be I didn't get it because english isn't my first language.

Unfortunately, there is one otherwise-modern country with mostly native English speakers which retains the death penalty.

The language was clear, its America that's at fault.

It's not stating your opinion that's taken badly, it's your opinion that's taken badly.

I think everyone in their right mind can agree that in most cases it's bad for society if you break into someone else's system.

If you take it on a case-by-case basis, it's a little hard to make that statement. E.g. would it be bad if someone broke into a Chinese network and use the information to help/warn human rights activists? To break into a company that's conducting unauthorized experiments on unwilling or uninformed subjects and leak that to the press? It's easy to say that vigilante justice is never a good idea, but the victims who can't get any other kind of justice might very rightfully disagree.

It's hard to even agree that it's always wrong to break into a computer system. To pronounce a minimum acceptable sentence of jailtime, and maybe even suggest that death penalty would be a good idea, too, is not something that's going to be taken well in the civilized world.

> Death is debatable, but in some cases fully warranted.

Myself and a lot of other people don’t believe in death sentence no matter the severity of the crime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_by_country

The two main reasons why I don’t support a death sentence in any case are:

1. People sometimes get sentenced for crimes they did not commit. By at least letting them live in prison rather than killing them we give them a chance to fight the sentence.

2. The law is not objectively “correct” because there is no such thing as a single “true” morality. Multiple moral stances exist, and we should be somewhat tolerant of that.

Amnesty International has some more arguments against death penalty as well. https://www.amnesty.org/en/what-we-do/death-penalty/

Finally I believe that the justice system should to the greatest extent possible exist to prevent crime and reform criminals so that they can be productive members of society, not primarily exist to punish criminals.

In my country — Norway — this is reflected in how the police handle confrontational situations. The Norwegian police force always tries to deescalate, whereas in the US the police are very aggressive in a lot of situations that should not call for that sort of reaction.

There are very many people that do bad things not because they are fundamentally bad people but because of their circumstances. Everyone deserves a chance.

Some people cannot be helped and need to remain locked up because they pose a threat to the rest of society, but that should be what we do when we see that we cannot reform them, not how we treat everyone who breaks the current set of laws.

I agree.

Laymen jury is a very disputed system in Europe. To have laymen scentencing someone is very, very questionable.

The US judicial system is more about revenge. Why have parole hearing with relatives?

The system in Europe is more about rehabilitation.

It's a bit rich for you to hold up Norway as a model for sensible attitudes towards punishment. This is the same country that sentenced a man who killed 77 people to 21 years in a resort-like prison. Regardless of your own philosophy, most people (even opponents of the death penalty) would view this sentence as so absurdly lenient that it verges on psychopathy towards the victims and their families.

(I strongly disagree with the original commenter, by the way. I do think capital punishment is warranted in extreme cases.)

The goal is rehab in Norway. Not punishment. There's still a loss of freedom... But with the goal of changing the person's behavior.

This from someone who is theoretically ok with capital punishment, but in practice opposed. I do not trust that the state gets the right people all the time. I also think it's too slow and burocratic a process to work as anything other than revenge.

A few thoughts:

(1.) In high profile federal cases executions occur relatively swiftly. The reason it's slow in many cases is due to all of the procedural safeguards that we have in place to protect defendants.

(2.) People often dismiss retribution without explaining why it's not a valid basis for punishment. Personally, I believe Norway is morally bankrupt for viewing rehab as the only acceptable goal of punishment, as the Breivik case vividly illustrates. You may not find the Breivik sentence appalling, but you should recognize that you are in the minority. And if this guy is going to lecture Americans about the ethics of punishment, I have a right to criticize the Norwegian approach.

(3.) Alex Kozinski made an interesting observation about the possibility of wrongfully executing someone: due to all of the procedural protections in place and all of the resources devoted to capital cases, the odds of being wrongfully executed are an order of magnitude lower than the odds of being wrongfully dealt a life sentence.

Given how awful life imprisonment is, I totally reject the premise that capital punishment can only be justified if it is infallible.

Yeah. Isolation cells are "resort like" now. Maybe you want to check in into such a resort for a few years? I mean it seems to be a great deal according to you.

If I had to be incarcerated, I would choose a Norwegian prison over almost any other country's.

> I knew that stating my opinion was going to be taken badly, but then I thought why censor myself? I should say what I mean and mean what I say.

No, it's not being 'taken badly'. It's on you. What you're saying is an outrage. HackerNews isn't a YouTube comment thread; we expect better.

Rather than complaining about how your readers misunderstood you, you might think to at least explain yourself when you go ahead and say that teenaged hackers deserve death.

Death is not "debatable" in any reasonable sense. If you'd just said "that road leads to prison, as it should" I could totally understand that, but there is no coherent moral framework in which death is an appropriate penalty for malicious hacking that doesn't kill anybody.

What about bug bounty programs?

It could be said that a non-zero percentage of bug bounty hackers are not actually white hats, but rather blackhats with poor connections or limited ability to fence their vulnerability.

Intent matters. Hacking systems for the purpose of finding vulnerabilities to report is within the spirit of authorized edge cases.