The week in your words: Hacking, music, and games

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Posted on 20 Jun 2008 at 18:02

In a week that saw a British hacker plead his case, a survey reveal kids steal music, and gaming cause a stir on the blogs, we take a look back to see what PC Pro readers have made of it all.

British hacker appeals to Law Lords

British hacker Gary McKinnon was first up this week. McKinnon's fighting extradition to the US after hacking NASA and the Pentagon a rather startling 97 times, leaving smug little notes each time. He calls it harmless trickery, the US calls its forty years in the slammer with mad-eyes Errol.

Understandably McKinnon's not particularly keen to participate, but many on our forums thought he had it coming.

"He admits to doing it - he just denies he did anything wrong in doing it. Seems pretty clear cut to me," notes Bioreit, the law in these parts. "He deserves to go to jail. He broke in, he got caught. Simple as. Definitely doesn't deserve the chair, but a few years in a cell would be about right."

Brumsta, however, was of the thought that his crime wasn't hacking, so much as getting caught: "If you're going to hack into US systems, don't do it from a country that bends over at will. Just asking for trouble."

Indeed the closest McKinnon really got to support was some brief squabbling over his sentence.

"If he'd committed murder or child abuse then fair enough - give him longer in my eyes," says phakebril. "But for hacking into the pentagon? Two years absolute tops, especially if they can't prove he was selling secrets to informants or something similar."

iPod generation steals half its music

We know, we were shocked too, but apparently not all young people acquire their music legally. Apparently, it's available for free over something called the world wide t'interwibble, which you "surf" and find tracks glistening like diamonds next to pictures of ladies' bottoms.

gavomatic57 was remarkably stoic about the news that civilisation as we know is crashing down around our ears: "Most of the music found on a walkman back in the late 80s & early 90s was copied too - okay there was no online file sharing, but much of it was from friends CDs."

hywelt, however, was busy revealing himself as that chirpy sort of fellow who'd find the silver lining in a nuclear cloud: "The headline seems very negative. Very glass half empty. They should be pretty stoked that they're getting paid for half of it."

Bless. Cheysuli, meanwhile, had gone very playground about the entire issue: "All through the eighties and nineties the record companies forced us to pay £16+ for albums that came on cassette for £8 when CD production costs were a tiny percent of tape production costs. What goes around comes around. Music? Stealing? They started it! Even now they cling, screaming, to a dead sales model trying to force DRM upon us, refusing the simple truth. Put the price down."

Why is PC gaming intent on killing itself?

And finally to PC Pro's ever-lovable "man in charge of mice" David Bayon, who this week used our blogs to mutter in Latin, wave some incense and generally proclaim the death of PC gaming. Or, indeed, just wonder why PC gaming was so concerned with expensive graphics cards. The way some folk reacted, you would have thought he'd shot their dog.