THE GRAY AND THE BLACK
Posted By: Glitch
From the beginning, hacking has dealt with doing things other people hadn’t thought of yet (or at least not legislated against), skirting the edge of the legal by exploiting loopholes and language, and of course doing whatever you can because you can and no one can stop you, whether it’s illegal or not. The line between the gray and the black can be a fine one, even in this day and age when Matrix crime is analyzed and defined in a hundred ways by thousands of lawmakers.
> If you want a good comparison, think of it as the difference between a gray market and a black market. On the grey market, things are a little shady and maybe you don’t know where it came from, and every now and again the cops bust somebody with something. The black market is full of the scary guys from the megacorps and the syndicates and the military—but that’s where the money, the freedom, and the power are.
> Mr. Bonds
The gray market of hacking is full of things that don’t appear that harmful. Selling corp scrip in an area outside of corporate jurisdiction, writing a script to exploit a flaw in a game and sharing it with your buddies at school, using your mom’s commlink for a few minutes to visit that node she doesn’t want you to go to, using a flaw in the vending machine interface to get it to dispense a free Gooey Bar, sharing music on a peer-to-peer network. Lots of people make use of tricks like these to make their lives just a little bit easier, and some of them even lose sleep over it.
> Some of those things you’ve described are technically illegal, but if no one gets hurt, where’s the harm, right?
> Turbo Bunny
> There’s always the potential for harm. Maybe not to you, or your family, or your friends, but some corp or artist somewhere might lose a few nuyen, some poor bitch will be fired for having an obvious passcode, and some poor bastard will lose a night’s sleep fixing gamecode when your exploit becomes widespread. It behooves us to think of the consequences of even the smallest rebellion.
> Kia
On the other side is the blatantly and grossly illegal that’s bread and butter to most of us here, which is what most people think of when they say hacking. Damn near any criminal or terrorist activity you can think of has its Matrix equivalent: breaking and entering (hacking a node), extortion, protection rackets, and hostage taking (denial of service attacks, security consulting, and ransomware), arson and destruction of property (crashing a node, deleting files), release of toxic, radioactive, or biological weapons on a civilian populace (viruses, worms, and trojans), graffiti (AR graffiti), pornography, theft, etc. Hacking can also facilitate other sorts of crime, especially white-collar crime like stock fraud.
> These new takes on traditional crime are what the syndicate hackers are most involved in, and they can be very protective against newcomers encroaching on their "turf"—never mind how ridiculous that term might be with regards to the Matrix.
> Mihoshi Oni
