>Hackers don't deserve all the blame

Perhaps you're using the term in the "politically correct" sense of "hacker" == "technophile". I use the term "hacker" in the sense of "computer criminal." So we may just have a linguistic mismatch here.

But - that said - the guys who are going around breaking into innocent peoples' networks are the problem. There's no moral basis I have ever heard of that makes it acceptable to blame the victim. And most users of home systems are victims in this war. Saying "because bob didn't have a personal firewall, a personal IDS, whatever - it's HIS FAULT that his system got hacked" is ethically the same thing as saying "it's HER FAULT she got raped because she was wearing a short skirt!"

People who want to informally or otherwise "test the function of software" have to make a choice between doing it in a way that causes no harm, or a way that puts innocent people at risk. The "security researchers" who seek and find new vulnerabilities and publish them, so that hours later they appear in new worms and trojan horses aren't exactly HELPING the situation as much as they would like you to believe.

mjr.

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