Tech: Firesheep: Bringing light to a serious problem, but at what cost?
- From a hacker’s perspective, releasing this was a good idea. Firesheep is a Firefox plugin that allows you to spy on people’s cookies from within a wi-fi network, effectively allowing you to log into other people’s accounts without knowing their passwords. Great, this will get people to work on this very significant issue and force HTTPS connections. But the problem is, you’ve released an exploit that makes it easy for people to spy on anyone, something that anyone can use. And most of those people will not have the idealistic ethics of the creator of this program. Yes, you’ll get Facebook to use HTTPS, even though it’ll cost them money. But you’ve enabled script kiddies to read personal information at coffee shops everywhere. Not everyone is a hacker. Not everyone is going to appreciate the existence of this. They’ll just feel violated. source