Computers: Pranksters, Pirates and Pen Pals

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College-age pranksters sometimes get more serious. University of California students at Berkeley figured out an undetectable way to crack a popular time-sharing system called UNIX, which would have allowed them to copy, change or destroy the data of thousands of users. As yet there is no evidence that they have committed any crime. Indeed, the wise guys tipped off authorities, leaving an anonymous warning in the university's electronic mail system that deliberately drew attention to their discovery. "They did the responsible thing," says M. Stuart Lynn, director of computing affairs at Berkeley, "they didn't exploit it."

Right now, about the only thing that victims can do is to hope that morality, like software, may become an item to duplicate and pass along to friends.