USPS text scammers duped his wife, so he hacked their operation

> The creator is a current computer science student in China who is using the skills he's learning to make a pretty penny on the side.

There's a strong argument right here for teaching technology ethics as part of a typical CS curriculum. I'm not saying that would have stopped this student from making his own unethical choices, but it does highlight the fact that we equip people with these really powerful technical skills, but we don't even try to equip them with the ethics to be responsible about it. We just sort of hope they were raised right, I guess.

Anyone here have experience with a curriculum that includes the ethics aspect?

Not ethics per se but all students at university in Norway take basic philosophy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Examen_philosophicum

The Markkula Center at SCU is fantastic.

https://www.scu.edu/ethics/about-the-center/center-news/inte...

The Brown CS curriculum has in the past few years started including “socially responsible computing” material across intro and non-intro level courses.

See https://responsible.cs.brown.edu/

All ABET accredited programs are required to include ethics and have been required to do so for over 15 years.

We explicitly learned about voht IEEE and ACM code of ethics for example (though this was not the only thing we discussed) . We were even tested on the difference. I'm always confused when people don't even get the baseline ethics training.

This person has lots of fellow students who aren't doing this. Maybe his CS classes aren't challenging enough.

Gotta be careful, though. If you teach them too much ethics then they won't want to work for most corporations.

Clearly you don't understand Chinese mindset, do you think he has no ethics? He has a lot of ethics, because he wouldn't dare to hack Chinese citizens, we know why :) but everyone else (except Russians, of course) are open-season for them.

In high school (over 2 decades ago), I figured out how to crack the school security software (and obtain its master password, thank you Windows swap file!) and after doing so, I installed a keylogger on the school library computers. I got access to dozens of email accounts, instant messaging accounts, etc. I'm self-taught all the way. In fact I dropped out of high school junior year with a 1.76 GPA. I knew what was right and wrong, but not yet mature enough to fully grasp the harm it does. I don't think any sort of ethics teachings would've changed anything.

> He has a lot of ethics, because he wouldn't dare to hack Chinese citizens

That has to do with fear, not ethics; the consequences of getting caught doing this to Chinese (vs foreigners) are significantly high (you do not f*k around with a system that has no due process)

Similar story here, though at a smaller scale, and with a better educational experience. I remember distinctly talking to my mom about the ethics of hacking, and my viewpoint at the time was - in the parlance of kids today - cringe.

Yeah we all had to take it at Portland State because CS was ABET. Was kinda surprised to learn it wasn’t a standard CS requirement everywhere.

There was also an ethics module in one of the massive pre-weed out 100 level courses.

Let's not blame CS classes for the unethical actions of one pupil. My CS classes weren't exactly challenging either, but I never wrote or sold a scamming toolkit.

My lesson came while ARP poisoning, when I saw that a teacher was using their social security number as their password.

Suddenly I realized even dumping passwords was an invasion of privacy, even if I didn't use them. And that passwords should never contain sensitive information!

Why does it have to be social? Why not just “responsible computing” instead?

The ethics classes I took delved into what good and wrong are, different ways to look at things, and a whole lot of debate about the concept of ethics itself (i.e. reading old works of philosophers, including some of the weird racist ones, understanding their take on the world, and reflecting on the shifted ethical perspectives, but also lively discussions within the classroom). Everyone already knew "stealing from the elderly is bad", so things were more focused on "what are the ethical reasons to restrict free speech" and "applying different ethical points of view onto a subject".

In the end, ethics courses only teach you to be conscious about your actions and learning how to convince others that you're ethical. An ethical person can easily pass an ethics exam. All of that knowledge, and being raised by good parents, do not completely prevent someone from becoming a criminal.

If you can set up a reasonably successful scamming business on your own as a student, you can earn enough money to move to the countryside and never need to work another day in your life, as long as you can manage to hide the money from the authorities. Or you can spend it all on drugs and other short-lives pleasures, like so many criminals do.

Cybercrime targeting vulnerable people is laughably easy and extremely lucrative. Hearing about how hard some people's lives are because of their student loans, I'm a little surprised this stuff doesn't happen more, really, especially with the growing resentment the younger generations seem to feel for the bad hand they've been dealt by the older generations.

I feel like you don't understand the word ethics the same way I do.

I see no argument for an ethics part in a CS curriculum. It's already quite watered down.

I’m of the minority view that kids shouldn’t reach legal majority until age 25. High school and college age kids really don’t have fully developed mental capabilities, and we should recognize that.

> 25

That's a myth based on a study that stopped studying brain development at age 25. If they'd kept going, we might have learned that the brain is constantly changing, and 25 is no more or less arbitrary than 18, 16, or 48.

https://www.sciencefocus.com/comment/brain-myth-25-developme...

> It could be a misunderstanding, stemming from brain scanning studies which looked at subjects up to the age of 25. But that’s like saying sprinters can only run 100 metres at most after watching the 100m final at the Olympics. The limit is imposed by the context, not biology.

Possibly, and I appreciate the fact checking, but it’s not the only bit of data. Renting cars is usually prohibited or prohibitively expensive under the age of 25 because of actuary tables. Kids below that age are more likely to have road accidents. It’s also about peak body fitness, which starts to go down hill there (although you usually don’t feel it until your 30’s).

I will say this:

Some cultures have a very strong "if you can scam someone and get away with it, you'd be a fool not to" mentality, often combined with the mindset that you should do everything in your power to improve your life, and that you're living in a constant state of scarcity - so if any opportunity pops up, you'd better take it.

And if it's some random faceless person on the other side of the world, even better.

You know why