In his current Sunday column, Dan Gillmor’s written a very good piece on the good guys and bad guys of the Internet, and the ways in which the Internet constitutes a microcosm of the forces of constructivism and vandalism:
But pure malevolence fills some souls, and the Internet is their toxic playground. One creep found a security flaw in the software powering the site and exploited it. This person posted programming code inside a comment form — some HTML that took users to an unaffiliated Web page containing one of the most disgusting photographs I’ve ever seen.
The site came down temporarily but quickly, thanks to users who alerted us. The offending post has been removed, thanks to a sharp-eyed programmer who let us know what had happened. The hole is being permanently repaired, thanks to the free software’s developer, who hadn’t foreseen this misuse.
We’d surely seen the downside of the Net. But in the response of people who helped us find, analyze and fix the problem, we’d also seen the profound upside.