At least on the surface, most cyber attacks appear to be clearly unethical as well as illegal. These include attacks performed for amusement or bragging rights, such as web defacements conducted “just for fun” and computer viruses launched out of curiosity but disregard for their consequences. They also include attacks done for personal gain, such as system intrusions to steal credit card numbe...

This created some good habits for me, such as defensive programming, careful desk checking, test planning, and analyzing before coding. But it also created some bad habits--a preoccupation with saving microseconds, patching object code, etc--which were hard to unlearn when the balance of hardware and software costs began to tip the other way. For example, when Fortran came to General Dynamics i...