Читать книгу Linux Security Fundamentals - David Higby Clinton - Страница 8

“With great power comes great responsibility.”

Words of wisdom. That’s the message displayed for administrators when they log in for the first time to many Linux distributions. Who said those words first? Aristotle? Kant? Nope. Spider-Man’s uncle. But hey, accept the truth from any source.

While we’ll discuss protecting yourself from attack at length later in the book, this chapter is all about responsibilities. It’s about your responsibilities both as a consumer of computer technologies and as an administrator of computer technologies. It’s your job to make sure nothing you do online or with your devices causes harm to anyone’s assets.

How is all this relevant to the world of information technology (IT) and, specifically, to IT security? Computers amplify your strengths. No matter how much you can remember, how fast you can calculate, or how many people’s lives you can touch, it’ll never come close to the scope of what you can do with a computing device and a network. So, given the power inherent in digital technologies and the depth of chaos such power can unleash, you need to understand how it can all go wrong before you set off to use it for good.

The rest of this chapter will explore the importance of considering how your actions can impact people’s personal and property rights and privacy and how you can both ensure and assess the authenticity of online information.

I’m not a lawyer and this book doesn’t pretend to offer legal advice, so we’re not going to discuss some of the more esoteric places where individual rights can come into conflict with events driven by technology. Instead we’ll keep it simple. People should be able to go about their business and enjoy their interactions with each other without having to worry about having physical, financial, or emotional injury imposed on them. And you should be ready to do whatever is necessary to avoid or prevent such injuries.