Tech blog: Please vote on Hacker’s fate
By Techgirl

Founded in 2005, American technology blog group TechCrunch is one of the great success stories of new media. TechCrunch Founder Michael Arrington, assisted by a great team, has made it the No. 1 tech blog in US. TechCrunch gets 7.5 million unique visitors a month and has the power to make or break startups. 

When Bill Gates started a Twitter account, he followed a handful of other Twitterers including TechCrunch.

While America has always placed a high premium on individual rights, has it become an overly democratic society? Each society tries to find the right balance between individual freedoms and responsibility for what is good for the collective.  While growing up, if I suffered a tantrum and threw a doll, my mother gently whacked me if I was out of control.  But such parental correction would be labeled a traumatic experience in America. 

Techcrunch was hacked in January, 2010.  It was defaced twice over 2 days and its traffic diverted to another website. The idea was to sell advertising on the new site to the hundreds of thousands of people who read Techcrunch every day.  At that time, no one had a clue on who was the hacker behind the attack.

But the Europe based hacker was finally tracked down.  The police asked Techcrunch whether it wanted to press charges against the hacker.

And what does Techcrunch do?  It publishes the evidence against his hacker on its website, and then asks its readers to vote on whether Techcrunch should press charges against the criminal who compromised their site for 2 days.

Not surprisingly, more than 75 percent of the Techcrunch readers who took the poll feel that such criminals should be prosecuted.  After all, it is a very unpleasant experience if your home or website is broken into.

What next?  Gizmodo conducting a poll on how much should it pay for a ‘lost’ Apple iPhone?  Or Steve Jobs conducting a poll on whether they should press charges against Gizmodo?

Perhaps the Indian Government should have a poll on whether it should lift the ban on website Savita Bhabhi.

Finally, what is credibility of such a poll?  If a guy can hack into one of the most high profile and secured tech blogs in the world, he can do the same to a poll which is created using very basic code.

Techgoss note:  Techgirl is a senior Tech journalist who reports on the IT, KPO and KPO Sectors for a leading media house.  In her spare time, she dabbles in satire in her blog
http://techgirltalk.blogspot.com