For a minute there I thought you were talking about Zuckerburg. I suppose tricking people to willingly give it up and selling it is different. How different is allowing apps to steal it through shoddy APIs though?
You didn't quantify it as hackers who steal > (some #) of personal informations need to have their hands cut off to kill their hacking careers and end their love lives. Whats that number? Should the random chan kid using LOIC as part of the crowd still qualify even though they don't have the knowledge to do anything more advanced yet? Seemed like they did before. I do agree that carders crossed the line into federal prison territory rather then going legit later. Although that won't be the case if they are caught, they'll probably get to work for the secret service like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Gonzalez because those groups are hard to infiltrate. Then they'll lock them up after they do something high profile again under the secret service's watch.
Complaining about stereotyping is not even a tad hypocritical. Here we have "all hackers should have their hands cut off." Where's the line between carders, hacker, hacktivist, script kiddies, or someone who can run a program and enter an ip address to flood a website? It's not all the same group attacking Sony (who is just as evil as anyone under those labels). You do know Sony is a company that has a history of among (many) other things installing root kits on unsuspecting people's computers through music CDs just a few years ago, right? What are we supposed to do with their hands? Also it isn't hackers that took the PSN down, its Sony and the Credit Card companies that are auditing them now to decide whether Sony gets to keep their merchant status. Since Sony obviously didn't have the system admin staff good enough to know who got in, how, where, or what they took not to mention prevent it in the first place.
Its a good thing you guys weren't around for IRC wars and crap in the 90s where if someone didn't like what someone else said or what they did to them they'd simply take them or their ISP offline for a few hours and they didn't need a bot net to do it because you could spoof a ping request to a broadcast and turn entire networks into unwitting flooders. Imagine trying to play CoD where if you were good enough to piss someone off they could send a single packet to your pc and freeze it requiring a reboot. Which only fixed it until windows got another one of those packets and those vulnerabilities were around and unpatched for months or years. The entire internet would be at defcon5 of nerd-rage then. Point is these things, while inconvenient and a pita, have to happen for things to get better. The fact that it happened to Sony is just poetic justice, couldn't have happened to a bigger a-hole evil corporation. Hopefully some of their customers realize who they are dealing with now.
Unlike Microsoft? Because we all know they're a bunch a saints in starched shirts and penny loafers....