If someone obviously has a stolen machine, of course it makes sense to avoid helping that person out, but on the whole, I think it's futile to ban information. It's like outlawing a baseball bat because you can hit someone over the head and kill them with it. If someone is so inclined to kill another person, and baseball bats are unavailable, they will find a lead pipe instead. And yet, the law-abiding community will not be able to play baseball because of the restriction.
For every person who is supposedly kept from doing wrong with the information, you're keeping 100 people from doing good things with that same info. I have actually witnessed proof that we're hurting the situation if we don't spread the information: Several large recycling companies have sold me hundreds of iBooks WITH sensitive information on them, specifically because they did not know how to get past the open firmware password, and they were too lazy to bother taking other measures. They were definitely negligent in selling the machines, but the point is, if they'd had the knowledge, the data would have been erased. Luckily, I have a policy of wiping all hard drives clean before selling machines, but I'm certainly not the only one buying computers from recyclers, and who knows where the sensitive data is ending up? So, case in point, this is a simple example of how the lack of knowledge in the hands of the right people actually CAUSES the proliferation of massive amounts of sensitive information. And this is not an isolated incident -- it happens in YOUR city every day!
Besides, there's a workaround for everything. By telling someone how to put a hard drive in an external enclosure, we're giving a workaround to resetting a firmware password, so should we not tell people how to salvage data from a dead machine? Maybe by telling someone how to replace a faulty inverter cable, we're illuminating a screen and letting a thief see stolen data, so maybe we shouldn't talk about screen repair either? Etc, etc, etc.
It's a slippery slope, and if you're serious about going in that direction, the only solution is to shut down the site. And is that REALLY the answer we're looking for?
