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Should Virus Distribution be Illegal?
mccormi writes "In a guest editorial on Newarchitect Sarah Gordon looks at whether posting malicious code should be allowed and what steps could be taken to stop it. What's worrisome though is that restrictions on malicious code doesn't take into account who it's malicious against and what truly defines malicious." Note that she's not talking about actually infecting computers, but merely making the code available for others to examine (and for some of them, no doubt, to try to spread in the wild).
Ugh.
Code is -art-.
When I was but a wee hacker, I used to LOVE reading virus source code. I would download all I could find (granted, at the time, it was from BBS', or sneaker-net), and let me tell ya, I learned much more from those virus' than I ever learned in any mainstream assembler class I've taken.
And no, I -never- used the code for malicious purposes. It was just amazingly interesting to me.
To make it illegal to write ANY type of code is just insane; and if you distribute it without disguising it as something else, what's the real problem??
If you think about it in the biological sense, from a purely result-oriented perspective, one might make the argument that viruses are good for computers. The justification is that viruses force people to make their code more robust, and less vulnerable to attack.
I think I subscribe to this to some extent. If we had no viruses, and didn't know what havoc they could play with our system, we'd be completely unprepared for any such trouble in our systems -- whether maliciously, or because someone's code happened to go wrong.
I don't think that you can place restrictions on what people write or do not write. I feel it's still the obligation of the system user to protect him/herself against problems and to be vigilant. It keeps us all in practice, and makes us more ready for whatever is out there, no?
I feel fine letting Symantec et al worry about studying viruses.
I feel fine letting Sun worry about Java.
I feel fine letting Microsoft worry about computer security.
I feel fine letting the LAPD internal affairs department worry about police corruption.
I feel fine letting the military worry about war.
In general, I feel fine about letting the fox worry about the henhouse.
Code for a virus is no different than certain Stephen King books. Both can describe illegal action. Nobody is claiming that Stephen King did anything illegal, nor is it illegal for people to buy and read his books. It's illegal to try to do some of the things he describes, in sometimes tiny detail, exactly how to do.