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The Economics of Executing Virus Writers
applemasker writes "Slate.com has an article titled Feed The Worms Who Write Worms to the Worms which argues based on economic theory (and somewhat tongue-in-cheek) that it is a 'better investment' to execute the creators of worms, virus and trojan authors, than murderers. Anyone who has tried to resurrect a network or computer after a nasty infection may agree. Although the author does not seriously argue for capital punishment for the script kiddies, it does raise some interesting issues about how much 'value' society puts on certain types of harm and the author's view of a government's role in protecting us from it."
Politicians love to associate their names with "get tough on crime" laws that raise the punishment for certain crimes... but you rarely here about anybody supporting lower sentances for crimes.
Is it just me, or is there an inflation effect hitting our criminal justice system as over time the punishments keep getting higher for the same crimes...
"They never would be missed, They never would be missed."
First, let's execute some spammers, _then_ we can move on to the virus & spyware folks. Viruses and worms only are a problem for one segment of the online population, spam has to be dealt with by all of us.
They may not fear death. I'd suggest limiting them to 33.6 kbps internet connections. That's the real hell.
Killing people is wrong. No matter who does it.
Execute the lazy/ignorant sysadmins and infrastructure guys who fail to keep their servers patched, have their firewalls set to "Allow all" and who leave the default passwords on their systems.
Yeah, right.
by putting them in a room with a bunch of spammers on penis enlargement pills and viagra.
This is just dumb. Perhaps if the monetary value were higher than the 83 cents they've calculated. They also fail to take into account that the safety increase is not just for that individual, but also for everyone they care about. So, would you rather have 83 cents, or the knowledge that you, your family, and friends are slightly safer?
Stupid, pointless article.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
While reading the article, just bear in mind that Slate is owned and paid by Microsoft.
Ironclad Security only exists when you have Chuck Norris on the shift. Do we really have to discuss this? (Plutonite)
We perform this kind of calculus as a society all the time. When the national speed limit (in the US) was raised from 55mph, there was a predictable cost in human lives. In fact, the fact that we allow cars in the hands of private individuals at all has a steep cost in terms of human lives, and so we attempt to mitigate the cost to some extent with mandatory safetey features, license issuance, etc. The same can be said of alcohol and tobacco. The same kind of math goes on in wrongful death civil suits on a regular basis. Human life does indeed have some finite value, although that value seems to vary depending on the human or humans in question.
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
"And then we nuke it from orbit; it's the only way to be sure..."
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
According to the U.S. government, anywhere between $1 million and $6.3 million.
I seem to remember hearing that the U.S. military uses the value of $2 million per soldier. I can't verify that at the moment.
Our legal system actually employs actuaries whose primary task is to compute the estimated earning potential and household work potential of a dead person based on what they had done at the time of their death and what statistics indicate what that person would have done in the future.
It's a sick job, but somebody's got to do it in civil cases involving a wrongful death finding in order for there to be a dollar value assigned to the verdict.
Good to see that the style of Jonathan Swift's famous modest proposal for aleviating poverty in Ireland is still around. His idea was to treat impoverished Irish children as livestock to be fattened up for consumption. A tongue cannot become more firmly embedded in a cheek!
Drill baby drill - on Mars
A suburb-born CPA who kills a police officer gets executed.
A ghetto-born man who ruins the retirements of thousands of families gets a slap on the wrist.
The problem isn't one of race or money. The problem is that sentences don't match the crime. Your initial statement was correct but your example brings elements into the situation that merely cloud the actual point.
I would argue that virus and worm writers fulfill an important role in software ecology. Billions have been spent on making computers safer from Ninja, CodeRed and Sasser. Without these threats the money would not have been spent and nearly every PC would be wide open today. Can you see how much power that would give to those who do not fear the death penalty?
If we were to kill all harmful bacteria today, infections will go back dramatically. But when, in 80 years, a new strain happens to come into existence, nobody will have any immunity system and humanity will be wiped in 24 hours.
One of the major assumptions by the author of the article (and most people) is that the death penalty deters murder. It doesn't.
:(
;P
Check out The Death Penalty Inormation Center for more facts, info, and studies.
All of the authors economic number crunching is totally invalid because of this.
However that doesn't mean that I don't WANT to execute them.
Since we've thrown the entire world on one ad-hoc network without securing anything, those pranks are damned expensive right now and there's a real problem. But.... most of the people causing these untold trillions of dollars of damage are bored teenagers, just as antisocial as a lot of other teenagers who are out smashing post office boxes, spray painting walls, and sniffing glue, that happen to be somewhat adept at using a computer.
There do seem to be a few pro's in the field that could be linked to the spam operations and possibly even corporate and government espionage, but they're still seriously in the minority.
So - does some kid doing something stupid warrant destroying the rest of the kid's life? Do these kids really understand the consequences of what they're doing and what kind of destruction they're causing? I think in most cases - no, they don't. In the rest, well - they're still kids. Punish them, let them know what they did was wrong, but don't try to lock them up for the rest of their lives or bury them under the jail for what to them seemed like a funny prank. There's a huge difference between creating a piece of code and shooting someone in the head.
I think we need to do two things.
I write code.
Given that Microsoft will write software that can be exploited, I'd much rather have it exploited by something that reboots my machine and some script kiddie gets a kick out of it, than have it exploited secretly and repeatedly by someone with worse motives. If we didn't have these occasional public displays of how insecure our software is, it would be far easier for other people to take advantage of it, people like the terrorists and governments. That would be a hell of a lot worse than having all your machines reboot, or even losing a hard drive here and there.
The real solution is quality software, and punishing virus writers won't get us any closer to that.
This argument is of course only valid as long as the viruses are relatively benign.
It's just you.
Some penalties for some crimes have gone up over the last 15 years (and some have gone) but over the last, say, 100 years, the severity of punishments served out has gone down dramatically. Think of the hanging judges in the wild west, or the justice system of any European country 150 years ago.
And since humans learn much more slowly nowadays, it takes longer sentences to teach them a lesson, right?
;)
The point is that humans aren't inherently bad, except in some rare cases, but some people get some fucked up ideas about ethics. So, the people who are causing significant harm get yanked out of society for a bit, deprived of some of the things they enjoy, in hopes that they will not only be negatively reinforced, but that they will also have time to think and realize why what they did was inappropriate.
Increasing sentences is only going to drive people batty.... at least, I say
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
Uhm... lemme guess, you got PAID for that time, didn't you? And wait - you didn't secure those machines after the last time you got hit, did you? Hell, you openly advocate installing a less secure OS because it saves you time - deal with the results.
I've had to deal with viruses in corporate situations before, it ain't pleasant, it did waste my time, but..... the comparison you're giving just doesn't work.
And for christ's sake, leave the bloody Nazi references out. They're stupid.
I write code.
Jesus, I can't believe you actually wrote what you did. Riiight, of course we need to learn the "mentality that crime can be low enough."
It's only ever low for those who haven't been raped, murdered, stabbed, robbed, etc.
For those that have, the rate is always too high.
I can see which of the two categories you fall in.
That guy took the words right out of my mouth. There is a cost of reducing crime, and it is not worth my freedom.
That said... I have been robbed, my wallet was taken from a locker at a gym (yes it was locked, no I never figured out how they got in...) I found my wallet, devoid of all cash, in a nearby trash can. I was also assaulted about 10 years ago, fortunatly no harm came to me, he took one swing at me, missed, and I ran... A lot faster than he could...
I think crime is pretty low right now. Of corse I wouldn't complain if the crime rate was lowered, but if big brother is needed to lower crime, I will take my chances, thank you very much...
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
I said it was filled with blatant lies and half-truths. For instance, if I'm writing about how horrible Wheat Thins are, I could write "These little crackers, made from the grain grown by the working class farmer and his underprivileged household, contain 10 calories apiece! Over the course of a serving, that's almost 500 calories! No wonder Americans are getting fat!". Wheat Thins aren't terribly bad for you, the farmer is doing what he wants to do for his living and neither has anything to do with Americans getting fat, yet all statements are true.
You can mix up any words to build something that sounds more ominous than it really is.
--trb
Ahem.
I've been both stabbed AND robbed.
Personally, I think the 'horrendous crime problem' in the US is more a product of the Media trying to sell advertisements than an actual problem. Hell, a study came out a while back showing that violent crime in the UK was the highest in Europe... and a throw away line in the report was that the US ("Known for its violent crime") was lower than any of the European countries being compared.
Yes. Crime is a problem. But, like the grandparent said, there comes a point where the cost of trying to lower crime more is more costly than the crimes themselves...
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living."
- Seneca
Indeed, skepticism abounds today, for I cannot believe that you wrote what you did.
There are these wonderful things called "statistics" and arguments like yours are designed solely for the purpose of keeping people irrational and avoiding thinking about them.
The basic thrust of your argument (and I'm hoping that thrust was unintentional) is that, so long as there is a one in six billion chance of being the victim of a violent crime, we as a society are responsible for taking whatever measures are necessary to alleviate that risk.
Let's pull a number out of the air and say that the U.S. spends $100B for state and federal law enforcement every year. Let's also imagine that each time we double that number, we halve the crime rate. Maybe it would be worthwhile to spend $400B to reduce the rate to 1/4, or $800B to get it down to 1/8th the current level. But what about 1/256th? That would cost $25T, which would mean that pretty much the entire economy would be channeled into crime prevention. Forget other wonderful things like medical research, we might not even be able to feed ourselves. And still, people are getting killed, raped, stabbed, and shot.
Nothing in the previous analysis even mentions the secondary costs that come with living in a de facto police state.
I think you're going out of your way to be insulted. When the grandparent says crime is "low enough," he doesn't mean that we just don't give a crap about the victims who remain. He means that the costs associated with getting it down further are unjustifiable. Going back to my earlier example, imagine if we halved the current law enforcement funding. Assume that caused the crime rate to double. Would that be a bad thing? Certainly. But that doesn't eliminate the possibility that it might be the best thing to do, if funneling that money into medical research lead to an overall improvement in the quality of life.
I could sit here and make precisely the same arguments you do, but in favor of such medical research. After all, for the parents of a child who died of cancer, there is no way the cancer rate was "low enough." But how big a tax increase would we allow to reduce it further than we already have? Would we allow the government to step in and start outlawing certain foods, or require that every citizen take an anti-oxidant tablet every morning? Would we sit by while those who refused the pills were jailed?
The whole idea is that we allocate things like resources and government regulations where they will produce the most good. Simple economics.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Here is a report of international crime statistics which shows that there is, in fact, far more violent crime in the US than in Western Europe.
The following are average numbers of homicides per 100,000 inhabitants per year from 1997 to 1999
US : 6.26
England : 1.45
Germany : 1.28
France : 1.63
Norway : 0.85
Russia : 20.52
S.Africa: 56.49
Interestingly, the land of the free also has the extremely high prison population (from the same source, again per 100.000 inhabitants)
US : 682
England : 125
Germany : 97
France : 91
Norway : 56
Russia : 729
S.Africa: 327