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Japan Criminalizes Virus Creation
camperslo writes with this excerpt from mainichi.jp: "Japan's parliament enacted legislation Friday criminalizing the creation or distribution of computer viruses to crack down on the growing problem of cybercrimes, but critics say the move could infringe on the constitutionally guaranteed privacy of communications. With the bill to revise the Penal Code passing the House of Councillors by an overwhelming majority, the government intends to conclude the Convention on Cybercrime, a treaty that stipulates international cooperation in investigating crimes in cyberspace.'"
Adds camperslo: "This legislation is a major move for Japan since the constitution there provides for privacy of communications, in sharp contrast with some other countries."
It also makes it punishable to send e-mail messages containing pornographic images to a random number of people.
So you can send pr0n to a non-random number of people? How is "random" defined? "Your honour, I will now demonstrate that my client arrived at the number 42 by a fully deterministic markovian process, thereby proving that his goatse spam wasn't sent to a random number of people. For my definition of 'random' I draw your attention to the writings of the 13th-century German philosopher Noodleheinz who said that ...
If this law is too broad it can actually do harm. Would bad code that contains bugs be illegal as well? How are they categorizing it?
I must say I don't see any problem with this. What's a virus you ask? Well that's what a jury is for deciding. I trust the common man to be able to understand these things, and if they need help there are people who are experts in these things. Virus scanners give me complete confidence that nothing will ever be improperly flagged as a virus or missed.
Not to mention, this law avoid all the complications of deciding on the intent of a virus writer. There could NEVER be a good reason for a virus to be written for research or private use, and with this law juries can rightfully just assume the ill intent of the creator. And if, for some reason someone like law enforcement needed to write a virus to protect us, we can be confident that the law won't be applied in their case since realistically you just have to selectively apply laws.
I've run out of sarcasm.
Will they make it illegal to make a tool that can make a virus? What about the tools that make the tools?
Korma: Good
You mean "lay judges", not a jury.
Still, that's an improvement over Japan's previous 98% conviction rate by judges. Part of that is the underfunded police force only investigates and prosecutes open-and-shut cases, and part of it is that judges tend to believe that and convict out of hand.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Is fork now to be illegal (in Japan) as it replicates code?
No. But a Quine might be. Try explaining it to a jury.
So the sole purpose of this program is to make a copy of itself?
As I mentioned in a couple of days ago concerning CCP being targeted by these people, this sort of legislation is the obvious result of their actions. Even if it is a decentralized group of fanboys and people who want to make a statement or just rail against the establishment, it's clear that this law was passed in direct response to Sony's bidding/what happened to them recently.
All that happens is that the more that they do stunts like they've been doing recently, the quicker the governments around the world tighten their grip on the rest of us and make us all suffer under a virtual online police-state. They think it's bad now? They have no idea how bad it could possibly get. Most of the Internet operates due to the good will and charity of the world's governments. And they're running out of patience very very quickly as of late.