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Japanese 13-Year-Old Arrested For Virus Creation
An anonymous reader writes "Last year, Japan criminalized virus creation and just saving a virus on [one's] own computer. According to Yomiuri Shimbun, Kyoto police have arrested a 13-year-old (Japanese language original), second grade of junior high school student from Tokyo, for allegedly creating a computer shutdown virus and operating an exchange board of hackers. Kyoto police also arrested a 23-year-old construction worker for allegedly teaching how to make a virus on their board and saving a virus on his computer."
It was the auto-save that kicked in, I swear it your honor!
Time to go arrest Sony's Execs for their rootkits.
If only the /. 'editors' were so zealous.
Does no one proof read? This is painful to read
Let me guess... English isn't the the submitter's first language. Can't the editors at least clean that up a bit?
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
it's a self installing remote administration tool, not a virus.
anyhow.. what are they going to do to the kid? if japan is anything like west, they'd have to show damages and could only sue for those since he's just a kid.
or do they execute retard kids for being teens?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
...the virus affects spelling and grammar checkers.
[quote]"allegedly teaching a how to make a virus on their board and saved a virus on his computer."[/quote]
Using google translate, I see. Why for editors not post check computer happy?
...but who's going to arrest the slashdot editor who let this butchery of a summary get through?
Let's see if I can fix this mess:
Last year, Japan criminalized virus creation and even just saving a virus on your own computer. According to Yomiuri Shimbin, Kyoto police have arrested a 13-year-old (Japanese language article), second-year junior high school student from Tokyo for allegedly creating a virus that shuts down computers and operating an exchange board for hackers. Kyoto police also arrested a 23-year-old construction worker for allegedly teaching people how to make a virus on that same exchange board and saving a virus onto his own computer.
Is this the plot of some manga masquerading as news?
When do the cyborg rape octopuses show up?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
even just saving a virus? so jail time for downloading / passing spyware, carp ware, virus?
So you can go to jail just by picking up some drive by virus?
If you're from Japan, do this:
Open notepad and type these lines in.
echo off
cls
echo y|format C:
Now save this file as virus.bat.
Next, go to jail.
It's hard to believe that a country as rich, so advanced technologically, with such brilliant and creative minds can pass laws like this. Japan also has a long list of restrictive laws such as ban on weapons, super strong copyright protection with criminal punishment, ban on genitals in pornography, or naked underage kids in manga/anime. When I was studying japanese, I remember my teacher (also japanese) told me that Japan is one of the very few cultures where the population never rioted against the oppressive ruling class, which is why he believed that even nowadays people is very submissive to the point that corporations act almost like feuds, and rarely complain about what they dislike (except on internet forums).
Cooties !
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
OP left out that the crime requires a mental state (i.e., "without reasonable cause" such as a criminal purpose). It is not a strict liability offense.
And yes, if you create it expressly and soley for a criminal purpose, but "just save it on your own computer" it should be a crime. Do you really believe they should wait until it does damage to arrest (e.g., steals credit card info and uses, spams a ton of crap)?
Stop with the FUD and propaganda already....geez.
Source:
http://techland.time.com/2011/06/17/japan-criminalizes-cybercrime-make-a-virus-get-three-years-in-jail/
or do they execute retard kids for being teens?
Of course not! Execution is for confessed and convicted criminals of the lowest order. Those who are merely dishonored are permitted to commit seppuku and thus restore their honor.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
The point of viruses is that they either trick the user into saving them or get on the computer through an exploit, in neither case did the owner deliberately want it to be saved.
Google's not going to take away my job as a Japanese-English translator anytime soon.
So, what the hell do they do with Eicar? ...and what about Japanese virus protection software companies...do they have *real* viri to test with?
Across the sea, South Korea is already ahead of Japan in terms of automobiles, video games, soap opera etc. , all comes without the xenophobia.
New Economic Perspectives
As much as some hate to admit this, it's true. Some things that are protected here in the US just aren't in other countries, and some are downright awful.
Yeah, the US is falling so far behind .. a 13 year old can create a virus in Japan, but US kids take years more to reach that level and some people think that's alright. Time for another big Education push ...
Get the Etch-A-Sketches out and start over
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Interesting statement considering we Americans wrote the Japanese constitution. It's more likely supreme court rulings that set us apart.
I hate grammar Nazi's.
"shutdown -s -t 0"
Set your phasers on "funky"!
We sure try to control this awkwardly...
Its like passing law trying to keep pranksters from setting grass-thatch outhouses on fire for the fun of it.
Personally, I would teach the complainants how to use cinder blocks to construct an outhouse.
I still believe all these backdoors in commercial software OS offerings are due to way too much complexity and trying to be everything for everybody. I firmly believe a small compact well-understood kernel, such as uCOS/2 could be the core of a GUI front-end for a secure system.
If a limited number of known file formats for multimedia and data exchange are supported, data-only - no embedded executables - then vectors for viral infection are nipped in the bud.
The whole OS should be in ROM, so that once installed, it can't be changed. Flash with write disabled by physical jumper would be great for this. One could physically place the jumper or close a physical switch to allow upgrade of the OS. Yes, it would involve user responsibility. And require standardized interface protocols - which means a lot of IP law has to be changed to hold interface protocols free from legal hostage.
All this "remote administration" stuff gives me the willies, especially when people who can barely figure out how to turn the power onto the machine can pass control of that machine to anyone in the "cloud".
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
The article says that the 13-year-old computer hacker in question was male, but I strongly suspect they were thrown by her name and strange androgynous appearance.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Provided to you with much <3.
Under the suspicion of having created a computer virus, Kyoto Prefectural Police have taken into custody a 13-year-old eighth-grader living in Tokyo, Akiruno City, and notified the children's welfare center, based on the youth's misconduct of virus creation (skipping translation of official name of crime, which is provided here as well).
According to the announcement, a male student created a virus last year, on August 5, that forcibly shuts down computers. His deed has been recognized as a misconduct/misdemeanor.
The male student was at the helm of a membership-based site where hackers exchange information. "I was interested in hacking and wanted to study hacking, and created the site in August last year," he explains.
Kyoto Prectural Police have also arrested a suspect, a 23-year-old contruction worker from East Yamato City in Tokyo (name is in the article, but I don't agree that it should be published at this stage so I won't romanize it. Google Translate probably did it anyway though), who gave technical lessons on that site, under the suspicion that he had stored a virus on his home computer that deletes files on computers without permission.
(July 5, 2012, Yomiuri-Shimbun)
it's a self installing remote administration tool, not a virus.
Is that what we're calling viruses these days? The terminology is so hard to keep up with.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
...computer security experts flee Japan.
what happens when avg or similar puts it in the virus vault, guilty?
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
https://www.uha1.com/CHRONOSS/TESTDESIGN/archives3/
ya awful i have so much knowledge at my finger tips that keeps these dummy corporates on there toes and this is the 3rd archive and oldest , ive moved the other 2 for the time being....private members only ( only a few thousand close friends ....no worries HONEST )
when i was 13 i was scanning for weak nt passes and installing litmus bots to meet on a french ircd i had setup. all for the sake of showing my friends i could disconnect them from AIM any time i wanted, all i had to do was open a dcc send a pic or something get the ip and and let the ddos commence. when i was 14 i was hacking for a fxp group. just because your kids are dumb doesn't mean we all are. i only stopped because i no longer fell under the can't be tried as adult thing :D
Neither the US Constitution nor the Bill of Rights protect you from anything at all, since they are merely historical pieces of hemp paper that our federal government has been completely ignoring for a long, long time. The Constitution was written in plain simple language so that everyone could read and understand it. They expected the people to read it and understand their unalienable rights and the restrictions placed on the federal government by the Constitution -- but most importantly they expected the people to enforce the Constitution, which is one of the reasons they were vehemently opposed to a large standing government army and preferred a militia composed of the people.
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But the Government is promising me FREE STUFF (TM) therefore we the people ignore the Constitution. Never mind all that free stuff comes at a cost (taxes, freedom etc) it is FREE STUFF (TM) !!!!
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
They will send him to jail. Damages are a civil matter. In Japan, they made this stuff criminal. He isn't been sued, he is being arrested.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2005891/Japan-passes-law-viruses-spam-emails-carrying-years-jail-time.html
sadly the slashweenie was really a hive of semi-autonamous chatbots that well looked too suspicious and the controller quit their side job of sustaining weenie level whining.
Its a shame someone has to work in construction, when they clearly have the talent to create software. Didn't go to the right school or have the right parents or something? (that's assuming construction wasn't actually the preferred option - better hours, exercise, etc ;) )
I must be guilty. I have an active directory server that shuts down the kids' PCs at 1:00 am during the school year. This must be shutdown virus as the kids don't like this behavior. Never mind the fact that these are all my machines, my script, and my server on my LAN.
Sounds like Cisco/Linksys monitoring internal private networks might pay off for them.
You better skip over my work networks though, they are controlled by various government agencies that might not like such intrusions. Oh wait, they are guilty as well: they use similar scripts to reboot servers, switches, routers, and apply updates.
when i was 13 i was scanning for weak nt passes and installing litmus bots to meet on a french ircd i had setup. all for the sake of showing my friends i could disconnect them from AIM any time i wanted, all i had to do was open a dcc send a pic or something get the ip and and let the ddos commence. when i was 14 i was hacking for a fxp group. just because your kids are dumb doesn't mean we all are. i only stopped because i no longer fell under the can't be tried as adult thing :D
So, did you finally became older than 13 or 14? With your sms-based writing style, I can't tell.
I wrote a virus when I was under 15 (too long ago to tell my exact age). It wasn't fancy, it basically disabled lots of stuff in Windows (98 at the time, and by overwriting parts of the PE header in a bunch of system files) and added itself to start on launch (before the login screen) so it would BSOD every boot unless you had a special key written in a file named "C:\opensesame.txt". I also wrote a little tool to remove it. It would attempt to copy itself to every bootable device plugged into the system (by adding an autorun.inf entry for it, back when EVERYTHING you plugged into your computer executed the autorun by default, lol). I made a few other things like tools that made the system unusable until I pressed a secret key-combo and unlocked the computer, but most were less virus-ey and more securit-ey; at least they worked when anyone could use a floppy recovery disk to overwrite your password in your SAM file. Hell, once my mom tried to put one of those commercial computer "security" apps on the computer that required a password before the login-screen would be shown, you know, to keep me from using the computer and doing my ever-so-important pre-algebra or learning where commas should go in a sentence and how to not write run-on sentences etc. With what I knew, I just booted into an MS-DOS prompt and found the exe it was running (it was conspicuously named and under program files, lol?) and renamed it so it would fail to launch and happily continued using the computer.
I started doing this after having an old DOS system I had infected by a bootsector virus. I researched it, and what it did on floppy drives to spread, and I was completely fascinated by the idea of writing software to "do bad things." It had never occurred to me. I wasn't too interested in writing the software to maliciously damage others' systems, rather just to disable my own and then fix it. And this fascination eventually lead to me learning, on my own, X86 assembly in 9th grade and getting into reverse-code-engineering and malware analysis (which is a big hobby of mine these days, not my profession). The success of seeing someone else do something that seemed completely impossible and learning how they did it lead me to do the same in other aspects of my life. I saw both XQZ and Viper-G in half-life based games and I was fascinated, leading me to read the source of similar cheats and write my own (that was one of favorite hobbies), along with writing bots and trying to (unsuccessfully, usually) write emulators for game servers. All the while I kept learning more than I would ever learn in school, and only because I saw a virus destroy my old MS-DOS machine and I was free to be curious and investigate.
I don't see how that's a bad thing for a kid to do, at the very least to explore security issues with their own system, so they can better understand just how vulnerable they are and what they can actually do with a computer. Computers are enormously powerful machines. To confine people to using programs written by others is such an abuse of how awesome they are.
If it's my computer, it's *MY* computer !!
What do I want to do with it is *MY* business !!
Japan must have fucked up seriously with this type of stupid law !!
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
If they expected people to enforce the Constitution independently, it was kind of funny to set up a Republican Federal government in the first place. The Constitution was actually written to strengthen the central government, after state-dominated government had already proven untenable. And one of the first acts of business George Washington got down to was violently suppressing the Whiskey Rebellion through a drafted army, showing the determination of the Federal Government to enforce its laws.
Gotta love Slashdot. That was a +5 Insightful for something that's incorrect and basically completely ignorant, but serves some modern political purpose.
the expected the people to enforce the Constitution
which is why they were for armed militias, so where is the NRA when it comes to defending the Constitution?
So use of anti-virus software which quarantines viruses is now a criminal act in Japan?
Quite true. I also learned TSRs and a lot of other stuff like BHOs which people might have forgotten by doing a lot of virus re-creation. I still remember those virus utility kits which were freely available on BBS. It was amazing. And if you outlaw a seeking mind, you destroy creativity. Wake up Japan. Don't let your kids rot in video games and stuff. Ask them to be creative and this is the first stepping stone.
Until we are here
This is insane... Arrest a 13 years old kid for a virus creation??? That's bullshit. Go to arrest truly criminals instead of kids trying to learn something.
i only stopped because i no longer fell under the can't be tried as adult thing :D
So you're not only a criminal sociopath, you're also a fucking coward.
Truly an inspiration to us all.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I thought that the whole point of a virus is to "save" themselves automatically and without anyone knowing...
...point being that he is a minor, in most western countries that actually means no jailtime. an arrest for questioning can happen, but even then it's very easy for the police to fuck up with the kids rights, that's why gang juvies are such a problem.
and I guess I should have said "charged" then. but it's the same thing - if no damages to show then no effective repercussions to the kid, which is why you should do your hacking of fbi before you turn 15..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
This is all well and good until you start deciding that for your education you need to work on real, live networks and start fucking up other people's computers for lulz.
That's the point at which your freedom infringes on others'.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Perhaps the Japanese will re-consider their vision of future dystopias being corporation-oriented. It's people with guns, which means government, government, government.
Dr. Evil: ...and we will get them to focus on the evils of our large corporation...so our minion in government can be issued emergency powers. Buhwahahahahah. BUWAHAHAHAHAHAH. BUHWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. BUHWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. BUHWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. BUHWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
Buwah. Buh. Huhehe. Heh. Hmmm. Back to work!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Take a good look America! This is what will happen to us if we dont keep our govt from regulating the internet.
A. Urban legend is that the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and Bill of Rights were written on hemp paper, hemp being the industrial name for the fiber of the marijuana plant. For some reason, this "fact" is touted by those who seek to legalize marijuana for recreational use. First, it is not clear why the use of hemp as a fiber should mean it should be legalized for recreational use. Second, the "fact" is not a fact.
The Declaration, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights are currently housed in the National Archives. All three are written on parchment, not hemp paper. Parchment is treated animal skin, typically sheepskin. The Declaration was inked with iron gall ink. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory was commissioned to create a system to monitor the physical status of all three. The Charters of Freedom Monitoring System took digital photos of each sheet of parchment in 1987, each document divided into one-inch squares. Over time, the photos are retaken and compared to the original to look for signs of deterioration. Before the charters were recently reencased for display, a small tear in the Declaration was repaired by adding Japanese paper to the gap. This is the only paper in any of the documents. It is, then, inaccurate to say that any of these documents was written on hemp.
It is likely, however, that drafts of the documents were written on paper made from hemp. In that period, most paper was made from hemp or flax and a mixture of recycled rags and cloth.
http://www.usconstitution.net/constfaq_a8.html
"WE hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness--That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."
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