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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'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).
Who said anything about funny? And something need not be clever to be true or worthy of repeating. You just sound like a Sony apologist.
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.