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| No | 15% | 156 votes | Total: 1028 votes | |
| Yes | 85% | 872 votes |
No
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Add to FavoritesComputer virus writers use their enormous knowledge of the functioning of PCs in order to take control of them, break into apparently secure networks, read secret data or execute operations and transactions without the owner of the respective PC knowing.
Computer viruses have had a devastating effect on some companies, as there were occasions where whole databases of customer information was deleted or stolen, but the wide majority of computer virus writers aren't pursuing such dangerous aims.
The major motivation to start writing a computer virus is just curiosity, as it is nothing else than a program, and everyone who ever did programming has to admit that he thought about writing a virus, too. Naturally, some virus get out of hands and start spreading and destroying information and IT systems, but they're very rare. For the minimal percentage of virus programmers who effectively do write in order to harm somebody else, prison should be applied. Maybe not for too long, as they didn't kill or physically harm anybody, but punishment has to be used here in order to show these individuals what is acceptable and what is not.
However, the most famous and most productive computer virus writers are an essential part of the IT economy and shouldn't be imprisoned as they are needed by every major PC company. Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Google, etc.: All employ genius hackers in order to test the performance and security of their systems. If they couldn't rely on these professional hackers, they couldn't adapt their systems to real security threats and thus every PC user would much more often be subject to data theft or other criminal activities on the Internet and the PC.
Furthermore, the average man who only thinks about hackers as "crazy young teens without any social life trying to harm other people's PCs" have to shift their point of view and accept that in the IT world, there are challenges and sports just as well as in the real world. And what for one may be the Saturday evening football game is for another the mutual Monday night hack attack where one friend tries to enter another one's PC and secret data. Such hobbies are to be encouraged instead of dismissing them, because the world is clearly going into a future where high technology is more and more important.
What's needed in order to organize and administrate these activities aren't prison and punishment, but a more accepting society which accepts to integrate these hobbies into everyday life by for instance creating hacker events and tournaments which would enable the PC specialists to live their hobbies without infringing the law.
Learn more about this author, Jim Schumacher.
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Yes
Yes, often these writers, when they are apprehended pay fines of hundreds of thousands of dollars and end up working for a computer software firm doing security. There have been cases of computer virus writers going to jail and being in trouble with the law how many times have you seen people's computers being seized and the virus writer being thrown in the back seat of the police car. Jeanson James is spending 57 months in jail, which I do think is reasonable; when computers fail they cost people time and money, and that's typically all that is lost no one is dying or anything, it isn't murderous these are usually just rouges that want to see what they can do and brag to their peers or make a name for themselves it is rarely that personal of a crime. Occasionally you hear of those infamous crimes of passion, such as that of an individual recently that got in his car and drove to Texas to burn someone's trailer down but that isn't the norm.
But yes, if people can go to jail for spam they should go to jail for viruses as well. Now they rarely do, because as mentioned earlier companies often swoop them up and get them to work on the right side of the law, which isn't necessarily the right thing to do but I can often understand why it is done. People have this mentality that virus writers can simply hack into people's accounts all day and steal money from major businesses and never have to suffer any real penalties for their actions and be set for life. An old article from 2003 on NPR suggests that virus writers themselves aren't being apprehended but those that spread the viruses do, sort of how people that spread copies of music that someone else ripped are the ones paying the exorbitant fines and get stuck with the bill.
Yet has much changed in four years? The mantra amongst techicians is that most amateur virus writers aren't going to waste their time with Macintosh or other Unix derivative systems like Linux because of the complexities of getting into those systems, as opposed to Windows which was relatively wide open, with the exception of Vista, which will usher in a new level of security for most Windows users. It that the users do not have information that the hackers want, or that the systems are not a challenge, but most amateurs are accustomed to runnings scripts in environments like Visual Basic, as opposed to the native layers of C/C++ that create the engine behind Linux systems. Often it can be rather difficult to even run a Linux system for regular everyday things, let alone to develop for it, despite improvements that have been made to the GUI. Macintosh doesn't even allow individuals to peek into a system to look at the code whatsoever, for the most part. As I mentioned earlier, the law is often 12 steps behind technology and rarely understands the true ramifications of what it is possible of, and virus writers have been smart enough, and thoroughly with their selectivity of who gets these viruses, that they haven't done enough damage to create the type of environment which would make it easier for them to be imprisoned.
Those laws may never be changed either; if more users become savvy and create real solutions to computer viruses and pose more of a challenge and Microsoft, which deals with 99.9% of the viruses you hear about is more effective at developing an OS that prevents the spread of viruses in the first place it may become a thing of the past. What Microsoft should do, and is in a position to do, now that they control the overwhelming majority of the OS market, is develop an operating system that developers have to work hand in hand with them to write software for, as opposed to making it all to easy to run a program in the operating system that has free access to the entire computers memory. It isn't that difficult to do, and other providers have been doing it for years at the expense of creating an operating system that isn't as user friendly as that of Microsoft's and the loss of potential market share. The issues that Microsoft has been having is finding a way to do that without making it harder to use the OS, which has been the unfortunate result of what has happened with Vista; bugs are shut out, but then again so are users and developers as well. Programs like IE7 cause problems in the operating system with applications that aren't even trying to access the Internet, and so on and so forth.
Learn more about this author, Christopher Kendalls.
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