[thelist] Re: Blaster worm punishment
Scott Benton
scott at printelectric.com
Sun Jan 30 09:05:55 CST 2005
> I consider such acts to be home grown terrorism and
> similar to murder, downsizing, or offshore outsourcing
> of sensitive material (network security, medical
> records, government work, etc.) in purely detrimental
> effects for no good cause.
I'm not well versed in anything about this case, but I'll throw in my
two cents. My opinion - this is essentially a crime against property,
and should in no way be compared to crimes against persons (murder,
terrorism, etc.) Furthermore, I think that home grown "terrorists"
writing worms is probably a good thing. This forces the major
developers to fix security flaws now, and therefore increases the
learning curve that the real terrorists will have to negotiate before
they can execute significant attacks on our electronic infrastructure.
Whatever doesn't kill us will make us stronger. My last comment - I
think our best hope is for a ground-up rewrite of Windows, with
security built in as part of the design - either that or everyone
should switch to Unix/Linux/BSD. My Mac (so far) doesn't get viruses or
worms or anything. I've been surfing the net on a direct DSL connection
to the net (no firewall, and incidentally no virus protection) for over
three years on OSX. I'm also running an apache server and an FTP server
on this machine. To date, I've had no problems that I'm aware of. For
the record, there is no critical data here, so I'm really not risking
anything. But I know that if I were running Windows under the same
circumstances, my system would be crippled by virus infection within
minutes, if not seconds.
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