[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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