[thelist] RE: blaster worm punishment

Matt Warden mwarden at gmail.com
Sat Jan 29 23:26:58 CST 2005


Steven,

On Sat, 29 Jan 2005 20:21:53 -0800 (PST), Steven Streight
<vaspersthegrate at yahoo.com> wrote:
> We've all heard how the "teenager" who unleashed the
> Blaster worm, primarily against Microsoft, got only 18
> months jail time, court supervision for 3 years, and
> has to pay up to $1 million damages.
> 
> I say he deserves much much harsher punishment, mainly
> because malicious code can potentially make a nation
> vulnerable to terrorist or criminal attack, can
> cripple an economy, can cause even death if a hospital
> network crashes, etc. etc.
...
> Whadyathink?

I think that (a) considering typical punishments of much worse crimes,
18 months sounds about right, if not a bit harsh, for writing a worm;
and (b) is it the worm developer that makes us vulnerable to
terrorist/criminal attack, or the OS developer? (that's rhetorical)

But I also think you're offtopic a bit for this list and owe a tip.



<tip type="javascript">

Need to remove all child nodes of an element? I was having a bit of
trouble doing this tonight, but found the answer on PPK's wonderful
quirksmode.org:

http://www.quirksmode.org/index.html?/dom/domparse.html

See the function clearIt():

writeroot = document.getElementById('nodemap');

function clearIt()
{
	if (!writeroot) return;
	while(writeroot.hasChildNodes())
	{
		writeroot.removeChild(writeroot.childNodes[0]);
	}

}

</tip>

-- 
Matt Warden
Miami University
Oxford, OH, USA
http://mattwarden.com


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