MyDoom seeks to destroy antivirus firms

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You SHOULD have left it alone, son..

..because your retort was lame and it sucked.

"OK.. so if I don't walk down the street wearing head-to-toe kevlar.. then I DESERVE to be shot for not taking the proper precautions? Ludicrous."

If it is the streets of Baghdad, then I'd say yes. The Internet is a public network, and as such it is a wild west and will definitely be prone to all kinds of deviousness and dirtiness. When I say deserve, I mean that you deserve to get hit for being blatantly negligent. If you take the proper precautions, you can be safe on the internet. To return to the oh so dreaded car analogy, if a guy doesn't wear his seatbelt, crashes his car, and goes sailing through his winshield..is that ALL the other person's fault, even if they were part of the cause of the accident? Of course not. They didn't MAKE him not wear his belt. In short, he got whacked because of his own irresponsibility. If he wore his belt (installed antivirus, firewall, shut off unneeded services before connecting to the internet) he most likely would have been fine.

"If you insist on using a car analogy, it's more like a terrorist putting a bomb onto your motorcycle, such that when you start it, it blows up."

Actually that was a terrible analogy. You see, because as I just said, a person has the choice to take the proper precautions. What you described would be like if right after you installed the OS you allowed a hacker to install a virus on the machine before you even connected to the internet. In the cyberworld, this threat does not exist. You are not forced to rig your machine, so your comparison is totally non-analogous. Unless you walk away from the machine and someone sneaks up and puts in a keylogger, there would be no surreptitous tampering that would take place, no?

"Because that's what virus writers are, cyber-terrorists."

Once again, overusing the term "terrorist" (as has become common in post-9/11 discourse) to describe anything or anyone as "bad". Nowadays the milkman that comes over midafternoon to pork your wife behind your back is considered a terrorist (when he's really just a pr*ck). People like you think the world won't be normal until everything deemed as "bad" is thoroughly abolished. This is fantasy thinking, and belongs to the delusional that think that someday there may be world peace. That's why I say virus writing in itself is not bad. It is not the criminal element that should be abhorred (for it will ALWAYS exist) but rather the intention behind the crime that should be considered with respect to how "bad" something really is.

"And what about all of the data lost?"

That's why they invented BACKUP, my friend. If you don't regularly back up, you deserve to get burned! Period.

"And what about if this software that needs to be re-installed is in a hospital?"

As many people have said on these boards over and over, NO system that is responsible for anyone's life should be internet-connected. Period. Should that ever be the case, the person who made the decision to publicly connect this life-saving system should be held just as accountable as the person who whacked the system with a virus. No? If I found out that my grandmother died because some butthead decided to connect her life support system to the internet, he would most likely be severely disfigurted or dead before a trial against him even started.

Posted by: Jeff Spicoli   Posted on: 10/18/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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