Computer viruses are great: if you’re not an idiot, you don’t get them at home; if your employers are not idiots, the impact on your worklife is zero; and if your employers are idiots, then you get to spend time doing fuck-all instead of working while they fix the systems. Meanwhile, they create ‘work’ for IT sysadmins, keeping them in beer, porn and things to whine about for the foreseeable future.
It’s no wonder, then, that the Samizdatisti suggest executing their creators, while suggesting that releasing computer viruses is tantamount to killing people. Bleedin’ mentalists…
(and yes, I know a large part of the law is about the necessity of protecting idiots from their own stupidity, and that virus creators therefore do need to be punished. But quite how anyone can get so excised about it is beyond me.)
Virus-writers should be executed, not for the damage they do (since everything you’ve said is right, for once), but for insulting our intelligence. "Hi heres the file you wanted!!!!!!" Really, how difficult could it be to write something vaguely convincing?
Actually, I’ve been inundated with rather clever viruses for the last few days — well, the emails are clever; not having been stupid enough to open the attachments, I have no idea how good the viruses are. (I wonder who’s targetting me?) Since my domain’s my own, I don’t believe anything coming from "The Squandertwo Support Team" — I’m sure I’d remember hiring them — but I have to say that the emails could be rather convincing even to non-idiots.
Odd that there’s no trackback on samizdata from you, John. It’s strangely upsetting to think you’d be a pussy about something like that.
My blog software’s too gay to do trackbacks, and I’d feel like a bit of a blogwhoring showoff if I posted a comment saying "I’m taking the piss out of you on my blog"…
Trackback is a desperately stupid and misguided protocol invented by people who don’t understand the web. But if you want to do trackbacks, then you can use this script to post them. But as I say, don’t bother.
What is a trackback? Are they like those shoes you used to be able to get with animal footprints on them?
No, much less useful. Here’s the spec; basically it’s a way to force a web page on somebody else’s server to make a link to a web page of your choice. As you can imagine, it’s used chiefly by spammers, though it was invented by web loggers.
Actually, I’ve been inundated with rather clever viruses for the last few days — well, the emails are clever; not having been stupid enough to open the attachments, I have no idea how good the viruses are. (I wonder who’s targetting me?) Since my domain’s my own, I don’t believe anything coming from "The Squandertwo Support Team" — I’m sure I’d remember hiring them — but I have to say that the emails could be rather convincing even to non-idiots.
I’ve had the same kind of thing – again, easily ignored (in fact, I’ve set up a rule to automatically delete anything purporting to come from my own domain, since I’m not in the habit of emailing myself) but could easily fool the credulous.
Then again, as a Mac user, it’s not as though the viruses would do anything even if I did click on them – the new Mac OS X Tiger operating system now alerts me whenever (a) anything is being installed and (b) anything is being run for the first time. Mind you, since no-one’s written any OS X viruses yet, this is rather academic…