Here's an article that was originally published in Wired Magazine which should be titled "Botnets and You".
It's a high level discussion of the benefits from cooperative computing (SETI@Home, distributed.net, etc) and the bad uses of the same techniques: Distributed denial of service, click-fraud, Phishing scams, ...)
Viruses and computer worms have changed over the years. In short: they used to be vandalism. Now they're a protection and/or theft racket using distributed computing techniques.
While we're near the subject, more regulation probably won't help this -- you won't find or reach the real people responsible and existing regulations already cover what they do.
I've seen proposals to make people liable in civil court for what their computer does under virus control but I don't think this will work. While it looks good on the outside ("Make people responsible!") the problem is that most people don't have the base of knowledge to understand the issues so the result would just be to increase the average cost of computing. It's not like drunk driving -- people have direct control over the alcohol consumption and understand the result. Most people don't understand why installing Kazaa is a bad thing but AIM isn't.
Even "kids today" don't get it -- sure, they're usually more sophisticated than their elders, but very few understand what's actually going on -- they're just comfortable with more complicated spells to work computing magic.
In the article, Bruce says "It's a natural side-effect of a computer network with bugs." I'd have to disagree. It's a natural side-effect of human personality.
Security is a compromise and frankly, most people don't *want* good security -- it gets in the way of too many things.
Most people say "their ought to be a law" when what they really mean is
"I don't want it to happen to me and I don't want to be responsible for
understanding it.".
Comments