A few weeks ago, (Canadian!) Clive Thompson had a piece in the New York Times Magazine about virus-writers. It was called the e-infectors. Neat piece. Should be more like them in mainstream media outlets. Thompson's piece generated significant response in terms of letters from readers last week and this week, there is a letter from a reader about those letters. Now, while I think virus writers are unambiguously criminals and should be punished, I'm inclined to agree with the viewpoint, reprinted below, of letter writer Danny Holstein:
Clive Thompson's article was well written and informative. The representative responses to it seemed to be uniformly negative and included descriptions like “reckless,” “criminal,” “Luddite,” “arsonists,” “extortion” and “terrorists” (word of the decade). In my opinion, these responses all miss the point. It is silly to believe that these kids are doing a disservice when they clearly describe how the viruses work and clearly show how susceptible computers are to attack. Being the cynic I am, I wonder who would listen if they merely complained to Microsoft. Do we believe anyone at Microsoft would take a call from an 18-year-old about why Windows isn't secure?
There are far more sinister forces out there: programmers who stand to gain from a computer breach will not boast about it on a Web site; most of the commercial victims (banks or insurance companies) would not even report the crime, being concerned about public loss of trust. I, for one, am glad that these kids are yelling, “Wake up and smell the coffee your computers are not safe from attack!”