Nerve Endings Firing Away

If you think it is still cool to program a virus and unleash terror on the computing world, think again. If NY Time columnist John Tierney has his way, he would make the buggers walk the green mile and fry them alive. After Sven Jaschan was convicted for creating the Sasser worm with a relatively light sentence (21-month suspended sentence and 30 hours of community service), Tierney was rightly incensed and made the case that “society might benefit more from executing a virus writer than from giving a lethal injection to a murderer”. After all the economic argument for handing out the death penalty was to prevent future economic damage to the society, he argues:

“It is worth more to execute a worm writer than it is to execute a killer. He estimates that the benefit of executing a murderer is roughly $100 million, the value of the about 10 murders prevented by the deterring effect of an execution. Viruses and the like cost the $50 billion a year, Landsburg writes. If a single execution of a virus write could deter just one-fifth of 1 percent of all that malicious coding for just one year, the world would gain the same $100-million benefit we earn by executing a killer.”

Of course, he takes the extreme way out. Viruses have become a serious menace to the society but no one has died yet. Although I once nearly died when my data was wiped clean by a virus. My tech spiritual guru (tech support) admonished me instead for failing to back up my data. So it is my fault that my data was erased, and not the bugger virus-writer’s. It is almost like scolding the girl for dressing skimpily and getting raped (I seem to come up with weird analogies lately). But as I understand it, virus writers will flourish as long as it is cool to bring down a company’s website or steal someone’s electronic data. Most of them are simply teenage pranksters trying to prove a point; uber-geeks whose talents could be utilized some place else more constructively. I don’t know about the law but if you wipe out my data, I seriously can kill (hackers, I am just kidding; tussi great ho! Whew! that was close).

On the other hand, Tierney has a lighter side too; he suggests an even worse punishment for virus-writers: “working 16-hour days answering helpdesk inquiries in an AOL chatroom using an uncool nickname like KoolDude.” What punishments can you suggest?