One certainly should take reasonable precautions against the general risks of (in?) life.

- you watch right and left (or left and right, depending on where you live) before crossing a street;

- you teach your children to swim, just in case;

- you wear a parachute, when jumping off a perfectly working airplane (OK, that maybe is a less general risk <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/winkwink.gif" alt="" />).

Although the fact itself is deplorable, virusses are a general, universal risk and therefor not taking any precautions could with some validity be considered unreasonable and negligent.

This risk of life is a fact of life, and taking precautions is like buying insurance - you hope you never need it; you fear, that you will need it; and you crave the money you appear to have lost when nothing happened. And only if and when something happened do you actually know whether your decision to do something was economically efficient or not. For risks of life, nobody takes away your self-responsibility for individual risk-evaluation and risk-management.

That said - what could be done in general? Why do we feel so helpless, and why does one rarely hear of a virus programmer being prosecuted and held liable?

Among other, technical issues, which I fail to understand, a global deficieniy comes to my mind.

It is the global nature of the internet itself, which provides loopholes against prosecution. There is no way to permanently ban an individual from internet access, also because of the anonymous nature of the majority of the traffic.

If I consider the internet a public domain, then programming and releasing virusses is an attack on public safety, similar to an act of terror is an attack on humanity in general, and it is pre-meditated, willful, with intent and full knowledge of the damaging consequences. It should be treated as such. Those instances should be hunted down with the same energy as any capital offence by all of society's means, and prosecuted and condemned, as a protection of public safety, which is a sovereign's duty. No civil liability suits restricted to individuals in court systems which take eons to decide and cost a fortune to the individual.

Is that realistic? Of course not.
Would that preclude future abuses? No, though it might reduce it - even though some of those programmers seem to regard it as a game of wits, and as such will always think to be more clever than the rest of the world.

A fatalistic feeling creeps up my spine. And it is this fatalism as a general attitude, which made the computer virus issue a risk of life, which has to be treated as - see above <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/sad.gif" alt="" />


In times of crisis it is of the utmost importance not to lose your head (Marie Antoinette)