I mean, there is such a thing as ethics. A programmer writing software with malicious intent or with the explicit purpose to defraud, undermine, or otherwise harm another person and/or their property should absolutely be held responsible for the code they write.
> A programmer writing software with malicious intent or with the explicit purpose to defraud, undermine, or otherwise harm another person and/or their property should absolutely be held responsible for the code they write.
Then I think Cisco, Microsoft, and all the other NSL, backdoor inserting, government roll-over companies count in this category too. Do you not see how slippery the slope is you are arguing for?
I don't know if it's that simple -- if I print out fake dollar bills it'll probably be treated differently if I sell them as movie props than if I sell them as counterfeit money you could pass off as real.
> Owning prop money in itself is not a crime. But it's a crime if people try to pass the prop bills off as real money, said Capt. Jim Duering of the Grand Island Police Department.
Seems like the same principle would apply if you were selling it for the purpose of enabling fraud.
From the article: "Essentially what this law says is that bills must be either 75% smaller than or 150% larger than the size of a real bill and one color, one side."
So printing fake money could be a crime even if you don't attempt to pass it as real.
The action makes it wrong not the code itself. Writing code cannot be evil, it's the user's decision to exploit the code for own selfish gain.
ex. See people using cars or knives or guns as weapons to commit crimes, we don't throw in Toyota or H&K executives in jail. Just because an item was used by someone, the inanimate object by itself do not display intent, intent is something that can only be held in the minds of a person.
Intent is what matters. Writing code can most definitely be evil when written with evil intentions, or with the expectation of having the code used in malicious ways.
It's a very different thing to write code with good intentions, only to have it repurposed by others for nefarious intent.
It's obviously not a black and white matter, or we wouldn't be having this discussion. The important thing to remember, though, is intent. What was that code or feature originally intended to do? If it was intended to be malicious, then why write the code?
I actually do not believe this is really a legal issue, and is instead a moral and ethical issue on a personal level. It is only becoming a legal issue because we have no other way to deal with it, since not every person operates on the same moral code. If more software developers went out of their way to hold themselves to a higher ethical standard, maybe fraud wouldn't be as prevalent as it is today, and we wouldn't need to have this discussion in the first place.
code itself cannot show intent. the code is executed when the person chooses to run it to fulfill their intent which can be judged to be bad in hindsight if it caused harm to others.
a gun by itself doesn't show intent to commit assassinations. only when it's taken by a revolutionary and aimed at the heart of capitalist pigs will the intent be realized.
the gun maker cannot be held responsible for creating a device that intended to kill someone important.
I guess you are trying to tie this back to HackForums as a way to suggest intent, this is a pretty weak argument. Unless there's private messages like "oh hell yeah my nanocore is going to be loved by criminals, I'm going to code the best keylogger ever.", there's no intent whatsoever to pin here.
> I mean, there is such a thing as ethics. A programmer writing software with malicious intent or with the explicit purpose to defraud, undermine, or otherwise harm another person and/or their property should absolutely be held responsible for the code they write.
Congratulations. You've just publicly stated you should remove your game from Steam and anyone else who distributes DRM rootkits. Rootkits are re-purposable into malware too.
I'm confident there is an extremely large gap between a game developer with an open-source video game on Steam (which does not use Steam's DRM feature or any 3rd party DRM) and a developer who writes a malware rootkit.
