lists wrote:
Lots of interesting views. Yes, people should have updated. However, this act of maliciously killing critical servers to score a point is the kind of thing malware writers do. It is also illegal in the UK under the computer misuse act. Insisting they update 'or else' is blackmail. Here we have two quite distinct criminal offences.
I nearly pointed that out yesterday - yes I'd think it is almost certainly an offence under the Misuse of Computers Act. But I'm not going to get in a froth about it.
I would imagine that the supporters of the action taken would respond that they only responded to requests to supply updates - to which I'd respond "rubbish" (or words to that effect). Admins set up freshclam in the expectations of receiving updates to the AV signatures.
Receiving a "poison pill" which was known would, and even announced to have the sole intention of breaking systems, cannot by any reasonable person to be considered a normal signature update. The act was updated a few years agot o cover exactly that sort of activity (which was missing from the earlier version). There has been a conviction that I know of that might be relevant in case lore - in that case, someone sent lots of emails to his ex-employers system with intent to slow it down. The defence that was thrown out was essentially he wasn't making an illegal access since by the act of running a mail server it was actively accepting inbound mails. The prosecution argued that what he sent were not "normal email", but abnormal ones sent with intent to cause harm.
The parallel is that this update was not a normal update, it was one specially crafted with intent to stop systems working.
Who is actually responsible for it, because free or not, your a fhucking criminal that want your hands cutting off and stuffing up your arhsehole.
Oh dear, you started off so well, that sort of language does not help your argument - in fact it simply makes it look like a rant from someone with a lack of language and social skills.
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