Chazography

Being the geek that I am, I was reading up on some technology news, and I happened upon an article detailing the arrest of a California man on charges of computer hijacking. He is alleged to have infected a large number of computers with trojans and other malware in order to create a legion of zombie computers which he used to collect ad revenues. Furthermore, that “army” of zombie computers was “rented” out to others wishing to carry out various nefarious activities such as Denial of Service attacks or spam. How much money did he make? Officials are estimating that he profited around $60,000 simply from adware revenues! That’s a lot of money! So the next question you’re probably asking is, “What type of sentencing is he looking at?” This is where my jaw dropped. If convicted of all charges, he will have to surrender more than $60,000, a BMW luxury automobile, all computer equipment, and face up to fifty years in prison! It’s that last item that really flabbergasts me. Fifty years in prison!

Don’t get me wrong. I hate all the adware and spam that is floating around the Internet these days, but at the same time, even drunk drivers who kill innocent people don’t face prison sentences that long. So my question is this, “Does our society place more value on monetary losses and technological annoyances than a human life?” If an individual can receive fifty years in prison for spreading malware and spam, shouldn’t the perpetrators of fatal crimes receive at least that much prison time if not more?

The next item on my techno-tangent involves a bill that seeks to plug the “Analog Hole”. If you’re not exactly sure what that means, let me explain. The authors of the bill want to encourage the adoption of digital media by forcing the conversion of analog content to the digital medium immediately after it’s created. That in and of itself isn’t so bad. However, the bill also wants to cripple that digital content with some sort of Digital Rights Management (DRM), and that’s what really bugs me. I’m not a fan of DRM as it restricts the user’s fair use rights, and it really only hurts those who follow the rules. Honestly, I buy all my music and movies, and I don’t want to lose the ability to rip my media content to a computer as a result of some stupid DRM scheme. The hackers always seem to get around the latest, greatest DRM anyways so why can’t legislators well enough alone?!

I know some of you are saying, “What about iTunes and Napster?” Yes, they alleviate the need for me to rip content and they have DRM, but they also deliver content in a lossy format. However, when I buy a CD (for about the same price as digitally downloading an album), I’m getting a lossless version of the content that I can rip over and over to my heart’s content without constantly degrading the quality. So let me state for the record that I do not like buying content in lossy form, and I will not use a downloading service until they offer me some sort of lossless alternative (which they never will).

That’s all I have to say on the subject, and so my rant comes to an end.