Reuters reports:
A federal judge sentenced a teenager to a year and half of prison on Friday for releasing a variant of the Blaster worm that was used to attack more than 48,000 computers.
Jeffrey Lee Parson, 19, appeared in U.S. District Court in Seattle, where he was also ordered to perform community service, pay restitution and be placed under supervision for three years following the sentence.
"If you use the Internet to harm people, it will be investigated and you will be punished," Jeff Sullivan, chief of the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney's office in Seattle, told reporters.
U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman, however, did not give the Minnesota teen the maximum 37-month sentence, saying Parson wrote malicious software and used it to attack other computers partly because of neglectful upbringing and supervision.
Having just spent the last several hours using SpyBot S&D, LaveSoft SE, and then using the Registry Editor in Windows to try and kill the VX2 virus on my son's computer, I am very, very upset.
I'm also upset with Microsoft. Look, if anyone knows that there is no such thing as bug-free software, it's me. I've spent most of my life writing software for a living, and supervising other people doing it. If Microsoft were a bunch of kids writing their first serious programs, I could be a little forgiving. But Microsoft is among the most arrogant corporations on Earth about what an innovative company they are, and how they only hire the best. Yet it seems like a week can't go by without someone figuring out another security hole in Microsoft's operating systems and application framework.
I really don't want any more innovations out of Microsoft. I would like them to get their software sufficiently stable, reliable, and secure that I don't keep getting tempted to switch entirely to Linux.
I used to be pretty sympathetic to Microsoft's plight. Unlike the Macintosh, Microsoft had to write software to support a huge range of devices, device drivers, and configurations. As you increase the number of variables, the more difficult is to imagine every possible configuration, and test even a small fraction of the combinations.
My sympathy has gone away. I have an HP Jornada 820. Every significant piece of software in this cute little palmtop is Microsoft. The operating system. The Pocket Internet Explorer. The Pocket versions of Excel, Word, etc. The are no hardware options on this box. Yet, if I leave the computer sitting--doing nothing--for more than a day or two at a time, it starts to freeze. Others have this problem as well, and the solution is the red "soft reset" button.
Let me explain. The Jornada 820 has no disk. It runs from solid state memory. If some piece of software fails to release memory when it is done running, the Jornada will eventually run out of RAM in which to execute. This is known as a "memory leak" because that portion of the RAM reserved for dynamic storage keeps losing blocks of memory, until you restart the whole computer. From the Jornada's behavior, and that the soft reset button fixes it, I can say with some confidence that this is a memory leak.
Memory leaks are not particularly hard to isolate. Almost 20 years ago, I wrote a wrapper around the memory allocation and release functions for products that I was working on to debug these sort of difficulties. Any company that releases a software product that has such a regular and repeatable memory leak is simply not a serious, professional software company. Of course, that's why people that go to work for them, producing shoddy, unreliable, unprofessional software become fabulously rich, and I'm still having to work for a living at 48. These are among the reasons that I am far less enamored of the virtue and rationality of free markets than I used to be--carelessly written, inadequately tested software makes you rich.
I'm thinking that this young feller should get a cellmate that besides being 350 pounds, besides being in prison for twenty somewhat years without seeing a woman in all that time, besides being a computer-literate pedophile, he should also be an individual that has nothing to live for beyond his prison cell.
Like Clayton Cramer I've worked on a few virus-infested machines for friends and I have no use for twisted teenagers that like to use code to attack society.
Computer users have been getting it up their backends long enuf - it would be more than appropriate if young Jeffrey Lee Parson now got the same for the duration of his prison sentence.
"Judge Marsha Pechman - that would be a sentence!"
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Like Clayton Cramer I've worked on a few virus-infested machines for friends and I have no use for twisted teenagers that like to use code to attack society.