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Author: Amir Taaki
Date:  
To: unsystem
Subject: Re: [unSYSTEM] Malware authors and best practices for addressing the issue from development / licensing perspective or other
Wow this is well interesting!

Reminds me of this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_Cleansing_%28video_game%29
"In the game, the protagonist (the player can choose either a skinhead
or a Klansman) runs through a ghetto killing African-Americans and
Latinos, before descending into a subway system to kill Jews. Finally he
reaches the "Yiddish Control Center", where a fictionalized version of
Ariel Sharon, then Prime Minister of Israel, is directing plans for
world domination. The player must kill him to win the game."

Not much you can do. It's kind of like asking to add countermeasures to
stop child porn in Bitcoin or whatever. I think any limitations I add
would be easily circumvented and have worse unintended circumstances.
The tools should be always free-er, most people do things I approve of
with them.

It's super cool people are using them (if you read the comments) to
already make stealth payments, and having the nonce emailed/tweeted to them.

People only use the malware because it addresses some need. Want to
combat that? Then make better tools and have nice established projects
to address the needs of the people. Otherwise people go looking for
backstreet abortionists or download dodgy malware.

On 10/02/14 01:31, Odinn Cyberguerrilla wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I have a request, which is how do developers address the circumstance in
> which someone utilizes your code as part of some effort to deprive (or
> steal as the case may be) someone of their bitcoin?
>
> This hasn't happened to me, but I have posed a question about it at
> bitcointalk:
>
> https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=454903.msg5045596#msg5045596
>
> It was prompted by the apparent use of sx by a malware author who then
> generated something called Stealthbit (which is malware, and which no-one
> should touch). [fortunately I have not tried to access or use
> Stealthbit.) However, this is a question that also touches on bitcoin
> development generally, due to that (it's happened before, it will happen
> again, etc.) people may end up using bitcoin code (if they haven't
> already) to develop something else that would then be used expressly to
> deprive someone of their bitcoins (such as steal them, but I am not
> thinking only of theft here). My question for developers is: Given that
> code is open source and anything can be done with it, good or bad, what
> are common development approaches to mitigate or potentially prevent
> malware authors from being able to easily appropriate the code you
> develop?
>
> I realize this question may sound dumb and out of place being that it is
> pretty obvious that code which is developed in a free, open source context
> can technically be used for anything. However, beyond suggesting that
> people just go to bitcoin.org for wallet technology, what can be done in
> the development community that would lessen the likelihood that the code
> you develop might be "misappropriated?" Please note: I am not sure how
> this issue might be approached from a development perspective, or license
> (MIT, Affero GPL, etc.) perspective, or any other perspective.. I'm just
> asking the question. I support bitcoin and other decentralized currency
> efforts including walled development such as darkwallet, and I appreciate
> what you all are doing. Maybe I'm asking the wrong question and it should
> be put another way, but I hope you will rephrase my question(s) in a way
> that makes more sense in the context of the list discussion here.
>
> Thanks for your work.
>
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>