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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
btw it reminded me of that game, because the opensource game engine
developers faced a similar predicament. They were even lobbied by a
jewish advocacy group to forbid rascist games in their license. The devs
(rightly) refused.

On 10/02/14 03:54, Amir Taaki wrote:
> 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.
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> unSYSTEM mailing list: http://unsystem.net
>> https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/unsystem
>>
>
>
>
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