In the Association of Internet Researchers mailing list, today someone had posted a message telling about an aledged virus VBS.Noped.a which "searches the target's machine for what it suspects may be child p***graphy and reports the names of files to the police". As the poster writes, it "demonstrates a rare conceptual ingenuity for the potential social dimensions of IT." I guess it is hard to prosecute someone (the virusmakers) for actually doing social good - but on the other side, it's only a virus - and who can tell whether it just happens to come upon someone's digital familyalbum, with pictures of the children playing naked in the garden - I guess, the owners of that would be reported to the police too (which btw, according to the post, has not yet responded to the virus' data). Bottomline is, that you can never depend on a machine being able to distinguish between what is right and what is wrong, since it is not able to (yet) incorporate the knowledge of the social context of the "deed" (here: publishing indecent pictures of children) in it's judgement. But still an intriguing concept...


# posted by Lisbeth at: 16:01