There's already laws against it.
Problem is, it's hard to find the people responsible.
Even if they do, it's not very easy to prosecute these
cases. Usually the people who engage in such activities
simply get a slap on the wrist because the prosecutor
doesn't want to risk taking the case to court and losing,
and in order to prosecute these people the prosecutor has
to do so much research that the case would likely not go
to trial for some time (possibly years) and most
countries have laws that state that the case has to go to
trial in so much time or the person is to be released
from custody. This means that most of the time they
make a plea bargin to settle the case.
If you want to see more changes, let your local
representative know who you feel. Doing so might change
the laws to make prosecuting these types of cases easier,
leading to more cases going to trial instead of resulting
in a slap on the wrist plea bargin.
Also it's absolutely impossible to make a system
impervious to outside interference. Even Apple systems
have been infected with viruses, and even spyware! The
only way to totally protect a system is to never connect
it to the Internet and never use any media that has been
used on other systems. Since some people spend all of
their time finding out how to breach a system, it's
impossible to totally protect any system.
Poor software? Have you tried to use Netscape? It's a
PoS. I can't even get it to install on my system because
the installer that I used screwed up when I was trying to
install the software. I uninstalled the software, yet it
still will not install.
The university I attended had an exclusive deal with
Netscape. Netscape was to be the sole provider for web
browser software. They had so many problems with the
software (1995, UNIX systems) that they didn't renew the
deal. Instead they started using both IE and Netscape
after problems arose with Netscape 2. Even Netscape 4.5
had it's problems with UNIX systems. The software would
frequently crash, usually when Java was loading. The
university's IT department had to issue an e-mail to
students to disable Java so the software wouldn't crash
when loading Java. Most of the other compaines out there
that compete with Microsoft aren't much better than
Netscape.
What I loved about the entire anti-trust case here in the
U.S. is that all of these companies that complained about
Microsoft's business practices were producing software
that wasn't as good as what Microsoft was producing. In
order to compete they would have to spend millions, if
not billions, to compete. Instead, they went to the U.S.
Department of Justice asking them to investigate
Microsoft. What I really love about the case was the
government trying to prove that Microsoft illegally hurt
Netscape because of its huge market share drop. Well,
the truth of the matter is that Netscape was trying to
compete with Microsoft and they didn't do enough testing
before they released the software to the public. They
ended up rushing products to the public only to find out
that the software was full of bugs, many of which caused
the software to crash. Another thing about Netscape is
they shifted focus from UNIX-based software to Windows
software before the market was capable of handling the
shift. What happened is their UNIX-based product
suffered and caused them to lose a huge amount of the
market share. The reason for this loss is that at the
time, UNIX-based systems dominated Internet usage, as the
Internet was only in it's infancy in the mid 90's when
Netscape shifted to mainly Windows products. Yet, the
judge in the case wouldn't allow that into evidence! Why
not, it's purtanent to the case!!
Alan
