Innocent Criminals

The BBC is following the story of a couple from Scotland who received a letter from Atari's UK attack dogs Davenport Lyons accusing them of illegally sharing a game called Race07. The letter demanded £500 not to prosecute. Fair enough, you might say, but there's a problem: Gill and Ken Murdock, aged 54 and 66 respectively, have never heard of the game, don't know what peer-to-peer file sharing is, and anyway, they don't play video games. I'm sure you can guess where this is going...

For those hell-bent on destroying the games industry by illegally dishing out the fruit of its labour for free, someone else's computer is a god-send. Simply trojan it with p2p software and store your stolen goods on it for others to take at will. The poor sap who owns the computer takes the blame. The trouble is, this is 2008, not 1998, and this simply shouldn't be happening.

The problem is the owners of the hijacked machines. Though they perceive the need and have the resources to acquire and hook up to broadband something that would put a Cray-2 to shame, some people seemingly don't perceive the need to secure it. What other reason could there be for a middle-aged couple being caught innocently ripping off Atari? This has to stop. We live in a time when perfectly good anti-virus software exists, and much of it is free, free and free.

So, what's the solution? To scare the population into protecting themselves by wrongly convicting a few until they get the point? To make it illegal not to take basic online security seriously? To insist on every Internet user having a yearly computer MOT? While the problem persists, software companies are going to lose out, and possibly even go bust. Chasing the file sharers doesn't work, and as the NLP lot are fond of saying, if what you're doing doesn't work, do something else. So, maybe it's time for the likes of Atari to be taking charge and teaming up with anti-virus companies to ensure that people like the Murdocks are safe to be let out on the Internet in the first place.

For reasons of cash flow if nothing else, that's not practical. To write operating systems that behave as if they were designed for use in 2008 rather than being shipped as an easily exploited work in progress also seems to have become impossible. An easier alternative might be to follow the example set by a group based around ETH Zurich. Their research into the number of out-of-date browsers still in use (it's a hell of a lot, and I'm willing to bet the Murdock's browser is one of them) led to the idea of creating software that tells you that it's out of date. The logical conclusion is to build this feature into Windows, so that after several attempts to get you to update, your computer will not perform any other networked function until you do so. Let's just hope Microsoft can get it together to implement something like this in a form that isn't badly holed below the waterline - again.