Should I Have The Right To Kill A Malicious Process On Your Machine?

Miscellaneous

from the the-debate-continues dept

Tim Mullen is pushing forward his argument that he (or anyone else, for that matter) should have the right to kill malicious processes on your machine. That is, if your computer is spitting out viruses, anyone should be able to force it to stop. He’s raised this argument before, and he though security experts would be on his side (and everyone else wouldn’t). However, he was surprised to find the opposite to be true. Security experts have routinely condemned his plan. He argues back against them, saying that since computer owners don’t have to take responsibility of a malicious process running on their machine, there is no infringement for breaking into their machine to stop it. The problem I see is how do you define a “malicious” process? What if someone wants whatever process to be running on their machine? And, what if you do additional damage to their machine in your effort to stop the malicious process? This “solution” seems to raise plenty of other problems.