I do agree -- having a Perl virus developed may be hazardous. However, I also feel there are two sides of the story.

Virii have been a problem for some time, and have been developed in all sorts of languages. There are already PHP viruses. With that in mind, it would seem likely that eventually, someone would write a virus in Perl, it's just a matter of when.

I don't feel that security by "ignoring it and hoping it goes away" would be a good long term solution. Is there anything that could ever be done to prevent a Perl virus from running? I don't really know. However, I would much rather have this opportunity to discuss the matter with the reasonable, intelligent people who frequent this site (not to be confused with "reasonably intelligent people", found at various other sites ;-), then run around trying to clean up the mess after it happens in the future, and THEN having this discussion :-)

So opening things wide open -- is there anything that could be done with Perl to prevent a Perl virus from doing damage? It seems extremely difficult, and I don't know any other language that has figured out a way around this. But if any language could develop a system to aid in prevention, it would be Perl!

tye, I'm not dissagreeing with you per-se. I suppose that I just feel that since it's going to happen anyway, that perhaps it would be easier to attempt to deal with the issue now. I'm just glad it was a monk offering code up for review, and not one of my users trying it out on my system. But perhaps this should be a non-public discussion -- I'll leave that up to you guys :-)
-Eric

Update: BTW, is there a system for non-public discussion on this site? Password protected forums, forums that require a particular level, etc?

Update 2: After seeing lemming's post, I changed all referenced of "virii" to "viruses", which is apparently the correct usage. Thanks Lemming :-)

In reply to Re: (tye)Re: Immoral? by andreychek
in thread Morality of posting Perl "virus" code? by tachyon

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.