Soon after this my view of the (informal, unscientific) tally (involving node reputations, Nodes to consider votes, and public and private comments to me) started to shift and I now place it somewhere between 3-to-1 and 7-to-1 in favor of not removing the code.

Even if the tally had ended up being close to 50/50, I would not repeat the temporary removal of viral code. Not that I regret what I did. This was "a first" in some ways and I asked before acting but acted quickly to make temporary changes that I thought were important. I think part of my motivation was tachyon's own words: "Still I am troubled by the morality of posting such code."

I also have not changed my mind about seemingly innocent but working code with viral features making it easier for malware to be produced, at least as much for allowing the steps toward malware to be small enough that they are easy to justify as not immoral as for just getting the ball rolling in terms of curiosity, motivation, and a code base.

Anyway, I wanted it to be clear that I won't be doing that for "dangerous" code again. I'll may well /msg the author encouraging them to change their mind, though. (:

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")

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

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