Re:Viruses (Score 1)

If you had any sense you'd notice that the "virus" in question was written by anti-virus people as a way to demonstrate a vulnerability of the w64 platform.

This is somewhat of a slippery slope for anti-virus companies. On one hand, they need these viruses to exist. It doesn't matter that these are released into the wild or not, as they can claim that their product protects you against *ALL* these dangerous viruses; using this to scare customers to protect their sorry, unprotected PCs. On the other hand, in order to protect their customers from these dangersous vermin, they need to understand how viruses work, so they are able to create viri in their labs. Kinda like the argument that a good security admin needs to be a good hacker, in order to fully understand how systems can be compromised, and take measures to ensure it doesn't happen (or make it damn tough to happen). But do you trust them enough?
Now, with this being a company, its in their best interest (to aviod a legal backlash) to *not* release these viri. But that's not to say that some employee with a mission, isn't going to take that lab virus and decide to set it loose. But either hand you look at, they have a a nice little money circle: they protect against viruses that others create, they create viruses in order to understand them so they can protect against more in the future, they proctect against the viruses that they create, and the circle continues.

Do you find road car crash tests equally repugnant?

Bad analogy there. In this case -- unless you're a real comspiracy theorist -- the crash test companies don't have the capacity to release a horde of cars, trucks, vans, and SUVs on the road, that are hell-bent on crashing into unsuspecting motorists. And that they are only crash testing the vechicles in order to better protect the other motorists that could be hit by their wild lab cars by urging the car manufacturers to build better cars.