I have flagged this question for moderator attention due to the fact that in the edit history I've found that the OP has explained that he's facing problems when writing malware to prank his friends. In most of the countries it's illegal. I got my flag declined with a comment that moderators don't pay attention to such behavior.

I strongly disagree. We all use software and often risk downloading malware by accident when looking for a jar that we need. People who write malware should be excluded from our community as we don't necessary want them to become masters.

What's your opinion?

marked as duplicate by xenteros, Luke, Paul Roub, davidism, Martin Tournoij Aug 25 '16 at 23:20


  • This is related: meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/262656/… – rene Aug 25 '16 at 20:31
  • As long as it's not a question that is specific to malware, but just a normal question applicable to a normal programming situation, there is no call for moderator intervention. Just remove the malware context (which isn't pertinent to the question) and vote/comment as you please. We look at the merits of the question rather than the user, and there is nothing in the world we can do to prevent evil people from doing evil things, just as terrorists might be using Open Source software as we speak. – Pekka 웃 Aug 25 '16 at 20:36
  • 1
    @Pekka웃 Do I understand correctly that if someone says I'm developing a virus it should stay on Stack Overflow? – xenteros Aug 25 '16 at 20:39
  • 2
    Yes, that is valuable information for white hat developers – rene Aug 25 '16 at 20:41
  • 3
    If someone says I'm developing a virus and would like to know how to concatenate two strings, then yes that question should have the virus bit removed (as it's not pertinent to the question) and the question answered (well not that specific example, that would get closed, but you get my point). You are still free to vote as you please; personally, I would downvote the question. – Pekka 웃 Aug 25 '16 at 20:47
  • 4
    Well, it is just a geeky teenage kid executing his revenge-of-the-nerds move. They tend to be pretty harmless, don't know enough yet. Don't even know to not disclose their goal :) They don't turn into evil hackers until they've been consistently rejected by their peers for a while to make them turn to the Dark Side. With 11 downvotes that's well on its way perhaps :) – Hans Passant Aug 25 '16 at 21:47

For the record, my exact decline reason to your flag was this:

Moderators typically do not intervene when it comes to legal issues. If you believe this is a serious problem, contact SE directly.

Stack Overflow moderators are (generally) not lawyers, nor are we all located within the same country. Asking us to be the judge of the legality of something used within a technical question places us in a very tricky position.

As moderators tell people in response to DMCA takedown requests, if you have a serious legal issue with a particular post, your best bet is to contact Stack Exchange directly via the "contact us" form. The company has the legal help to review this, moderators do not.

Sure, from time to time we'll delete absolutely trash questions that are of questionable legality, but that's because of the question quality, not legal issues. As has been stated by Makoto, there are a large number of questions about software jailbreaks, reverse engineering, exploits and how to protect against them, and so on, all of which may or may not be legal in various jurisdictions. All we can judge is the technical merit of these questions, not their legality.

Again, if you have a real problem with this, contact Stack Exchange directly via the proper channels.

  • I doubt SE could comment on the legality of this either way, since I don't think that they have a lawyer specialising in digital rights in that country where ever OP is on staff. Anyways, there are plenty of ways someone can write malware for a non-illegal purpose, for instance to train or test antivirus heuristics scanners. – Magisch Aug 26 '16 at 5:23
  • The laws of the country where the OP is located wouldn't matter. It would be the laws for the country where Stack Exchange is based and where their website is hosted. I'm not sure if they have a lawyer on staff or not, but I don't think disseminating information that can be used for the creation of malware is actually illegal in the United States. The law tends to punish the act of creation, rather than artificially curtailing the free exchange of information. (Unless it comes to IP, then stuff just gets nonsensical.) – Cody Gray Aug 26 '16 at 8:10

In general: security researchers and white-hat hackers also make use of this site, and given their line of profession, they may have to interact or write software which could be seen as harmful to other computers or environments. Further, we are not lawyers and we cannot make any comments on anyone's jurisdiction, so it's far removed from us to say that this software is illegal.

For this question: it's a jerk move. This person doesn't win me over since all he wants to do is delete files from legitimate users. I'm not going to say that I defend their actions, but I will say that there are legitimate reasons to delete files in Java. (Also as a nitpick, he managed to completely edit the question with the "solution" he reached. That'll get fixed soon.)

In this scenario, you're welcome to disagree with the content of the post by using your downvote, but the main two lessons here to be had:

  • We can't comment on the legality of this. The morality of this can say more, and in reality, the guy really doesn't need to be near a computer.
  • Don't execute random, arbitrary code that you see on the internet thinking that it's safe. Lots of people can post lost of dangerous code here, so before you decide to run it in your IDE, just be sure you have some kind of idea as to what's going on with it.
  • 1
    so with the second point don't do what help vampires do – Memor-X Aug 25 '16 at 22:24

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .