I'm a software developer. I do not program games, I'm doing line-of-business applications for corporate customers. I love my job and I spend quite a bit of time on programming related web sites such as stackoverflow.com.
And there is one thing that I'd like to vent about: if you question ever so slightly evokes a notion of malware/virus, instead of answering your bloody question (or just keeping their mouth shut for that matter), people starts questioning your intentions. And instead getting help you find yourself in position of having to defend yourself. What about innocent until proven guilty? Why do I have to specify scenario where this question/answer can be used legitimately (as opposed to maliciously)? I mean, to be completely honest, I don't event understand why not to answer a question about creating malware. Not all virus writers want to harm others. Many, I'm sure just do research and never let their viruses in the wild. In any case it does not matter. An opinion (or million) on programming related site would never stop a determined person. But ok, I can pretend that I understand why people does not want to concentrate on the technical side if they feel they are contributing to something evil. Let it be. Still, until to you are *sure* that the person asking is creating malware, (which is almost never since no one mastered the art of mind-reading yet) can you just do a courtesy not to put them in a position where they have to justify themselves? You cannot know if they deserve it, and therefore you should not do it because you WILL affect innocent people.
On a related note, I remember a story, when a person asked a very well defined technical and not so easy to answer question, about how to modify his genealogical software package to support a case of a man who had children with his daughter. The total majority of answers was how it is disgusting that this software writer even *considering* including this feature into his program.
For goodness sake, it's a *technical* site and a technical question. It's not about morale or ethics. If your morale or ethics is not letting you answer these questions, this is fine, then don't answer. But could you please refrain form chastising other people, this is not what the web site is for.
You could think, that since that the web site is built around professional/mature community, the number of incidents like this would be minimal. But oh noes, responses like this get tons of upvotes, and it just saddens me, that this is who we, humans are.
