pmas, I think you did a good job at summing things up.

Let me be a devil's advocate for a moment. My question is -- where exactly does the point lie where code becomes a hazard? The code originally written on this could modify perl scripts in the current directory, and it was removed because it was deemed dangerous.

Now, where exactly is the line drawn that seperates code that is "okay" from something that should not be posted? In this case, the code was drawn up in the first place due to this post, by chromatic. In fact, chromatic's original post was rated quite high (and yes, I had to use a vote on it right now to figure that out ;-) Nobody seemed to object to that particular post.

The code in this post was removed because it gave a working example of how to create something virus-like. But by leaving Chromatic's post, aren't we saying that it's fine to write a virus, here's how to get started, we just aren't going to show you the exact code.. meaning that the person has to be at a particular skill level to make it work. So in essance, it would seem as if we are leaving virus writting for the more skilled Perl programmers, and simply keeping the script kiddies off the street for the moment.

Again, I'm saying all of this as devil's advocate. However, the question I am posing is this-- how do we know when to remove code? What if what was posted could be used for good as well as bad, is it worth keeping it then? What if self modifying code could be used as a fancy form of "perl -i blah"? What if "perl -i blah" could be used as a virus? Just some thoughts to ponder :-)
-Eric