In the waning days of calendar year 2004, I watched some friends as they happily killed off some "botnets", and then pondered the usefulness of this (if any). A "botnet" is a collection of stolen computers, whose owners are still using them. Botnets are useful for sending spam and receiving stolen credit card numbers and all kinds of other things a bad guy wouldn't want to get caught using his or her own computers for. So, why isn't killing "botnets" an unrestricted good idea? Here's what I said about it on 30-December-2004: [...more]