Tonight’s “Tech Live” tells the story of Gigabyte, a young kickboxer and virus writer. She can kick you in the pants and wipe your hard drive cleaner than a dog’s dinner plate.

“I’ll just shoot you from behind,” I say, carrying my TV camera. It’s almost time for the 6:00 p.m. kickboxing class, and Gigabyte is the only woman learner there. She’s also something of a virus-writing genius, having started programming at age six. “I figured out how to write a few lines of code on my uncle’s Commodore 64,” says Gigabyte, who has just recently celebrated her 18th birthday. At age fourteen, she wrote her first computer worm, which took over the shutdown screens of infected users. Two years later, she wrote another powerful virus that damages MP3 files. And recently she has become the second person to write a virus in C# (pronounced “C sharp”). Her so-called “Sharpei” worm, which comes in an email attachment, infects certain files in computers.

“Virus writing is so aggressive, and most reasonable people consider it an act of vandalism(蓄意破坏), or at least potential vandalism,” I say. “That’s not my problem. The users are running the virus. They are the ones clicking on it,” she says.

“So you really think the people who execute(运行) these programs are responsible for the damage that your viruses do?” I ask. “Actually,” she says, “I think many people should have to have some sort of license to get on the Internet.” Gigabyte is quick to remind visitors that she never releases her viruses into the wild. Instead, she sends them to antivirus companies, hoping for the kind of affirmation(确认) that only comes with “high-risk”. But she also has posted her viruses on her homepage, meaning anyone else could release them. “That’s not my problem,” she says. “When people make guns, can you blame them when somebody kills somebody else with the guns? I only write them; I don’t release them. I do want to work with computers for a living, but not with an antivirus company.”