why do people make viruses to infect other peoples computers? do they think its funny to cause a hassle for other people? and if so can u get a virus from websites? or does someone have hack your IP address to inplant the virus?

Welcome to the internet.

Here is a better one, "Because we can."

make a company, and watch it sit there, all its information open to the public, because it's never needed security, a competing company would just easily hack into the first company, gather all their inside information, and use it to their advantage to cripple the first company.

if we create viruses which exploit flaws in a system's security, we force the system to be made more efficient and more secure. by creating a virus, im increasing the drive to create new technology to secure as well as increasing the drive to break the new technology.

if no one had ever created a virus, there'd be no market for antivirus programmes, and eventually, there's gonna be someone who has true malicious intent, and i would rather be at least a little better protected because a few people created more or less harmless viruses inbetween that i had to deal with getting rid of.

consider yourself blessed that people fuck up your computer regularly.

also, there are a lot of ways to earn money (among other things) with a proper worm.....

Good argument, but i thought that hackers wanted freedom of information

I'm going to take another approach to this argument, but only slightly.

Scenario (albeit not too far from the truth):

I am a software developer for a company. I work overtime every day and get underpaid. My working conditions are deplorable and it really affects my ability to produce what my boss wants.

For some reason or another, this company I work for has tricked me into coding for Windows systems. Therefore, I know the Windows API and most of the system's inner workings. I know its shortcomings and its vulnerabilities.

One day, I finally have enough of my bosses bullshit and quit... but before doing so I pull some Office Space shit. The previous weekend I coded a worm to exploit the Bcc feature of Microsoft Outlook, and compounded that with a kernel hijacking exploit that gives me unmonitored remote access to every infected machine.

The first part of the worm, the Bcc exploit, allows me to inject new headers into the Bcc tag, perhaps.... some malicious code? Everyone who receives my email is now infected, and everyone who they email gets infected. Exponential growth.

where 'Y' equals the number of people infected at any given time and 'x' is the number of times the email has been sent (uniquely, as in, a new computer has sent it).

The next part of the worm, the kernel hijack, allows me machine level access to the computer(s). It first goes in and removes all blocks and file restrictions that might be in place and then sends my terminal station a ping with the IP address of the infected machine.

I now have a list of infected computers and the ability to log in as root on all of them, remotely. I can do whatever I want to the company now: massive crash, delete all of their data, leak private documents, etc. They are at my mercy.

Not all hackers are assholes and do it for kicks.. or 'because they can'. There's a lot of a politics in the hacking world. Also.. this was an example of malicious hacking, which I seldom endorse.

Most hacking is done on the opposite side of the spectrum. The internet itself as well as its underlying structure is the bastard love-child of hackers in the 1970's. Almost all of today's FOSS is hacked together in some way or another, so simple saying 'hacking' doesnt always imply bad malicious things.