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Re: [SG] OT:Virus-why

Susan Saxton wrote:

> I apologize if this is a stupid question, but
> *WHY* would anyone want to do this to
> someone else?  I could even understand it if it
> was business to business underhanded
> competition (not "understand" but certainly
> perceive the rationale), but between other "joe
> blows" what is the reasoning?  Plain mean?
> Power?  Can someone attempt to explain this
> to me?

I'll take a brief stab.  When I was in grad school, it seemed to
several of us that there were few real challenges.  Further, we
wanted to see how far we could go with .. whatever it was we
were trying - mainly pushing the limits as far as possible.
Now, this was back in the olden days (mid- to late-70's) when
the Unix source came with the OS, the net was very crude network
composed of email and a few newsgroups and the idea of PCs were
vaguely discussed as a fantasy future.  We used to get onto the
net and see if we could get onto other computers to see what was
there.  As we got more sophisticated so did the games.  But we
were also playing with other computer & science nerds, all of
whom were more than able to play back.

It was sort of ... like a computer version of phony phone calls.
What we did back then was essentially harmless, though it was
annoying to some, no actual damage was ever done.  But it was a
challenge.  If someone said it couldn't be done, we'd spend many
a night in the computer lab proving that it could.  One of our
CS profs caught on and began to give us the same sorts of
challenges but on our own computer.  For instance, he would hide
a module of code somewhere on the computer; we had to write
programs that would traverse the account structures and parsing
code ... blah, blah.  The point was the challenge & the
impossibility of it, not the harm.

I think viruses are essentially the same thing taken to a
harmful extreme.  The original viruses were just a sort of
message saying "ha, ha, I got on here & could have done anything
I wanted".  They have become a means of competition among some
of the most skilled programmers, including an informal scoring
for finesse, technical difficulty, creativity and so on.
Unfortunately, they do an awful lot of damage to the rest of us
along the way.

That's about the best I can come up with.  If I could ever get
my hands on one of these guys ......
jaime
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