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Re: [SG] OT:Virus-why -Reply

Thanks Jaime, satisfying explanation.

>>> jaime <jknoble@WARWICK.NET>
06/06/98 07:58am >>>
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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