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I don't think I could count the times I've seen an overflow because programmers fail to realize that strcpy() also copies the trailing \0

It's even on the man page, fer Pete's sake!

http://www.skrenta.com/rt/utzoo-usenet/ apparently includes a copy of all 141 tapes which comprise the oldest archive of usenet messages.

Didn't realise the Apple ][ used the 6502, wasn't that the same CPU in the original 8-bit NES?

Not enough time right now to go into depth, but I sorting through a collection of 5.25" Apple images, I saw this message popup on one of the emulators "bootup". Had no idea what it was and didn't bother looking too far in depth into it. This was back in 2006, when I was organizing my collection of stuff I had written as a kid, random public domain disks I had copies, of, random things I had made copies of as a kid from my gradeschool computer lab, etc...in the process, plenty of "catalog" commands ran (this is how it spreads, he has the 6502 source http://www.skrenta.com/cloner/clone-src.txt on his website and a few more items about it there), plenty of disks "swapped" out of virtual floppy drives, so I'm sure the infection is well spread.

Maybe I'll keep it around as a living pet in my emulator :)

Well if they want to be assholes about it, why not just drop them off of the database completely?

It seems to me that Google is in a good position now to offer a deal to sites; they can either agree to be crawled, and thus end up in a cache for 30 days or whatever, or they can just not end up in the index at all. Their option.

Get rid of the "oh we want to be in the index and get traffic, but not be cached" option, which is basically web sites wanting to have their cake and eat it too.

I think these sites have an inflated opinion of their own relevance to the world. They can sue Google, but Google can effectively remove them from the Internet, at least as far as 70-90% (depending on who's doing the counting) of users are concerned.

For most people, google is the internet. The average computer user equates google with their start page, and many people think web search = google search, I.E. "im going to google this myspace stalker". http://www.skrenta.com/2007/01/winnertakeall_googl e_and_the_t.html

Try this link: http://www.skrenta.com/2006/12/googles_true_search _market_sha.html Google 70.6% Yahoo! 18.7% MSN 8.9% Ask.com 1.7% Do the math! :-) Total = 99.99%

Anyway, there were probably worm/virus prototypes before 1983. Anyone know of them?

In 1981-1982 the first computer virus, Elk Cloner, started spreading in the wild but it was not until 1983 when Fred Cohen finally proved that the concept of a computer virus was viable. To my best knowledge the first worm spreading in the wild was IBM Christmas Worm in 1987 and the first Internet worm was Robert T. Morris' Worm in 1988.

But there is definitely a predecessor to "VD": The Elk Cloner Virus. Showed up on the Apple II, and the message would appear after 50 resets of the disk. It would infect any disk put in where you did a CATALOG of that disk.

There is a webpage dedicated to it (with source!) at this location.

"Elk Cloner: The program with a personality"


It will get on all your disks
It will infiltrate your chips
Yes it's Cloner!

It will stick to you like glue
It will modify ram too
Send in the Cloner!


There are other similarly dated variants. Elk Cloner has been mentioned in the press in the past; this is someone at the BBC being lazy. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, glorifying the process as if it was a great accomplishment is a little strange.

Ah - good ol' Richard Skrenta - founder of the Open Directory Project and many other things - who did, indeedy, write the Elk Cloner virus for the Apple II in 1982. I thought the BBC had the anniversary wrong, but I didn't have anywhere to "moan" by skrenta missing his bit of limelight until now ;)

Ah - good ol' Richard Skrenta - founder of the Open Directory Project and many other things - who did, indeedy, write the Elk Cloner virus for the Apple II in 1982. I thought the BBC had the anniversary wrong, but I didn't have anywhere to "moan" by skrenta missing his bit of limelight until now ;)

How many virus writers go on to live normal, productive lives? How many never write another virus?

(Ah, to heck with it. Kill 'em all and let DoS sort 'em out!)

Tim

Several editors do, in fact, keep copies of the RDF dumps on their machine and it is well known within the ODP community that any action by Netscape/AOL that displeases a large majority of editors will result in us setting up a competing service (probably even with assistance of skrenta and co - the founders).
Netscape know that any major fowlups on their part will result in them being shot in the foot.
Richy C.
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