Slashdot Mirror
Sim Plague
Brian Kingsbury writes: "The New York Times has an
article on a new twist in the world of the Sims --- a "virus" that
can kill off a player's characters. In a particularly sadistic twist,
the virus is carried by a guinea pig that players download from the
Sims Web site. I wonder what's next, maybe the Black Death?
" That's all Nate would have needed to complete his House of Fear - locked doors, no food, two ghosts, and the kitchen on fire. Will Wright, you're a genius.
Well, if you look at the author of the article, it's none other than John Markoff! If the name doesn't ring a bell, he's the same guy who wrote sensational articles about Kevin Mitnick many years ago which ultimately resulted in Kevin getting treated so badly by "the system". You can read more at http://www.freekevin.com/.
Markoff wouldn't know good journalism if it bit him on the ass. Why the New York Times continues to employ someone as irresponsible as him is beyond me.
From the article:
Although there is no easy possibility that the guinea pig virus will escape from Sims and cause havoc in the Internet world, the specter of software viruses in the future of computer gaming is real, Mr. Smith said. "When they introduce a future multiplayer version of Sims, it will create an interesting social dynamic," he said.
Why can't they just tell the story, and not try to inflame the public with these false potentialities? JESUS. The article was great right up until this point. One of the (many) things that I loathe about the media is how they have this uncontrollable desire to make issues appear as nasty and brutish as possible. This is a perfect example. Virus in a computer game? We must surreptitiously imply that it might affect the entire Internet! That's MUCH more interesting!
FUCK THAT. Just tell the story! Grrrr....
-Rev.I thought everyone forgot all about that. It was new years eve 1993 on Furry, actually. And it did more than just attach itself to a person's description. It infect the room they were in if possible, so anyone walking into the room got infected. It infected the links between rooms, objects, and even actions on objects. (So if you create an object with a link to a program and run that command to run your program, the virus infected that command as well. Every time you ran it, you would be re-infected.) There were also plans to abuse something called _listen, which executes a program whenever a person _receives_ a message. So a person could get infected just by _hearing_ something. But the programmer didn't have enough permissions, which is probably a good thing.
Another thing the virus did was overlay each person's ability to communicate. The virus had its own special versions of the basic "say", "pose", "spoof", "write", and "whisper". (It could only create these through a big in the MUCK code on Furry, I'll note.) The payoff of the command was that after midnight (ie. one New Years), all infected users would have their communications silenced and rerouted to a special log file. Actually, the messages got printed out to the user's screen so that it _looked_ like everyone could hear them, but in fact they couldn't.
This "fun" went on for a good half hour until one of the administrators figured out what was going on because of a bug in the modified page program. (Note to coders: *always* test your code before you install it in public.) Eventually they just reinstalled an older DB to clean out the virus.
Incidently, they people perpetrating this took the log file, flamed it, and then posted it to usenet. In retrospect, that was a bad idea, but you do stupid stuff when you're 15...
If you're curious about the aftermath, a lot of clueless users on Furry complained to the programmer's sysadmin. Of course, the clueless users blew everything out of proportion, not understanding what really went on. When word finally got back to the programmer, apparently he had written an "internet worm, capable of copying itself between different servers on the internet." I only wish I was that good of a coder! Apparently the FBI got involved for a short time, until they realized that the Furry server was located in Canada, so any felonous charges would have to be tried in an international court. Once the feds finally realized it was just some stupid prank with no lasting harm, the programmer never heard a thing from them again.
Anyway, the guy lost his internet access, which was through a university. He spent the 9 months of downtime (before getting another account) working on a program to let people play several variants of Poker on MUCKs. Ironally, this program is still popular on Furry to this day. Consider it one last bit of both apology and spite.
But that was a long time ago, and I was a different person then.
-Ted
~=Keelor