Slashdot Mirror


Viruses: More Hype than Danger?

blankmange writes "CNN is carrying a story on how the big virus scares within the last year or so have been just that: scares, usually hyped by the media with software companies standing by to reap the profits. 'The market for computer security is booming as PC users become more aware of the need to protect themselves from worms and viruses. "Code Red" hit the headlines in July last year, with dire predictions that the PC worm would cripple the Internet. Yet in the end, Code Red didn't even make the year's virus Top 10.' PDAs are the next marketing target, along with cellphones."

10 of 419 comments (clear)

  1. OGG TO CRUSH MP3 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    http://www.ogg-vorbis.com the new open, smaller file size, greater quality and FREE OGG! Down with MP3!

    1. Re:OGG TO CRUSH MP3 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

      all oggs bases are belonging to us all

  2. worldwide anthrax tour by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    It wasn't easy becoming president of the united states. It took a lot of hard work and perseverance. I had to sweet talk a lot of committee men, reassure a lot of lobbyists, and impress a lot of constituents. But I did do it, and now I get to be president.

    Some say that being president is the ultimate form of public service. I agree. That is why one of my first acts as president was to launch a full- scale nuclear strike against numerous civilian population centers both home and abroad.

    In all, I think we used about 4000 warheads, about half for the US and half for Europe and Asia. We only lobbed a few at the lower hemisphere, as I didn't see the point in wasting expensive weapons on niggers, spicanos, and their respective decrepit habitats. For example, we used a couple of solid, high- yield weapons on Mexico City but most of Argentina was untouched. Then again, within a month the radiation will have spread to those forests and the inhabitants will have ceased to exist.

    It takes a lot of skill and courage to demonstrate this kind of leadership. It also takes some direct assistance. I can't launch a full-scale nuclear strike by myself, it would require more willpower than any modern man has. But after getting some of my scary, hard-line friends into the White House, it was just a matter of time before we could retarget the missiles, stage a new soviet threat, and give the order to launch.

    On the first day of the new world, I addressed the American public and thoroughly confused them. I told them that Chechen rebels had siezed power in Moscow and had loosed nuclear warfare upon our peaceful nation. I told them that we would knock down their weapons with new technology, that at worst a few cities would be lost. In reality, I had given the order, and I had drawn up the target list, which included Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Long Island, Staten Island, Westchester, Albany, Cornell, Binghamton, and Buffalo in New York State alone. We had targeted every major American city, every minor one and every major suburb we could find on a map. We were thorough as hell.

    I was in the air when the bombs fell, it seemed as safe as anywhere else and proved itself to be so. There were seven of us: me, two cabinet members, three secret service agents, and the pilot. We had offed everyone else in the White House on the way to the plane, not because we had to or even because we wanted to. We just did. Now there were seven of us, the Magnificent Seven, if you will, not looking for a bunker to hide in but to make a difference in people's lives.

    We had pulled it off pretty well because when we arrived at any particular destination, our respect and good name were still intact. You have no idea what it is like to show up at a munitions dump somewhere in the midwest, find some scared kid standing at the door, and off him. Just as he realizes who you are, and thanks God for your presence, you turn on him and fill his young virile form with scars of hot lead. There is nothing that compares to that, except maybe nuking your own people, or, nerve gassing indigenous populations.

    It would not be hard to nerve gas indigenous populations from the safety of the white house. I could, for example, get on the horn and give the Air Force a line straight into the jungle. However, there is something to be said for nuking your own pilots on the ground and going in there and doing it yourself, which is what we were prepared to do. We went to munitions dumps around the country and picked up anthrax, botulism, nerve gas, and a host of other fun toys. We loaded them up on the plane and headed for the southern hemisphere.

    Our first stop, Argentina. We landed the plane and told whoever happened to be standing there that we were there to help. It is not as if that country has a government or anything resembling civilization. We got off the plane with our suits and drums of spores, hired a truck into the middle of the jungle, and laid waste to as many people as we could find.

    It is remarkable the kind of respect one gets when one shows up wearing a radiation suit in the middle of a worldwide nuclear holocaust. In reality, we did not need the suits, not for radiation at least - it would take days or weeks for the specter of death to settle over the remote regions we were visiting. We wore the suits partly for respect and partly to handle the dangerous nerve agents we were handing out to the natives.

    Our favorite was the botburger, the botulism hamburger. We would mix botulism into ketchup and smear it all over food we were handing out to indigenous populations. I don't know why these people were eating our hamburgers; they had plenty of food themselves and the radiation hadn't yet reached their homes. I think it is possible that people instinctively like to be aided in a crisis. We usually had little trouble getting them to eat and the ones who didn't were offed as soon as the effects started to appear on the ones who did. You would think there would be a lot of gun-toting crazies in these remote native villages but there aren't, you can pretty much do whatever you want.

    At this point you are probably wondering how this all came together. I'm not really sure to be honest. Like I said, it took some teamwork but how the team assembled itself is not really clear. It was something we all wanted from the beginning, something we were raised to belive was right and just. We generally assumed a certain level of trust between the seven of us, and never really questioned each others' motives. After all, how do you verify that someone else wants nuclear death as much as you do? What happens if he pops you in the face right at the moment of decision? It doesn't matter really, this whole operation requires a certain kind of fatalism and it went forward primarily because we could all see that we were like-minded. If one of my friends offed me during our worldwide anthrax tour, I wouldn't really care, we're not really the kind of people who care about anything.

    Our next stop, Papua New Guinea. I'm not really sure where it is, you'd probably have to ask the pilot, but there were people there and we fed them anthrax and botulism. The ketchup method was really great for both agents, because it took the spores out of the air and put them right down peoples' throats. Now, you're probably wondering if I get a certain kind of glee from offing these people but the fact is, I don't. There's a certain kind of fatalism that's required, a certain kind of, this is the only thing we can do to help these people, and while they might be capable of helping themselves, maybe we can make one small difference in these people's lives.

    We saved the nerve gas for Africa. There was just no way I was going to hand out botburgers to black niggers, and besides, it's not like we were experts, it took a good two weeks to figure out how to work the nozzles. Once we got the gas flowing, however, we became pretty efficient. We could mow down a village in about six hours, which meant we could do three villages a day when the weather was clear. We could even work in shifts. A week in Africa, that's only ten or twenty villages but I had to wonder, would be the same for these people if I didn't get myself out there?

    At this point three weeks had gone by and the new weather was beginning to set in. We started wearing the suits pretty much the whole time and it felt different, like we had given birth to something greater than ourselves. There was a lot of gray now, and it didn't seem wrong so much as new, a color for the new millenium. I hadn't really been thinking about much of anything since we started our tour and it lent a certain ease to which I could appreciate our new surroundings. Population centers were few and far between, and the people we found were already stricken with disease. This is what we expected but we made sure to feed them botulism, it wasn't really clear why we should treat these people any differently than the healthy inhabitants we had been dealing with prior.

    We crossed naturally into Turkey, having left behind the plane somewhere mid-continent. It was a measure of how confident we were feeling, to be a thousand miles without our wings, because after all we were in the plane when the bombs went off and those little red lights below, you could just tell they weren't going to hurt us. We gassed Turks, and it was in Turkey that I realized that I had a pretty good efficiency for this, that I probably could have been in the military too and been fine.

    I think we were crazy to go to Europe but you know at that point how do you tell anymore? I mean, we certainly hadn't been romping around the US the whole time and being in Europe during the second month was kind of a chill. We met all kinds of people - Czechs, Poles, Slavs, Greeks, Germans, Frenchmen. Like I said, I was getting pretty efficient so I was gassing whole towns. I could get the remaining inhabitants huddled around some food or something and then I would turn on the gas. There's not much you can do when you're in a crowded room and the gas is suddenly on. This was especially satisfying in rooms full of dirty greeks, but I didn't really mind gassing the french or british either, there was a certain kind of, well, this is how it is.

    In the third month we started getting weary. We had seen most of what lies on the other side of the atlantic, and the pacific just wasn't as interesting. We tried to get our energy up by going to australia, but one look at those dirty natives and it was just gas, gas, gas. It was amazing at that point that none of our fatalism had poisoned our own success, I mean, there was no good reason why we should have made it to Australia, we were just an unusually committed team. And I think we were pretty satisfied with ourselves, too, that somehow maybe we were making a difference in the greater scheme of things.

    After Australia we went to go look at some slopes, which was kind of annoying but you know, making a difference and all that. With nuclear weapons we had made sure to leave nobody alive on the islands of Japan and we targeted Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea, and the rest of it pretty well, the way we should have when we were fighting those wars. But there were still plenty of chinkanos nestled here and there in China, and we went after them with anthrax, botulism, and nerve gas.

    We lost our pilot in China, which was funny because we had just picked up a transport in Britain for the ride over. It was our first flight in weeks and now we were stranded in pattyland, lugging tubs of sarin in and out of the mud and wondering what it really takes to kill indigenous populations. He fell, actually, which seems weird but at least it was a good honest death, not one of these efficiency killings we were dishing out with our sprayers and tubs of gas.

    Some of us stopped wearing our suits in China, which seems stupid but it depends on what you mean by it. The guys without suits moved pretty easily, sometimes they went off by themselves and took out an extra village because they could get around so much faster. It was kind of hard to keep a level head about it, I mean, on one hand I want to remove indigenous populations but on the other I want to make sure I'm still around to do it! So that was kind of hard, but we figured it didn't matter, so long as there were some of us left towards the end, it wasn't even that we considered survival important but that maybe we could last longer than most.

    I don't know how long the suits are rated for, but I think mine stopped working because I started hemorraging blood in China. It didn't help that we had been three months on the road, lugging tubs through mud and feeding anthrax to all kinds of spics, spicanos, chicanos, chinkanos, and chinkettes. I started throwing up blood and it seemed like maybe I wouldn't last too long after that. Probably one of the other guys would get tired of lugging me around and he would off me in my sleep. It's not that we didn't care about each other, we did but we were pretty focused on the mission, it was almost more respectful because we were all pretty interested in success.

    At this point the new weather was pretty harsh, and not only had I killed 200 million americans with heat and radiation, but I had picked up the fruits of their labor and used them to bring peace to a number of indigenous populations remaining in remote areas. I had probably killed 30 or 40 thousand niggers, nigglers, nigglettes, spics, spicanos, chicanos, chinkanos, chinkettes, slopes, slopanos, and slopettes with nerve gas, and we had given out as many hamburgers as we had in our possession. I felt good, like maybe I had made a small difference. And I slept, and for the first time in what seemed like forever, I dreamt of a green earth.

  3. Mmmmmmkay by Beliskner · · Score: 0, Offtopic
    Viruses: More Hype than Danger?
    root# cd /
    root# rm -R *

    Mmmmmmmkay

    --
    A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
  4. yeah tell that by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    to everyone that got infected with one :)

  5. smellbot by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    I madeyou waste a mod pint by making this post go lower.

  6. Re:more hype, for sure. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    now im scared :o

  7. Re:Was the CNN author a Systems Administrator? by t0qer · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Like, "don't insult your coworkers if you want to stay employed"?

    Hey fuck you, me and three hundred thousand other people in San Jose are laid off right now you cum guzzling jerk off. MIS/IT is a numbers game, you get 1 admin per 200 employee's. Since your obviously a dumbass anyways let me do the math for you.
    Thats
    300,000 people in San Jose Unemployed
    Divide that by 200
    That's 1500 Sysadmin's all trying for what jobs are left out there plus those other 298,500 assholes we had to support before the layoffs applying for MY JOB even though they don't have a clue. Do you really have any concept of reality motherfucker or do I have to beat it into your head for you?

  8. Re:Girls are Scary by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Structurally, the clitoris is like a penis in miniature, with a shaft, a glans, and a hood.

    What? There's no way I'm going to sleep with someone who has a penis, however small it may be. What options do I have left?

  9. Re:2nd p by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Um... a fear of scatophiles?