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20th Anniversary Of Computer Viruses Commemorated
DoraLives writes "Our good friends at the BBC are celebrating the 20th anniversary of the computer virus. So, viruses are no longer teenagers and are now entering adulthood, as 'there are almost 60,000 viruses in existence and they have gone from being a nuisance to a permanent menace.' What wonders shall there be to come, as these marvelous bits of code continue to grow and multiply?" We ran a recent BBC-authored story on the psychology of virus writers.
This *just* came to you? Did you just crawl out of your WWII bunker or something? Welcome to the 21st century, alas, no flying cars yet. :-)
Seriously though, this is definitely where computing is going and I can't necessarily say it's a bad thing. Viruses won't get very far if they have to be signed by a trusted authority before they're physically capable of running on your hardware. On the other hand, the days of compiling your own source code and running the resulting binaries is probably nearing an end if the trusted computing platform people have their say in it. Unless there's a setting to disable this I'd say open source computing is destined to die off.
I wouldn't worry too much though since as long as the Asian computer companies exist there'll be suppliers for hardware to satisfy our requirements for non-DRM capabilities.
Buy? I think you mean lease all your software from MS. :-) Much more profitable for them if they have a guarenteed annual income from you.