Virus Writers - The Enemy Within

Slob Nerd writes "An interesting read from todays Observer "He's 21, he's got dreadlocks, likes punk bands... and his hobby could wreck your computer in seconds. Clive Thompson infiltrates the secret world of the virus writers who see their work as art - while others fear that it is cyber-terrorism.""

Comments

My Hero

[DarkHelmet]

I think this is the third time this story has been posted.

Googled version to NY Times story

Of course, does it really count if the same story appears on a *different* page? Or a different website.

Maybe it's time that slashdot subscribers get a cached version of the story hosted on slashdot. That way, when an editor is about to submit a duplicate story, it'll check for similar articles cached on the site. That way this kind of thing doesn't keep happening. Hell... Slashdot editors won't even have to read slashdot anymore!

Thank you CmdrTaco for rejecting the story I just submitted in favor of this one. And I *know* the story I submitted wasn't a duplicate, or else my web server would have felt it. ;)

You really are my hero.

Re:My Hero

[DarkHelmet]

Oh yeah...

The slashdot article where this story already appeared is here:

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/02/06/194322 9&mode=nested

Re:My Hero

[Motherfucking Shit]

And just three days after that, it appeared here:

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/02/09/024524 8&mode=thread

Which, I imagine, makes this story not a dupe, but a triplicate!

Re:My Hero

[squiggleslash]

Worst of it is that this in The Observer, a British Sunday newspaper that hasn't had any credibility in the tech community since the infamous "Peddlars of Paedophile Porn" episode back in '97.

For those who missed it: That paper printed photographs on its front page of the chairman of a large British ISP and the owner of a famous anonymous remailer in Finland that was the target of a campaign by the Scientologists, under the above headline. Their logic? For the former individual: there's paedophile porn on the Internet, so if you're running an ISP you must be selling such pornography. Kind of like the Queen is a child pornographer, after all she was head of the Royal Mail at the time (Britain's post office), and child porn often gets sent by mail...

The allegation against the anonymous remailer was, in many ways, even worse. The service was free and had been crippled so it couldn't be used to send binaries in any practical way, so in no sense could he have been described as "peddling" that kind of material. The allegation came at a time when the service - used by a variety of groups from abuse victims who wanted to discuss issues anonymously on Usenet to Amnesty International and dissidents who needed privacy - badly needed help as the CoS had various lawsuits against it citing copyright infringement. Attackers of the CoS had used the service to publish, anonymously, various CoS tracts. The service shut down one week after the Observer article was published.

The Observer ran this campaign for two weeks and finally went silent over it, never issuing an public apology or a retraction. During this time Britain's fledgling Internet community went, to put it mildly, pretty much ape-shit.

For me it was a bit of an epithany, I suspect it was for many others too, as it demonstrated how low the press can get when they're trying to get readers. This wasn't some third rate tabloid, it was a newspaper famous for its supposed high-minded liberalism and commitment to truth - it was an article in The Observer that lead to the founding of Amnesty International, another that lead to Britain's withdrawl from Suez.

Do I take seriously an article published in it about virus writers? You bet I don't. I don't think anyone in their right mind can take that newspaper seriously.

... and his homepage ...

[bdejong]

http://www.spth.de.vu/

- bram

Article Was Lifted Directly From NY Times

[tealover]

Here's a link to the first paragraph.

Is this a copyright violation ?

Au contraire, viruses already affect medical care!

[ccmay]

Virus writers are just lucky computers haven't advanced far enough where medical machines can be remote controlled via the internet.

The PACS system (digital X-ray reading monitors) at the hospital where I work caught Code Red last year, and was down for a day or two. X-rays were being read on printed films just like the old days. Slowed everything down significantly. I don't know that it directly affected any patient's health, but it certainly could have.

-ccm

meaning of [sic]

[n3k5]

[sic] means "Spelling In Context".

No, it doesn't. 'Sic' is a latin word. I don't speak latin and I'm too lazy to look it up, so I only recall the approximate meaning, which is something alone the lines of 'such', 'thus'. The implied meaning is "yes, what I just wrote indeed was in the original text just like this". So, your explanation of the concept is not bad at all, but your concrete answer is plain wrong.