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Scientist Infects Self With Computer Virus
superapecommando writes "A British scientist claims to have become the first human to be infected by a computer virus, in an experiment he says has important implications for the future of implantable technology. Dr Mark Gasson from the University of Reading infected a computer chip with the virus, then implanted it in his hand and transmitted the virus to a PC to prove that malware can move between human and computer."
just plain stupid
this sounds like that cyborg man retard from a few years ago.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
OK that's pretty stupid.
What a fscking moron
Or a show-off.
Or better, a fscking show-off moron
I couldn't think of anything more irrelevant, like, REALLY
I mean, this is Uri Geller type of BS
The mind boggles.
how long until
The implications of this being that.....what? When The Evil Government (tm) infuses us all with tracking chips, we open up ourselves to being hacked?
I can see it now....
Can new RFID technology lead to making you or your families ZOMBIES of the federal government? TONIGHT on Glenn Beck!
My other sig is clever.
Infect chip.
Implant chip.
Get chip to infect computer.
How was it ever contracted, let alone transmitted by the human? You could wear the chip as a necklace, tie it to a paper airplane, or just throw it and get the same results.
All he showed was that a computer virus can be transmitted from an implanted computer to an external computer. The scientist did not infect himself with a computer virus, he infected a chip that he had implanted in himself. If it is news to you that a computer chip implanted in a person can be infected with a computer virus, then this is the wrong board for you.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
If we're looking for firsts....
I once had a cold and sneezed on my keyboard.
Does that make me the first human to infect a computer???
Or was the good doctor merely going after being 'first' at something?
Adult Role Playing Forum
We're still far off from GITS's brain hacking. His biological functions remain entirely unaffected, as he is merely carrying the infected chip with him. Effectively, he might as well just be keeping a passcard with an infected smartchip in his wallet, the result would be the same.
How is this different from transmitting a virus via floppy diskette, other than the fact that he carried it on the inside of his hand, and the read/write mechanism was RF instead of magnetic?
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Is for this researcher to be the first to contract the metavirus when it arrives...
The article is just worded poorly. It implies that he actually contracted a computer virus, just like any human virus.
All he really did was just implant a chip in his hand that had a virus on it. Then he demonstrated that the chip would actually transmit the virus. Which isn't really a huge shock, since he was using it to communicate with other devices in the first place. According TFA, he used it for security passes and his phone.
So, at some point, he turned this into: "Pacemakers are at risk"....which, since they're not communication devices...no, no they're not.
Sounds to me like someone lost their grant money or something, and was trying to justify eating doughnuts for 3 years and doing nothing else.
"No one is more miserable than the person who wills everything and can do nothing." -Emperor Claudius 10 BC - AD 54
I will now be the first human being to have Linux installed ...
*puts Linux ISO on USB flash drive and drops his pants*
My work here is dung.
I agree with everyone that this demonstration was stupid... But the bigger question here deserves to be discussed - implanted devices CAN be infected with viruses, and we have to be careful about that... Implanted devices are becoming more and more common - it's not just pacemakers anymore. There was an article in Wired recently about the drive to create a "smart" insulin pump, one that would sense your blood sugar level and then adjust insulin delivery accordingly. This will become more and more common as we apply technology to "curing" disease... Keeping that technology virus free should be a high priority, especially as this technology gets integrated in more complex ways.
Brawndo: It's what plants crave!
Wake me up when someone has actually infected an organic organism at the cellular level with an honest to goodness computer virus made up of 0s and 1s (which is theoretically possibly since the human body controls itself in large part by electric pulses sent from the brain).
http://www.bynarystudio.com
http://www.google.com/search?q=captain+cyborg
Ah, without clicking on any links (we have to stop feeding that fraud), google let me know this was the work of his sidekick, not him directly. Now, I demand that this fraud be fully identified in all future slashdot posts about him or his minions (an addendum to this thread would be wise, too), because HE'S A FUCKING CHARLATAN!
Seriously, he called himself the "first cyborg" for putting an RFID chip in his skin years after people have had pacemakers, cochlear implants, and fucking wires in their brains (for vision to the blind and computer communications for the paralyzed). All reporters who called him "the first cyborg" should be fired, all "news" outlet that published that crap should be fined and stripped of all journalistic-perks (press passes, immunity from certain police procedures, etc). He's an attention whore who pulls these stupid publicity stunts to promote his books, stop helping him with his frauds.
You can't take the sky from me...
If I swallow my thumb drive containing all my favorite programs, would they come out decompiled?
. . . my body runs Linux afterall :)
Since when does being a Socialist mean 'someone who has a different opinion than me'?
That is probable one of the biggest piece of false-science I have ever seen in years. The exact same thing could have been done with any compromised wireless device; the fact that the chip is under his skin is completely irrelevant. People helping to carry computer viruses have been around for decades, remember those floppies of shareware with virus on them??? Come-on!
Dude has a crappy computer chip in him that has a virus on it. Now what? Will he try to get rid of the virus? Will he try and take the chip out?
He has a useless computer chip in his body. That has got to suck.
Imagine him trying to brag to people about it:
"I have a computer chip implanted in me." "Cool, what does it do?" "Nothing, it is infected with a computer virus."
FAIL
The world is how you make it
Makes about as much sense as flying mega shark.
What is it with nerds and implanting technology into their bodies? It doesn't seem to have much to do with practical use. Is it some kind of power fantasy?
For me, this post and summary is an all time low for Slashdot.
Maybe if the summary had said "check out how stupid this is..."
Geeze. C'mon. What if somebody has their abdomen opened up and puts an entire laptop in there? What's the difference?
And for his next trick, Dr Mark Gasson will insert an Atari 2600 controller into his anus, and proceed to control a Windows PC's mouse cursor with it. This is the first time a human has ever taken over control of a computer with the twitching of their rectal wall, and demonstrates the need for anal computer security.
All hail scientific achievement.
What we do not need in the IT security field is stupid publicity stunts.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I'm not one to complain about /. editors; but, come on!
This is "News for Nerds - Stuff That Matters." Did CN just hire some recent college grads that majored in Type-Writer Maintenance and wouldn't know the difference between HD Memory and computer memory?
Just....plain....stupid.
I'm never going to infect my computer with a rhinovirus, or a common cold, or polio. It's not going to get smallpox (even in the lab), chickenpox, or herpes.
When we start making computers out of biological components, then we can have this discussion. In the meantime, I could implant an infected chip in my shoe and make a claim.
Stupid.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
One that's wasting tax payer money on Dr. Who toys.
Someone obviously needed to get into the press desperately again.
and then i proved Man can core dump.
Idiot.
Well, no, this fails to be even Uri Geller kind of BS. Uri Geller was a fraud, but he knew how to put on a good show and sell an illusion that was actually quite appealing. In fact, a notion that many people wanted desperately to believe in.
And even if you didn't believe in magic, it was at least very interesting as in trying to figure out "where's the trick"? Before Randi went and showed how it's done, it wasn't obvious at all to us non-trained in the conjuror arts. It was a good trick.
But this guy and Captain Cyborg... words fail me. Really.
I'm a SF fan. I like the idea of cyborgs and all. I like the idea of transferring information directly from a machine to a human and viceversa, though I must qualify it there: to a human brain. I'm even willing to entertain the notion of human consciousness transferred to a machine -- though not to the extent of being a techno-rapture cultist or anything. Etc.
I should be exactly the market target for this kind of stuff. Except not _this_ kind of retarded stuff.
Someone thinking that implanting an RFID chip under the skin makes him Captain Cyborg, or this guy thinking that storing a computer virus on a chip under his skin makes him "infected"... isn't even funny. It's ridiculous, stupid, and just a complete non-sequitur for the actual topic of cyborgs. A guy with a pacemaker or hearing aid is actually more of a "cyborg" because those actually interface with the living tissue and perform a function. A chip that's under the skin but not actually connected to anything biological just is not it.
It doesn't even leave you thinking "what is the trick" or "good trick", because there is no trick. It's just a bad case of equivocation. It's transfer from PC to human only by virtue of the vagueness of the phrase, rather than any useful sense or interesting sense.
If we're to talk Uri Geller comparison, guys like these are more like the equivalent of some guy claiming he's the first guy to eat with his arse. So he shoves a spoon's handle up his arse, takes it out, and then eats something with that spoon.
It's freaking sad, that's what it is.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.