Q-Dos was written by Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products, and he has admitted that it includes a lot of 'borrowing' from CP/M, which was written by Gary Kildall of Digital Research.
Supposedly as late as DOS 7.0 there was still code the the kernel that was an exact (and illegal) copy o parts of the CP/M bios.
The funny thing about DOS is that when Bill Gates made the deal with IBM to provide an operating system for the PC, he didn't really have one. He knew SCP had written an operating system, but he didn't own it yet. Instead, he ripped them both off. Says a lot for the company's later history.
Your analogies aren't valid, because you're talking about cases where there is the threat of physical harm to an actual person. The Code Red virus is annoying, and it's causing major problems, but it's not going to kill anyone, and it's not going to permanently damage your system.
The only thing that you have the right to do it to tell the admin of the infected server via email. If they ignore you, run a traceroute and ask their service provider to firewall them for port 80. Then they'll have a real incentive to fix the problem.
If you attack someone else's machine, then you're on exactly the same ethical level as the person who wrote the original virus.
There are a lot medication for the flu. You can find a few dozen at your local pharmacy.
I think what you meant to ask is if there is a vaccine. The answer is yes, but the flu virus mutates fairly rapidly. Every year there are a few more new strains, and so you have to go get a new flu shot if you want to stay immune.
Any attempt to alter the code running on someone else machine is totally immoral, regardless of whether you're trying to be 'helpful' or not. It's still a virus, and you're still tampering with someone elses machine without their consent, and it's quite likely that you're going to end up going to end up trying to defend yourself in court.
A much more sensible way to deal with this type of virii would be to create something like the RBL for known infected machines. I don't have the link handy, but the RBL is a list of known unsecured email reflectors, and it's used to fight spam. It's pretty simple: mail servers configured to use it simply refuse to accept any SMTP connections from all servers on the list. When a site is added, a notice is sent to root at that site, and the site can get removed simply by telling the RBL maintainer that they've fixed the problem.
To solve the problem of these DOS floods, all you'd have to do is put a packet sniffers on the major backbones that flag the traffic from infected sites for operator intervention. The operator then just adds a packet filter to reject whatever types of packets are being flooded, and sends an email to root@infected site telling them to fix the problem. Once they fix it, they just reply asking to have the filter removed.
The workload from this kind of solution could be immense if there are large numbers of infected hosts, but it would be totally voluntary, and the workload could be spread out quite a bit if the major networks collaborated and maintained a master blacklist. Also, this would be an easy way to quickly minimize the effect on the network of any kind of DOS flood.
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Q-Dos was written by Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products, and he has admitted that it includes a lot of 'borrowing' from CP/M, which was written by Gary Kildall of Digital Research.
Supposedly as late as DOS 7.0 there was still code the the kernel that was an exact (and illegal) copy o parts of the CP/M bios.
The funny thing about DOS is that when Bill Gates made the deal with IBM to provide an operating system for the PC, he didn't really have one. He knew SCP had written an operating system, but he didn't own it yet. Instead, he ripped them both off. Says a lot for the company's later history.
SPQA
Your analogies aren't valid, because you're talking about cases where there is the threat of physical harm to an actual person. The Code Red virus is annoying, and it's causing major problems, but it's not going to kill anyone, and it's not going to permanently damage your system.
The only thing that you have the right to do it to tell the admin of the infected server via email. If they ignore you, run a traceroute and ask their service provider to firewall them for port 80. Then they'll have a real incentive to fix the problem.
If you attack someone else's machine, then you're on exactly the same ethical level as the person who wrote the original virus.
SPQA
There are a lot medication for the flu. You can find a few dozen at your local pharmacy.
I think what you meant to ask is if there is a vaccine. The answer is yes, but the flu virus mutates fairly rapidly. Every year there are a few more new strains, and so you have to go get a new flu shot if you want to stay immune.
SPQA
Any attempt to alter the code running on someone else machine is totally immoral, regardless of whether you're trying to be 'helpful' or not. It's still a virus, and you're still tampering with someone elses machine without their consent, and it's quite likely that you're going to end up going to end up trying to defend yourself in court.
A much more sensible way to deal with this type of virii would be to create something like the RBL for known infected machines. I don't have the link handy, but the RBL is a list of known unsecured email reflectors, and it's used to fight spam. It's pretty simple: mail servers configured to use it simply refuse to accept any SMTP connections from all servers on the list. When a site is added, a notice is sent to root at that site, and the site can get removed simply by telling the RBL maintainer that they've fixed the problem.
To solve the problem of these DOS floods, all you'd have to do is put a packet sniffers on the major backbones that flag the traffic from infected sites for operator intervention. The operator then just adds a packet filter to reject whatever types of packets are being flooded, and sends an email to root@infected site telling them to fix the problem. Once they fix it, they just reply asking to have the filter removed.
The workload from this kind of solution could be immense if there are large numbers of infected hosts, but it would be totally voluntary, and the workload could be spread out quite a bit if the major networks collaborated and maintained a master blacklist. Also, this would be an easy way to quickly minimize the effect on the network of any kind of DOS flood.
SPQA