Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!whuts!mhuxh!mhuxu!m10ux!rgr
From: rgr@m10ux.UUCP (Duke Robillard)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Internet Virus: SunOS patches
Message-ID: <754@m10ux.UUCP>
Date: 10 Nov 88 21:33:11 GMT
References: <76493@sun.uucp> <3596@phri.UUCP>
Reply-To: rgr@m10ux.UUCP (Duke Robillard)
Organization: AT&T Bell Labs, Murray Hill
Lines: 29

In article <3596@phri.UUCP> roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) writes:

>Since it's a real pain to rlogin to all those diskless clients, you might
>just want to write an anti-virus...
>Sort of a viral self-destruct gene implant. 
> [...] BTW, before people jump all over me, I'm not really serious about 
> this, even if it is a neat idea.

Why not?  As a number of people have pointed out, if this recent 
worm weren't so prolific (which may have been a bug) it might have
sat around for months.  Maybe there are a bunch of others already
sitting around, which are less obvious (making them better parasites.
A good parasite doesn't make its host sick, at least not right away)

It seems to me that as computers/os's  get bigger, more complex, and
better connected, these kind of things are going to become inevitable.
The long term solution is to write anti-bodies.  After all, that's
what evolution came up with, and she had 4 billion years to work on it.

This will have the positive side effect of channelling some of the 
talent that might tend to write worms and viruses into writing
immune systems, since anyone who would find one interesting would
probably find the other interesting as well.


-- 
|       Duke Robillard           UUCP:     {backbone!}att!m10ux!rgr  |
|       AT&T Bell Labs           ARPA:     rgr@m10ux.att.com         |
|       Murray Hill, NJ          or maybe: m10ux!rgr@att.att.com     |
|                                BITNET:   rgr%m10ux.att.com@cunyvm  |