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From: kdo@edsel (Ken Olum)
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin,sci.bio
Subject: Worm vs. Virus
Message-ID: <1617@edsel>
Date: 10 Nov 88 17:44:45 GMT
References: <5330@medusa.cs.purdue.edu> <3595@phri.UUCP>
Reply-To: kdo@lucid.com
Organization: Lucid, Inc., Sharon, MA
Lines: 25

In article <3595@phri.UUCP> roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) writes:
>spaf@cs.purdue.edu (Gene Spafford) writes:
>> (Note -- it's a worm, not a virus, since it can replicate itself and
>> does not hide itself inside other code.)
>
>	Several people have mentioned that it's a worm and not a virus.  I
>tried to explain this to my wife (who is a molecular biologist who works
>with biolgical viruses) and she didn't like the term worm.  She says that
>the distinction of not hiding inside other code is better described by
>calling them lytic viruses and lysogenic viruses instead of worms and
>viruses.  Anybody for electronic transposons?

The terminology depends on the exact analogy that you make between
computers and living things.  If you say that a machine is like a
cell, then this recent problem is indeed a virus, because it gets
inside your host and uses the machinery of the host to reproduce
itself and spread to other machines.  If you say that a program is
like a cell, and a machine is like a multicellular organism, then it's
a parasite instead.  If you say a machine is just a fertile place
where programs live, then the "virus' is just a random organism.  I
favor the first analogy, and I think the lytic/lysogenic terms are
good ones, but somehow I can't see them getting used much by the news
media.

					Ken Olum