Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!mit-eddie!mit-amt!beb
From: beb@mit-amt (Brian E Bradley)
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin
Subject: Re: Fooey on your cynical, litigious personalities
Keywords: cranky, tired, geek
Message-ID: <3282@mit-amt>
Date: 12 Nov 88 06:12:41 GMT
References: <5392@saturn.ucsc.edu> <2313@stpstn.UUCP> <23076@mordor.s1.gov>
Reply-To: beb@media-lab.media.mit.edu (Brian E Bradley)
Organization: MIT Media Lab, Cambridge MA
Lines: 47


  Let's call it what it is: "computer rape".

  Sure, you lost a day's work because of the virus, and you got heartburn.
But that's not what really bothers you.  Your machine seems somehow --
well, DIRTY...  You don't really trust it anymore.  It's been "doing it"
for someone else.  And, deep down in the back of your mind, you KNOW that
your rival's code was BETTER than yours: once the computer tasted HIS
code, it could think of nothing else.

  Gentlemen, let's be sensitive to the victims, too.

  Because of the Worm, our relationship with our Signifigant Automata is
forever changed.  Their increasingly infected chassis are more and more
human every day.

  The appearance of dangerous diseases in the electronic ecology means 
that the majority of guys will marry one machine and avoid the swinging
"network" information meat market.  Unless, of course, his machine is
down for some reason, or the guy needs something "special".

  In a surprisingly short time, a user will be able to go to the drugstore
24 hours a day to buy "network protectors"; perhaps they will even be
ribbed, colored, scented, and disposable after one use.

  In the meantime, even the most ardent civil libertarians among us are
growling and threatening to bludgeon virus publishers to death with
baseball bats.  Control over personal property is a much more compelling
motivation than concepts like "the free marketplace of ideas".  But, until
the law catches up with the current marketplace of intellectual
property, software publishing (and "genetic" publishing, for that matter)
is an ill-defined and lawless game.  Perhaps some future court will rule
that a man can kill to keep his black box from being raped.

  And "rape" is the issue here.  To spare my colleagues the embarassment
of irrational, emotional public displays, I would like to point out that
many systems administrators are behaving like the victims of forcible
rape.  Be aware of your own actions, and be careful that your choices
are not driven by unhealthy motives, such as obsessive paranoid reactions
to a perceived loss of security.  Set reasoable goals, curb your extremism,
and don't pop a blood vessel over it.

  If youthink you're suffering, I suggest a brief dip in Women's Movement
books.  They've been grappling with the same issues as we Worm-Fighters,
but they've had centuries of life-and-death experience coping with the
problem.  Of course, the Computer Security Support Groups DO exist, but
they are impossible to find or join...