Insane Reality issue #7 - (c)opyright 1995 Immortal Riot               File 002 


% News from the front %

-----------------------

Here's a few quite interesting articles I've typed up for your pleasure. 
First off is the WIRED Feb-95 article about computer viruses written by 
Julian Dibbell (A New York based writer who contributes regulary to the 
Village Voice). After the Wired text a few more "virus-related" articles 
follow.



I'm quite sure there're quite a few typo's and a a lot of other errors 
in the articles because I often write the stuff late on nights, 
not very motivated to get it 100% error-free.



I decided to type the Wired article up even though it was very long, because 
this magazine can go to places Wired cannot, and also for our readers who 
haven't got it.



My comments are between '[* *]',

So now besides the fact that Gheap was called the official Archivist, and 
this article is according to another magazine-editor was filled with standard 
virus hype you also will deal with my silly comments about his writing :-). 


PS. (þ A semi-lame disclamer of sorts þ)



A beta-reader of this article told me I was very bitchy towards the persons 
written about (Tom Ray & Mark Ludwig), if it looks like that, I'm very sorry, 
this was never my intension..  And yeah, some of my comments are believed to 
be nothing but wrong and that is just a result of me not being too well 
informed about the things written about, but acting like a BesserWisser, 
I just couldn't resist adding some of my complaints and such things.. 
Ah well, whatever, nevermind!



DS.



- TU



WIRED FEB '95

=============

What scared you most about getting that virus?

Is it the prospect of witnessing your system's gradual decay, 
one nagging symptom following another until one day the whole thing comes 
to a halt? Is it the self-recrimination, all the useless dwelling on how 
much easier things would have been if only you'd protect yourself, if only 
you'd been more careful about whom you associated with?



[* What scares me the most about getting a virus is that it will trash 
   my HD when I have no backup on things I've been working on for a very 
   long time *]



Or is it not, in fact, something deeper? Could it be that what scares you 
most about the virus is not any particular effect it might have, but simply 
its asserive, alien presence, its intrusive otherness? Inserting itself 
into a complicated choreography of subsystems all designed to serve your 
needs and carry out your will, the virus hews to its own agenda of survival 
and reproduction. Its oblivious self-interest violates the unity of purpose 
that defines your system as yours. The virus just isn't, well, you. Doesn't 
that scare you?



[* Alien presence? :). That's just fucking overdoing it, what if 
   a person doesn't believe in aliens, should he then not believe 
   in computer-viruses either? And what does he mean that "You're the virus?" 
   I don't quite get him.. *]



And does it really matter whether the virus in question is a biological or 
an electonic one? It should, of course. The analogy that gives computer 
viruses their digital analogs an interesting proposition, but it falls 
short in one key respect. Simply put, the only way to full understand the 
phenomenon of autonomously repoducing computer programs is to take into 
account their one essential difference from organic life forms: they are 
products not of nature but of culture, brought forth not by the blind 
workings of a universe indifferent to our aims, but by the conscious effort 
of humang being like ourselves.



[* Well, to me and all people with a minimal intellegence it does really 
   matter if I get an electronic form of AIDS or a biological one. Real 
   life viruses is though an quite an interesting topic. How was AIDS 
   created for example? By the nature or by humans? *]



Why then, after a decade of coexistence with computer viruses, does our 
default response to them remain a mix of bafflement and dread? Can it be 
that we somehow refuse to recognize in them the traces of our fellow 
earthlings' shaping hands and minds? And if we could shake those ands and 
get acquainted with those hands, would their creations scare us any less? 
Those are not idle questions.



[* To me, they're quite idle since I know the answers. I can shake hand with 
   viruswriters and still be afraid of getting my HD wiped with one of 
   their creations. It's not the person one should fear, it's their products. 
   It's not that you are afraid to meet a military-dweeb who designed 
   an A-bomb in a dark valley, but the power of his product *] 


Overcoming our fear of computer viruses may be the most important step we 
can take toward the future of information processing. Someday the Net will 
be the summation of the world's total computing resources. All computers 
will link up into a chaotic digital soup in which everything is connected - 
indirectly or directly - to anything else. This coming Net of distributed 
resources will be tremendously powerful, and tremendously hard to harness 
because of its decentralized nature. It will be an ecology of computing 
machines, and managing it will require an ecological approach. 


[* That did to me sound like one dystopian vision! That is why we have to 
   stop this with our digital-weapons known as viruses and create as much 
   chaos and destruction as we can. *]



Many of the most promising visions of how to coordinate the far-flung 
communication and computing cycles of this emering platfor converge on a 
controversial solution: the use of self-replicators that roam the Net. 
Free-ranging, self-replicating programs, autonomous Net agents, digital 
organisms - whatever they are called, there's and old fashion word for 
them: computer viruses



Today three very different groups of heretics are creating computer 
viruses. They have almost nothing to do with each other. There are 
scientists interested in the abstract behavior of self-replicating codes, 
there are developers interested in harnessing the power of self-replicating 
programs, and there are unnamed renegades of the viruswriting underground. 


[* I guess he classify you, me and most of the viruswriters in the last 
   mentioned group. However, we're named in the meaning that we use aliases. 
   Just maybe he got in contact with a viruswriter known as "The Unknown", 
   but hehe, I don't quite know :) *]



Although they share no common experience, all these heretics respect a 
computer virus fo its irrepressible mobility, for the selfcentered autonomy 
it wrests from a computer enviroment, and for the suprising agility with 
which it explores opportunities and possibilities. In short, virus 
enthusiasts relate to the virus as a fascinating and powerful life form, 
whether for the fertile creation of yet more powerful digital devices, as 
an entity for study in itself, or, in the case of one renegade coder, for 
reckless individual expression.



[* Who is he to say that *all* viruswriter consider a virus to be 
   a powerful lifeform? I don't think so and I doubt many creators 
   that know what a virus really is classify them as such either. *] 


Getting a buzz from the Vx.

--------------------------

One computer virus writer in his early 20s lives on unempolyment checks in 
a white, working-class exurb of New York City. He tends to spend a fair 
amount of his leisure time at the local videogame arcade playing Mortal 
Kombat II, and would prefer that you didn't know his real name. But don't 
let the slacker r‚sum‚ fool you: the only credential this expert needs is 
the pseudonym he goes by in the computer underground: Hellraiser. 


Hellraiser is the founding member of the world-renowned virus-writer's 
group Phalcon/Skism. He is also creator of 40Hex, an electronic zine whose 
lucid programming tips, hair-raising samples of ready-to-run viral code, 
and trash-talking scene reports have done more to inspire the creation of 
viruses in this country than just about anything since Robert Morris Jr.'s 
spectacularly malfunctional worm nearly brought down the Internet. 


[* Perhaps so, but since he's going to ramble on about the world being one 
   digital place he should also mention that 40Hex would've inspired a whole 
   fucking world of digital 'pranksters'. However, inspiration does really 
   vary and I didn't start viruses because I found 40Hex to be a cool zine. 


   However, 40Hex does as good as always include a few ground-breaking 
   viruses or new viral techniques, so I guess in that way 40Hex have and 
   always will supply viruswriter with a few cool ideas.



   The problem with 40Hex and a few other zines is the lack of good commented 
   virus-source code making it very hard to follow and understand the 
   underlying technique the virus in question uses. Not all virus code is 
   structured and obvious. I don't blame the editor of 40Hex for this, but 
   the contributors to them should realize that a zine has very many readers 
   and not all of them are code-geniouses. For example, try following and 
   truely understand the Mirror virus by Bit Addict ex-TridenT published in 
   issue #13. Silence... *]



And as if all this weren't enough, Hellraiser also comes equipped with the 
one accessory no self-respecting expert in this cantankerous field can do 
without - his very own pet definition of computer viruses. Unlike most such 
definitions, Hellraiser's is neither very technical nor very polemical, and 
he doesn't got out of his way to make it known. "Sure," he'll say, with a 
casual shrug, as if tossing you the most obvious fact in the world: 
"Viruses are the electronic form of grafitti."



[* Uh, I don't really know if I've got the definition. How do you define 
   the term 'computer-virus' by the way? Perhaps as "A program that can 
   inserts itself on different mediums on computers from where it can be 
   executed and replicate further"? Or "A program that secludes data and 
   corrupt programs on your computer" (grin)? Ah well, define it however 
   you want, I like Hellraiser's definition, but the work 'grafitti' could 
   as well be exchanged with nearly any word. "Viruses are the electonic 
   form of poetry" for example, how about that? *]



Which would probably seem obvious to you too, if you had Hellraiser's 
personal history. For opon his teenage prime, Hellraiser was also a 
hands-on expert in the more traditional forms of graffiti perfected by New 
York City youth in the 1980s. Going by the handle of Skism, he roamed the 
city streets and train yards with a can of spray paint at the ready and a 
Bronx-bred crew of fellow "writers" as his side, searching out the sweets 
spots in the transit system that would give his tag maximum exposure - the 
subway cars that carried his identity over the rails, the truck trailers 
that hauled it up and down the avenues, and the overpasses that announced 
it to the flow of travelers circulating underneath.



[* I just wonder how the term 'viruswriter' would come to be the choice of 
   word to describe a person *programming* viruses. Maybe Hellraiser 
   actually had something to do with it? *]



In other words, by the time Hellraiser went off to college and developed a 
serious interest in computers, he was already quite cozy with the notion of 
infiltrating other people's technology to spread a little of himself as far 
and wide as possible. So when he discovered one day that his PC had come 
down with a nasty little digital infection, his first thoought was not, as 
it often customary, to curse the "deviant hackers," "sociopaths," and 
"assholes" who had written the program, but to marvel at the possibilities 
this new infiltration technique had opened up.



Street graffiti's ability to scatter tokens of one's identity 
across of an entire metropolis looked provincial in comparison. 
"With viruses," Hellraiser remembers thinking, "you could get your 
name around the world.".



[* Well, dear Hellraiser, even though you're retired I'll have to correct 
   you. Hellraiser is not your name, it's your handle. :-). I wouldn't like 
   real-life-freinds to call me The Unforgiven. *]



He was right. The program that had infected his own computer in the late 
1990, the so called Jerusalem virus, had spread from Italy to Israel to 
North America before finally making its way into the pirated copy of the 
Norton Utilities that brought it to Hellraiser's hard drive. And though 
Jerusalem's author remained uncredited, other programmers' from nearly 
every corner of the globe were pulling off feats of long-distance 
self-aggrandizement that dwarfed anything wirhing the reach of America's 
spray-paint commandos.



A kid who called himself Den Zuk had launched a

virus that was flashing his handle on computer screens all over Europe, the 
US, and South America. Early speculation placed its origin in Venezuela, 
but the virus was eventually tracked to its true sorce in Bangung, 
Indonesia, when a researcher in Iceland guessed that some enigmatic 
characters in the source code were in fact a ham-radio call sign; they made 
concat with the call sign's registrered operator, who immediately copped to 
his authorship of the program.



[* For unknown reasons he didn't mention that the 'researcher' was Fridrik 
   Skulason. But more about that in the "viral-morality" article :-). *] 


Equally far-ranging was the journey of the Joshi virus, which spread from 
India to parts of Africa and on to the rest of the world, popping up every 
January 5th to command computer users to type "Happy Birthday Joshi" if they 
wanted control of their systems back.



[* Kinda neat payload idea, just a bit too obvious :-). Hmm.. one of those 
   days I just might implementing such a routine to activate 960601 and 
   force the user to write "Happy birthday Emma, 18 years today!", else, 
   all their data will be raped..  Well, then atleast they deserve it not 
   congratulating her and stuff.. ! *]



What impressed Hellraiser as much as the vast geographic distances covered 
by viruses, however was their long range over time. After all, a painted 
graffiti tag would only last as long as it took to fade away or be painted 
over, but viruses, it seemed, might replicate forever in the wild. 


[* There's no such thing as forever. Everything that starts also has to come 
   to an end sometime, often also quite brutally. Every nice thing has an 
   end, which means that viruses too, will die. *]



Indeed, the Jerusalem virus had been doing so for three years before Hellraiser 
encounted it, and four year later it remains one of the world's mosts 
commonly reported viruses. Likewise, Den Zuk is still reproducing on 
computers worldwide six years after it first left the island of Java; 
Joshi continues for the fifh year in a row to extort internation birthday 
wishes. Dozens of other viruses from the US, Canada Eastern Europe, Taiwan, 
Australia, Turkey, Malta, and other far-flung locales thrive globally (This 
despite that the antivirus industry spends tens of millions of dollars a 
year to eradicate them).



[* I don't quite know how he got that 'figure' "tens of millions dollars", 
   but it wouldn't suprise me much if John Mcafee had given it to him since 
   it seems a bit too high. *]



Bearing encoded bits of their author's souls - clever jokes, crude graphics, 
friendly greetings, and, of cource, occasionally, malicious intensions 
(though in fact the majority of viruses found in the wild are designed to do 
no damage) - viruses roam the earth in apparent perpetuity. 


[* He's unfortunatly correct when he says that most in the wild viruses doesn't 
   do any harm. Bummer! Why is that by the way? Because they commit suicide 
   when wiping out the HD so it can't replicate further? Well, does this also 
   mean that suicide can be fucking worth it? :) *]



For Hellraiser, steeped as he was in graffiti culture's imperative to "get 
the name across," there was only one possible reponse to this new 
technology of self-projection: he had to get in on the action. But how? 


[* Why not buy an assembler book? That would supply information of which 
   functions there were available when writing programs for DOS? *] 


Virus writing wasn't exactly a standard subject in computer-science 
courses, and even the computer underground - with its loose-knit network of 
bulletin boards, and e-zines proffering instructions in the illicit arts of 
hacking and phone phreaking - wasn't the most dependable source of virus 
lore. Occasionally, a hack and phreak board might offer a small collection 
of cryptic viral source code for brave souls to experiment with, but as far 
as Hellraiser knew, the only system exclusively devoted to viruses at this 
time was a place called the Virus Exchange, operating out of what was then 
the world's epicenter of virus production: post-Communist Bulgaria, where 
the Cold War's endgame had left a lot of overtrained programmers with time 
on their hands and anarchy in their minds.



[* One thing I admire with reporters is their way to combine words to make 
   them sound really neat! "Time on their hands and anarchy in their minds" 
   is an example of this. Sorry I can't do this.. uerm, well not in english 
   anyway! *]



Lacking the money or the phreaking skills to dial in to the Virus Exchange, 
Hellraiser made do with what he did have: a live specimen of the Jerusalem 
virus, replicating furiously inside his desktop system and poised to trash 
ever program file he tried to run on any upcoming Friday the 13th. 
Carfully, Hellraiser extracted all copies of the virus from the computer 
and holed up in his dorm room to examine its workings. He studied it for 
weeks, and then finally, tentatively, he produced a virus of his own. It 
was a shameless hack really, essentially just the Jerusalem code with the 
line "SKISM-1" inserted in place of a few of byte orginal characters. But 
after infecting as many computers as he could and subsequently findings his 
creation enshrined in antivirus literature as the "Skism-1" virus, 
Hellraiser swelled with a pride he would later recall with some amusement: 
"Shit, I thought I was the man back then."



Hooked on that buzz, he dove deeper into his studies, aiming for 
proficiency in DOS assembly language, the formidably austere low-level 
programming dialect in which Jerusalem was written (like the vast majority 
of computer viruses then and now). He quickly acquired the ability to 
produce viruses he could truly say were his, and along with this ability, 
he picked up the beginnings of a rep among New York-area denizens of the 
underground. Gradually, through the hack/phreak (h/p) bulletin-board scene, 
he made contact with other isolated viruswriters - subculture orphans 
compared with the h/p crowd and its Legions of Doom, MODs, Chaos Clubs, and 
other constantly forming and re-forming groups and factions. 


Hellraiser started wondering why he shouldn't put togheter a group of his 
own. Soon enough, the retired graffiti bomber was again running with a 
crew, formally known as Smart Kids Into Sick Methods (Skism for short) and 
dedicated to sharpenings the virus-writing skills of both its members and 
the virophilic pulic at large.



And it was to serve more or less those lofty ends that Skism's electronic 
house journal 40Hex was born. Named for the assembly-language function by 
which viruses copy themselves, the publication hit the board of the Vx 
underground with an infectioness all its own. (Vx, short for virus 
exchange, denotes all boards devoted, like their Bulgarian namesake, to 
virus discussion and traffic in viral source code).



[* As you, I and all viruswriter knows (however not stupid reporters 
   it seems) the function 40h (int21h) means nothing more than "write 
   to file or device". Viruses don't have to use that function to replicate 
   Circus Cluster doesn't, for example. A bit more research about viruses 
   would be nice from reporters trying to describe the scene and viruses, 
   but well.. can't get it all now can we? *]



Its unapologetic bad attitude was a brash wake-up call to the still embrynic 
virus-writers' community. "This is a down and dirty zine [which] gives examples 
on writing viruses and ... contains code that can be compiled to viruses," 
wrote Hellraiser in the introduction file of 40Hex's March 1991 premiere. 
"If you are an antivirus pussy, who is just scared that your hard disk will get 
erased so you have a psychological problem with viruses, erase these files. 
This ain't for you."



The warning scared off no one, of course, least of all alleged pussies of 
the antivirus industry, who took to scoring ever new issue for a peek 
inside the mind of the enemy, getting up close and personal at last with 
the phantoms they'd been battling for years. Not that the life of the virus 
hunter was a lonely one. In fact, the antivirus community was already in 
many ways a more advanced subculture than that of the virus writers, 
complete with local color and a mystique all its own: the industry pioneer 
and media darling John MacAfee was famed for his biddy morning-after 
overestimation by a factor of 10 of the Internet worm's damage; then there 
was those Bulgarians, the notorious and proud Dark Avenger - who signed, 
and even dedicated, his viruses - and debating the burgeoning taxonomy of 
virus species, nervously policing the boundary between the great unwashed 
and those trusthworthy enough to handle "live" specimens, the world of 
antivirus research offered its initiates a thrill somewhere between the 
delightful romance of butterfly collecting and the grim camaraderie of 
working for the National Security Agency.



[* I think the AVers still are more organized than viruswriter's are, and 
   I find atleast two good reasons why this is the case. First of all I 
   think viruswriting should be chaotic rather than organized. We do it 
   because we like it, not because we have to. Then, it's about economical 
   things as well. They've to be very organized to manage collecting/detecting/ 
   updating their product so they can sell it. If they weren't organized, 
   they never would have managed the hard competition to battle against 
   viruswriters and other AV-software companies.



   However viruswriters can be organized in some way meaning that we have 
   regular contacts via email, IRC, mail networks and all that. Still 
   we haven't decided any specific time/date for "mass-meetings". If we 
   did, well, we'd get more organized, but the charm would dissapear 
   rather fast I figured. So for short: Viruswriter's are not isolated, 
   but not very organized. *]



In comparison, virus writing - while obviously not without its kicks - 
lacked community. But in the months and years following 40Hex's d‚but, that 
began to change. The previosly inchoate and virtually invisible 
virus-writing underground at last coalesced and shifted into a high gear. 
Various groupds proliferated and crossbred: Skism merged with another New 
York posse called Phalcon to form Phalcon/Skism supergroup, while the 
pan-European TridenT team and the Canadian-Australian-Swiss-Taiwanese- 
multinational NuKE crew qucily rose to challenge Phalcon/Skism's prestige 
and programming skills.



[* The member of TridenT were *all* from The Netherlands. Just as our members 
   only are from Sweden. (Sorry Coke :)). *]



Zines multiplied, too. NuKE's Info Journal and West Coast virus writer Urnst 
Kouch's Crypt Newsletter challenged 40Hex's hegemony, as did the number of 
so-called Vx bulletin board that rocketed from a handful worldwide to rough 
estimates of as many as 200 at present.



[* Yeah, and VLAD came up, new groups (like Genesis) are forming, new zines 
   are being released and it's still an ongoing process we see today in the 
   vx-community. *]



Amid all the rapid groth it helped set in motion, 40Hex has kept pace. After 
the first raucous issues, Hellraiser handed over the editorial reigns to 
Phalcon's designated archivist, Garbage Heap, who has steadily increased 
the circulationof the zine while slowly steering it toward something 
suspiciously like respectability. Available now in a crisp, desktop-published 
paper edition as well as good old-fashioned e-text, today's 40Hex still brims 
with the gnarliest of viral code and remains a feisty defender of the right 
to create and publish viruses. But it frowns on anyone who looses viruses in 
the wild and is more likely to solicit guest editorials from antivirus types 
than to hurl obscenities at them.



[* Well, I guess all vx-zine editor's defend the right to create and publish 
   information of any kind, else it would be quite odd for the editor 
   in question doing things he doesn't believe in. I believe in information 
   freedom and consider that swedish law which forbids censoring cool. *] 


The young hellion who founded the zine would probably not approve - that 
is, if the same young hellion were still around to say anthing about it. But 
he isn't. Not really. Hellraiser has undergone some changes of his own 
lately. Once quite cavalier about releaseing viruses that intentionally 
deleted files or otherwise "fucked people's shit up" (after all, what 
better way to make your tag linger on in their memory?), he eventually 
decided that creating destructive programs just gave virus writing a bad 
name and resolved thenceforth to produce viruses with more or less benign 
payloads only. And then one day, not too long ago and without much fanfare, 
he simply called it quits. Partly, he was starting to chafe at the limited 
range of programming challenges invovled in virus creation, he says, but 
more to the point, his evolving young world view had somehow gotten 
infected by a creeping respect for the right of others to control what goes 
into their own digital back yards. Destructive payload or no destructive 
payload, Hellraiser reached the conclusion that it was just plain "wrong to 
'pollute' other people's system with viral garbage."



[* Maybe it's wrong to do it, but you have to break a few egg's to make 
   an omellet‚ so, who really gives a shit? *]



Which isn't to say he's gone over to the ranks of his old antivirus 
nemeses. Hardly. He's still too tight with all his Phalcon/Skism homeboys 
for that. Even if he weren't, he's been a virus writer for too long to feel 
comfortable with the easy demonizations that are the stock in trade of 
antivirus rhetoric. For the rest of us, of course, it's easy enough to 
accept the standard caricature of the underground virus writer as a 
low-grade sociopath. After all, what else but antisocial perversity could 
lead someone to produce a mechanism we encounter principally as we 
contamination in the digital enviroment, as noise on the line? 


[* Hm, that caricature doesn't fit on other reporters. Other people would 
   often describe us such as "intelligent young male with splitted parents 
   who seeks his identity in another person - the viruswriter. A remorseless 
   youth who's thrust repededly has been broken and abused and who now are 
   out there seeking respect from whoever gives it. Isolated from real life 
   and real friends, the viruswriter is only motivated by hate who's mislead 
   creativity results in viruswriting."



   Hahhaha! I don't know if I like his or my description the most, but if 
   I am refered to as as low-grade sociopaths or social-failure, 
   I don't care, since both aren't the truth. However, it's fun to 
   read what they think, and sit on the facts yourself.. *] 


   (I love TU's spelling mistakes, I gives his arguments a slightly 
    dirty twist ;)) -rb



Yet Hellraiser's career path - from graffiti writing to virus writing and 
beyond - demands a more complicated understanding of the virus phenomenon. 
It asks us to recognize that viruses, like graffiti, are just as much 
signal as noise - that they are in fact an irreducible confusion of the 
two. As hellraiser came to recognize, the noisiness of viruses is built in 
- they are by definition information that subverts control. But as the 
subculture Hellraiser helped build will always remember, ever virus turned 
out into the computer wilds - like ever tag sprayed onto the hard urban 
landscape - is also a carrier for the purest and strongest signal a human 
being can send. "Remember my name," the virus says, which - after all - is 
another way of saying: "I'm alive.".



[* I can send a lot of stronger signals, for example do remember when 
   you said "I love you" and really meant it for the very first time? That's 
   *a lot* stronger line, and could of course also be expressed in a virus. 


   What we express in a virus is very different, but I've no idea what I 
   personally have or tried to express in a different viruses. Look beyond 
   the text included in a virus and look at the code-structure. Is is a 
   signal if you include some destruction code? That could to some of us 
   mean "Don't mess with me", "leave me alone!", "HATE!", or it might as 
   well mean nothing at all.



   And what if a destructive routine activates in a very technical way, or 
   is itself very cleverly written? Can that say something about the person 
   writing it? Does it mean that the writer of it does express his revenge 
   and feelings in a way that he understand, but not the victims? Can this 
   reflect how the person deals with his own in-real-life conflicts? 


   Anyhow, saying that a virus only mean "I'm alive" is what gays would 
   describe as "butt"-close-minded. It can mean anything like "See what I 
   can do!" or it might as well mean nothing at all.



   For me, viruses is one way to express something and even if I don't know 
   exactly what I'm trying to express, I'm sure there's something ;). But 
   on the other side, psychologist always say you're trying to express 
   something whatever you're doing. If you're listening to some kind of 
   music, wearing some kind of clothes, they'd say it mean something. 


   The problem with this is that the very same thing means different to 
   different persons. And because of this fact one just can that say something 
   mean one single thing. If you do, you're nothing but wrong. *] 


This is about as far as most discussions of virus writing get: ignorant 
kids trashing about in codes, creating horrible simple but efficient 
digital bombs. And even if you take a very generous view what the 
underground virus writers are inadvertently creating new forms of life, the 
discussion of beneficial viruses would have to stop here if it weren't for 
folks like Dr.Mark A. Ludwig.



[* Well, describing something as big as the virus-community in a few pages, 
   and saying that it is as far it can get does really makes me laugh. If 
   you hadn't been involved with the virus-scene and wanted to know everything 
   about it, would the above stuff written by Julian written be enough? Of 
   course not! Silly guy that reporter :)



   And what comments can he expect by calling *all* virus writers ignorant 
   kids? I'm neither ignorant nor a kid, still I write viruses. By definition, 
   you're over no kid if you're over 18 (like most virus writers today are), 
   but an adult. When I started to write viruses, I was over 18. *] 


The Mutator in the desert

-------------------------

Mark Ludwig lives in a desert, and compared to Hellraiser's background, seems 
to hail from an entirely different planet. But Ludwig, too, is chasing the 
elusive nature of computer viruses.



A married man with three young children, Ludwig lives in Tucson, Arizone, 
where barrens of sand and sun and saguaro cactus shimmer not too far beyond 
the sump-colled confines of his home. But the desert where he wanders is 
someplace else entirly: it's the lonely intellectual wilderness reserved 
for those who practise science on the fringe, outside the cozy realms of 
institutional affiliation, proffesional consensus, or methodological 
decorum.



He doesn't have to be there. With his PhD in physics from the University of 
Arizone (and his prior course work at Cal Tech and MIT), Ludwig could 
easily return to the fold of respectable reserchers if he chose. All he'd 
have to do is let go of his somewhat obsessive scholarly pursuit of the 
wild computer virus, and pick a slighly more conventional object of study. 
Or maybe just pursue his present subject with a little more sober attention 
to devising antivirus countermeasures and a lot of fleeful fascination with 
viruses in and of themselves. Or maybe justs tone down the florid 
libertarion rhetoric and sweeping philosophical claims in which he tends to 
cauch his otherwise gruellingly meticulous analyses of viral performance 
and technique.



Really, it wouldn't take much. But Ludwig isn't likely to do any of these 
things, because he actually seems to prefer the hardshops of the fring to 
the rewards of a life of techno-scientif inside.



He didn't always. "Once I was a scientist of scientists," writes Ludwig in 
the introduction to his latest self-published treatise, Computer Viruses, 
Artificial Life, and Evolution." Born in the age of Sputnik, and raised in 
the home of a chemist, I was enthralled with science as a child. If I 
wasn't dissolving pennies in acid, I was winding an electromagnet, or 
playing with a power transistor, or doing a cryogenics experiment - like 
freezing ants - with liquid propange."



[* Geez, what a funny childhood Mark had! (not!) Well, no wonder he turned 
   out (in general terms) weird. Well, even though the "educational 
   losses" I don't regret spending my childhood as a normal kid playing 
   soccer, ice-hockey going skateboard, and being way out of the digital 
   world we're heading for today.... *]



Eager to work his way into the company of "the great men of science" and 
join their noble quest for objective Truth (he'd read about it in textbooks), 
Ludwig rushed through his undergraduate work at MIT in two years, then plunged 
into his graduate course of studies with equal enthusiasm. Bye the time he get 
his doctorate, however, he'd seen enough of the political infighting and blind 
prejudice that structure the real work of contemporary scientific 
investigation to sour the romance permanently. Dillusioned, he dropped out of 
the hard-sci grind and into a job working with computers, a field that at 
leasts provided some of the wide-open pioneering spirit that the textbook 
histories of science had promised, even if it moved him further from pure 
science's intimacy with the mysteries of nature.



But not long after that, around 1988, he started picking up reports of 
contagious programs running loose among the machines he now had his living 
from, and the course of his life changed yet again. for Ludwig, viruses 
came bearing the same mind-expanding message-in-a-bottle they would not 
much later be bringing to Hellraiser. Except that Ludwig decoded the 
messages a little differently. Where Hellraiser heard the signal 
"I'm alive" coming from the viruses's creator, Ludwig understood the 
message as coming directly from the virus itself. Viruses behaved like 
living things: self-reproducing and autonomous. Might we not understand 
life a little better, he wondered, if we can create something similar, and 
study it, and try to understand it?



[* First of all, we might understand more of life as we study life, but 
   since viruses as we know them today is no living organism, it's pointless 
   to study viruses for that purposes.



   And in my opinion, life is just too damn complex to understand. Finding 
   a solution to everything is doomed to fail. Everyone with a decent 
   (as would refer to as 'Strm und Drang') life will probably agree me. 
   Thinking about things you'd really want to understand, but all it does 
   is make you more confused.



   You're not suppose to understand everything. In that case, human's are 
   very limited, and frankly said, I don't quite understand the meaning 
   with this insane chase of finding facts beautiful on paper, but 
   in reality, nothing but empty words.



   Facts wouldn't make us more sophisticated, what could make us more 
   knowledge-armed would be if we accepted things as parts of life which 
   somehow just happends and accept it. Or maybe we would be more 
   sophisticated if we knew all facts of life, but to which price? 


   What by the way would understanding life better result in? Could that 
   give us a definition to what the meaning of life is? I think not since it 
   it's more of an opinion and does indeed vary more  from person to person 
   than a fact does.



   Erm, but on the other side, understanding everything thus being by 
   by some people's definition God could though be quite cool. Or just 
   maybe, knowledge isn't the answer, but accepting that you don't 
   know everything?



   Right now, I have no clue what I'm trying to say, and since I can't write 
   down any answers here either, just let's go on. However, if this kind of 
   discussions does interest you call our board for private/open discussions 
   and I'm quite sure me and Redback will reply upon everything written! *] 


   (yeah, we can sometimes get real deep :P) -rb



The mysteries of nature, in other words, now loomed closer than ever - right 
there on the wide-open technological frontier to which he'd fled from the 
wreckage of his scientific aspirations - and Ludwig couldn't resist the 
temptation to get questing after them once more.



His initial attempts to acquire specimens to obverve were frustating. 
Today's teeming ecology of one-stop Vx trading posts didn't exist. When 
Ludwig approached the antivirus community for access to its shared research 
collections, he found himself shut out: then as for now, the A-V crowd 
refused to release captured virus code to anyone outside a trusted inner 
circle.



[* Yeah, the AVers fucking never share anything. Not even what they would 
   consider a respected highly educated scientist. Ah well, this also mean 
   that if you want something - there is different ways of getting it. That 
   itself is quite interesting, so just be flexible and if your first 
   idea doesn't come true, keep on trying until the goal is achieved! 
   (Words of wizdome,That'll be $5US please!) *]



So, true to his style, Ludwig decided to go it alone. He set up a 
BBS, announced a bounty of US$25 for every viruses uploaded, and sat back 
awhile the code rolled in. After building up a representative cross section 
of the wild virus population, he set about examining his haul, and within a 
few month his research bore its first fruit: The Little Black Book of 
Viruses, a technical primer on the essentials of virus writing, complete 
with scrupulously annotanted source code for four viruses programs of his 
own creation.



[* There was some rumours that Mark Ludwig didn't write all of the code 
   he published, is that true? Frankly said, I don't know any of this 
   myself, so I just typed it up for no meaning whatsoever :) My best 
   guess is that he wrote it himself.. *]



The Little Black Book made something of a name for Ludwig, but it wasn't 
an especially pretty one. Though the tutorial viruses were pointedly 
nondestructive and came surrounded by warnings against their misuse and 
instructions on how to keep them from getting loose, the book was roundly 
condemned as an incitement to digital vandalism. In the three years of 
steady sales since The Little Black's original publication in 1991, various 
mainstream computer magazines has summarily dropped Ludwig's advertisment 
for the book a inappropiate subject matter for their audiences. 


[* It's exactly what they're doing with sex-ads in Sweden. I find this to 
   be complete wrong (not that I'm a buyer of sex-products/movies or so). 
   If there is a market for something and people want to have something, 
   who are then to say they can't have it? What's wrong with giving people 
   what they want if it doesn't harm the surrounding people? 


   Another example is drugs. If people really wants to try out 
   how drugs affect them, why shouldn't they be allowed to do so? 
   Because it's dangerous? Well, pot of any kind is not dangerous and 
   that's a fact. I'm not saying that drugs which make people aggressive 
   should be legal and people shouldn't use that kind of dope if that means 
   harming other people. But where's the harm? I say there is none. 


   However, if we take the US of A as an example of fucked-up drug politics, 
   we see that drugs makes harm, indeed. Then let us ask the question why. 
   Is it not, in fact that people can get rich by selling drugs and try to 
   make other people use dangerous drugs because they want to get rich? Of 
   course it's in the seller's best interest to see that people get 
   addicted to an expensive drug, since it would help him earn more 
   money that way.



   (That's why some sellers lace their drugs with a highly addictive 
    drugs and chemicals) -rb



   Then addicted people would do anything (like stealing/robbery, etc) to get 
   money to buy more drugs. Now, is that the fault of the drug or fault of 
   laws forbidding them?



   If drugs were legal, and there would be no economical profit in selling 
   drugs, there would be no harm either. However, some 'drugs' are legal 
   in (nearly?) all countries.An ordinary ciggarette contains nicotine 
   which is a drug for sure. It's addictive and beside that it's addictive, 
   it's also dangerous to smoke.



   Pot is not addictive since it contain no nicotine and it doesn't do any 
   harm to the individual either. It won't make people agressive so why 
   forbid it? Is it a matter of governmental principle or is it just plain 
   dumbness?



   (what are you saying man? sure it's addictive) -rb



   Okay, before I continue with Mark Ludwig, I want to state that I'm 
   against heavy-drugs that harm the individual who are using it, but still 
   I think it's up to him if he want to destroy himself. In the question about 
   soft-drugs (as pot), I say "legalize it!" because it's not a question of 
   good or bad, it's a question of freedom. Forbidding something never 
   helps I think and isn't personal freedom very important? 


   As conclusion: There is no good in letting other people control what 
   we should and shouldn't do, think or use. If someone is interested in 
   viruses, don't take that away from the person with stupid laws. If 
   someone wants to buy a porno-movie, why stop him? If someone want to 
   blow a joint once in a while, why won't you let him? *] 


And when the book was recently released in France (as Naissance d'un Virus 
"Birth of a Virus"), it publisher there were immediately slapped with a 
legal injunction against distributing it with the infectious source code 
intact.



[* This is really upsetting me. Trying to control information is really 
   fucking low. Don't think I've to comment anything more about this since you 
   agree me and Mark on this one :) *]



But Ludwig has remained undaunted in the face of the world's virophobia. If 
anything vehemence has only sharpened his determination to share the wealth 
of his knowledge. "People think of viruses as an invasion from Mars," he 
says, "and that hurts research into these things. My aim is to change 
people's attitudes, to cut down some of the hear."



[* One of my aim with viruses is that they should replicate and cause 
   other people some harm. People shouldn't rely totally upon computers 
   and at the same time be aware of how unsecure the so-called information 
   society really is. The best method of teaching people this is not 
   to tell them what could happen, it's to make it happen. That is one 
   of the main difference between an anti-virus researcher and 
   viruswriter. Cruel or not? I don't give a fuck. *]



To that end he has established an annual internation virus-writing 
competition, flying cheerfully in the face of the "swarming hordes of 
antivirus developers." (One year's contest rewarded the smallest functional 
DOS virus submitted.)



[* Well, the smallest functional DOS-virus won't most likely disturb the 
   AV crowd since it won't replicate for shits. Maybe the most complex, 
   hard-to-find/remove, virulent virus competition should, but I don't quite 
   Mark has the ability to judge the incoming viruses. *]



Ludwig also publishes a newsletter now, Computer Virus Developments Quarterly, 
in which he mingles detailed technical discussion of viral code with rants 
against the tyrannical tendencies of American government the moral bankruptcy 
of contemporary Western culture, and (last but not least) the evils of 
repressing detailed technical discussion of viral code. Occasionally he even 
gets a sign that the general public is starting to come around to his pro- 
knowledge agenda: after five month of wrangling its way through the French 
courts, for instance, the suit against Naissance d£n Virus was finally thrown 
out by a tribunal arguing, as Ludwig proudly reports, that "trying this case 
was like putting Galileo on trial again."



[* What I figured of that text is that Mark won the case. Furthermore, I 
   also agree with Mark that the moral in today's society is pretty low. 
   Virus-writing is however not a dilemma of morality.. *] 


Yet amid all of Ludwig's busy agitation in defense of viruses, what ever 
became of the intellectual mysteries that first drew his attention to them? 
His pleasure at being compared to Galileo, the archetype of the politically 
incorrect scientists, certainly suggests that he never lost his sense of 
scientific mission. But the proof of Ludwig's abiding interest in viruses 
as tools of natural philosophy lies in his sequel to the Little Black Book: 
the aforementioned Computer Viruses, Artificial Life, and Evolution. 
Published in 1993, the book is a dense and daunting 373 pages' worth of 
charts, differential equations, and tightly reasoned arguments in support 
of Ludwig's intuition that self-reproducing computer code bears deep 
lessons about the workings of life.



As the title's nod to the fashionable new scientific dicipline of 
artificial life makes plain, however, Ludwig is clearly aware that other 
reserchers, backed by the imprimatur of Official Science, have been 
building on the very same intution for some time now. The first two volumes 
of the Santa Fe Institue's Proceeding on Artificial Life published in 1989 
and 1992 devote several papers to the idea of computer viruses as synthetic 
life. But taking the idea further, Ludwig argues that computer viruses, 
unlike such other forms of artificial life as cellular automata, mobots, or 
genetic programming, are the only form of artificial life not based by the 
hope of their creators. Because computer viruses must exist in an 
inviroment (DOS in particular) that was designed without any thought of the 
digital organism that might come to inhabit it, they are free from any 
accusation that the enviroment's "physics" were written to support the 
emergence of their lifelike behavior. Or to put it more bluntly, feral 
viral ecologies (versus the controlled experiments in university labs) 
represents the only known simulation of life that does not implicitly (and 
quite unscientifically) build God into the system.



[* Now Julian is saying that a computer virus in the wild is God or did 
   I confused his message? If he did, I have no clue how he come to that 
   conclusion. Religious people claim that God created everything and well, 
   what did a virus create? Data-corruption? Infected files? AV-people? 
   A neat hobby? A lifestyle? High Phonebills, et cetera? Well.. in most 
   people's eye something bad for sure! Does this mean that Julian thinks 
   God has only created evil things? Haha! There I got his words really 
   twisted :), something I just love.. ;), hehe. *]



Having carefully constructed this ambitious claim, Ludwig proceeds to test 
drive in straight into the heart of biology's most vexing questions: How 
did life get here in the first place? How did the staggering diversity of 
life forms that exist today come to be? He sics viruses on the theory of 
evolution itself, in other words, sending them in to illuminate with their 
logical simplicity the still murky depths of Darwin's grand hypothesis. 
It's bold move, but a puzzling on at first glance. Although the viruses 
found in the wild may exhibit a wide range of lifelike features, they've 
never been known, after all, to evolve.



[* A virus probably wouldn't evolve either. It's just do the same thing 
   in the same matter over and over again. People have always been thinking 
   of how everything once was created and because we can't find a logical 
   answer we try with unlogical guesses. For example, we say that there is 
   a good person known as God that created everything. Now if God actually 
   had created the whole fucking universe who created him? Well, I could 
   quite easily write four pages with questions that noone can answer 
   conserning religion, but since this is an article about viruses I rather 
   not.. *]



Or have they? Not too long after the first virus was written, the first 
antivirus program was written as a countermeasure. Once anti-virus software 
was introduced into the cybernetic ecology, viruses and the programs that 
stalk them have been driving each other to increasing levels of 
sophistication. This is nothing less than the common coevolutionary arms 
race that arises between predators and prey in organic ecosystems. 


[* Well, then it's not the same virus that has evolved. Today we see 
   more complex viruses than we did 1987, but the same virus written 
   in 1987 stil perform exactly the same thing in the same way it did 
   then. It didn't envolve, people writing viruses did. *] 


Step one in this quasi-Darwinian dance took place when security-minded 
programmers developed what has since become the standard defense against 
viruses for most PC owners - scanning software that looks for telltale code 
fragments of known viruses (often some scrap of grafitti-esque text) and 
alerts the user when it finds any. In time, virus hackers responded by 
wrapping their programs in a blanket of encryption imrenetrable to 
scanners. But since the built-in subroutines that decryp the program for 
execution cannot themself be enciphered, antivirus programmers simply 
retooled their scanners to look for the decryption code. Later, in step 
two, the legendary Bulgarian writer Dark Avenger came up with a clever 
innovation known as mutating, or polymorphic, virus. A mutating virus 
randomly reorganizes its decryption algorithm every time it replicates to 
outsmart the policing of the scanner. In step three, antivirus engineers 
devised "heuristic" scanners, built to sniff out all but aln insignificant 
percentage of a virus' mutants through educated pattern recognition. 


[* Personally, I liked this chapter but of course I have a few things to 
   nag on. He described what he refers as the virus 'evolution' a bit 
   too simplistic, mainly because he didn't have followed the scene during 
   the last years? However, Dark Avenger didn't invent the polymorphic 
   technique, when the MtE was released there was already existing 
   polymorphic viruses out there (Mark Washburn series of viruses is a 
   perfect example), but Dark Avenger wrote one of the the first truely 
   advanced polymorphic engines and got a lot of attention. Around the same 
   time (when MtE was made public), there was also another polymorphic engine 
   available for debuggers included in the "Slovakian" virus (v 4.0 being the 
   lastest I reckon).



   Also note that a polymorphic engine won't have to mutate every time the 
   virus is infecting a file. A slow polymorphic virus can for example change 
   the en/de-cryption strategies after every reboot. The benefits is obvious, 
   then how can the AVers make goat-files to test all known decryption- 
   routines? Well, they're problem solvers and might have figured out some 
   smart solution, but it's still tricky, and take a lot of more effort. *] 


Surveying the fossil record of this game, Ludwig found himself pondering a 
logical next move: what if someone were not to develop a strain of 
polymorphs with a genetic memory, so that rather than completely 
reshuffling their structure with every generation, the few mutants that 
escape discovery by heuristics could pass their undetectable code on to 
their offspring?



[* I havn't seen Marks engine myself and couldn't judge it either since 
   I don't think I qualify to comment how good an engine is. My point is 
   though that if a virus with polymorphic encryption proves to be very 
   hard for decent AV-products (TBAV, AVP, F-prot) to detect then it's 
   good. If it's impossible to detect, or crack, then it's as good as 
   perfect. *]



The prospect of virus populations able to autonomously build up immunity to 
any scanning techniques thrown at them thoroughly depressed antivirus 
programmers.



[* I think AVers just love the challenge to break a hard-ass polymorphic 
   engine and other difficult challenges, for example, heuristics. Wouldn't 
   it please them if they could detect and remove a virus before they had 
   seen it? I think so..



   They see however no technical challenge in finding/removing a normal 
   virus, but maybe they're proud to detect/remove thousands of them in 
   one product in a short amount of time..



   My best guess is that they're not depressed, but pleased once the 
   challenge is taken. *]



To Ludwig, however, the possibility proved too intriguing to 
wait around for some random underground hacker to realize it, and he 
resolved to do the job himself. The result: Ludwig's "Darwinian Genetic 
Mutation Engine," a programming utility that turns any normal DOS virus 
into a souped-up, genetically evolving polymorph, complete with an option 
for sexual gene-swapping between individuals that come into contact in the 
wild.



[* It wouldn't be a random 'hacker' to write a new kind of polymorphic 
   engine. It would be a very skilled (and probably also famous) one. 


   However, I have no clue whatsoever what he means with a evolving 
   polymorpic sexual thing. Does Mark think the engine should learn itself 
   which variants a scanning-software could detect and not use them anymore, 
   but rather build a new encryption/decryption routine which couldn't be 
   detected? Well, good luck.... *]



Curious hackers can find the Darwinian Geneticc Mutation Engine's 
complete source code in the pages Computer Viruses, Artificial Life, and 
Evolution along with detailed experimental results demonstrating the 
ability of Darwinian Genetic Mutation Engine-enhanced viruses to run rings 
around existing scanners.



[* Well, it's not really worth to make an engine that is detected before 
   it's released. A virus goal is to spread and if you're spreading a 
   detected virus, people will detect/remove and warn other user for it. 
   A detectable virus won't most likely spread. Ofcourse Mark is no 
   different, he also wants to write undetectable code. *] 


But the program's deeper significance, of course,

lies in its potention to transform viruses' heretofore hacker-driven 
pseudo-evolution into something vary like the real thing: a finely tuned 
interaction of variety and natural selection that allows the enviroment 
itself to shape the internal code of the organisms dwelling in it. 


The Darwinian Genetic Mutation Engine is all Ludwig needs, in other words, 
to prove viruses capable of meaningful evolution, and incidentally, test 
Darwin's theory. And it's no suprise perhaps, given Ludwig's hard-earned 
distrust of anything smacking of intellectual orthodoxy, that he has found 
that Darwin's venerable theory fails the test.



[* Ofcourse it would fail with what he expected from it. An engine isn't 
   self-learning. It won't evolve. It won't change the internal code- 
   structure. By studying his own code, he would've realized this. *] 


Running his beloved viruses through assorted experimental hoops and mazes, 
Ludwig followed them to the conclusion that Darwinian evolutionary mechanism 
alone are just not mathematically fertile enough to have created and shaped 
life as we know it. This is a well-worn scientific heresy, of course, but 
it's not without its small but respectable following within the ivory 
walls Ludwig so proudly dismisses.



[* An engine is a encryption-utility. Not a real-life generator :-). *] 


To be fair, though, Ludwig is not asking to be ranked among his boyhood 
heroes - those scientific greats whose unique insights clear broar new 
vistas of understanding in a single bound. All he wants from the rest of 
the world is a modicum of respect for the wild computer virus as a 
legitimate subject of scientific investigation. Or at least acknowledgment 
that this enduringly lifelike wonder could be useful if we but understood 
it, rather than the casting of it as the ultimate technological taboo. 


[* To some parts, I do agree Mark. Viruswriting should *not* be taboo. 
   No information should be classified taboo. However, if viruses need 
   to be scientifically studied to understand life better or not is really 
   nothing I really care about. I think I disagree him concerning this 
   though. *]



Ludwig managed a remarable intellectual shift. He elevated the computer 
virus from the digital equivalent of a can of spray paint to an object 
capable of perhaps infinite variations and almost lifelike behavior. 


[* No, he didn't. The reporter just made a stupid metaphor. A virus 
   is just another computer program with the ability to spread. It's neither 
   a spraycan nor a lifeform. *]



He transformed a tool of vandals into a field of scientific study by 
emphasizing a computer virus' biological affinity. But by the time Ludwig 
began publishing, the computer virus was already well on its way from the 
fringes of science to the seat of honor at research symposiums. 


[* Now, he's calling us vandals. A person who writes computer viruses for 
   the pure challenge of inventing and implementing new code techniques 
   isn't vandalism. People who deliberate destroy data with the help of 
   computer-viruses may be, but that's definitly a minority among us. *] 


Booting up the Cambrian explosion

---------------------------------

"I'll be out at my place in the jungle over the weekend", said the message, 
posted in May 1994 from an abscure Internet site in Central America, "so 
I'll be out of e-mail contact till Monday."



And just like that, University of Delaware ecologist Tom Ray (now visiting 
scholar at the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International 
in Kyoto, Japan) disappeared once more into the rain forest of Costa Rica, 
leaving behind the clean conveniences of the digital world of an organic 
riot of plants and animal life. As promised, though, he would be back. 
Ray's passion for the unkempt splendor of the jungle has remained unabated 
after nearly two decades of intermittent research there, but in the last 
few years, it's the digital world that has claimed his closest attentions. 
Since late 1989, Ray has done his most important field-work seated in front 
of a computer, observing the busy fruits of an activity that has come to 
define his career: he breeds viruses.



[* I also breed viruses when I'm infected. The flue spread that way for 
   example if you breathe on another person. Then the person might as well 
   be infected :-). Hmmmm, what a power you'd have if you could breathe on 
   a computer and only by that, infecting it ;). *]



Or to put it more precisely, he breeds worms, since that's stickler's term 
for software that is both self-reproducing and able to execute its code 
independent of any host program.



[* True, but does his worms infects programs by inserting code into them, or 
   does his worms only travel on their own? *]



Ray convinced that his programs are as good as alive, calls them simply 
"organisms", or "creatures." Whatever they are, though, he's been breeding 
quite a lot of them. He's been breeding them with the full support of his 
university employers, with the financial backing of major corporations, and 
with the steadily growing curiosity and respect of fellow researchers in the 
field of both biology and computer science. And if all goes according to plan, 
he will keep on breeding them until he has achived a goal far more adventurous 
than anything yet attempted by other virus programmers - infusing the vast 
unused spaces of the global computer networks with a roiling digital ecology 
as complex, as fascinating, and ultimately as beneficial to humankind as the 
rain forest that he has long sought to protect and understand. 


[* Huh? If Mark had big dreams, they're nothing compared to this guy! *] 


In short, by infecting the Net with self-replicating code, Ray aims to turn 
into a jungle. He didn't start out so ambitious. In the beginning there was 
just a lone drive of a Toshiba laptop to populate, one tiny digital gern to 
do it with, and a hunch Ray had been kicking around for a decade or so to 
spur him on. The hunch was that experiments with self-replicating programs 
(Roy had first heard about them as a Harvard undergrand in the late '70s) 
might add some theoretical rigor to eco-science's essentially anecdotal 
attempts at explaining the abstract processes that gave rise to the complex 
interspecies relationships he had observed in the field. "I was 
frustrated," he would later tell a group of collegues, "because I didn't 
want to study the products of evolution - vines and ants and butterflies. I 
wanted to study evolution itself."



[* To study evolution would be quite interesting thing to do, don't 
   you think? To find out all answers about the evolution is though kinda 
   hard, if not impossible.. *]



In this Ray's attraction to self-reproducing programs differed little from 
that of Mark Ludwig (who in fact was not unfamiliar with Ray's work by the 
time he set out to write his magnus opus on computer viruses and 
evolution). Unlike Ludwig, however, Ray felt neither philosophically 
obliged nor ethically disposed to work with viruses able to thrive in 
already existing computer enviroments. Not that he never considered the 
option. In fact, his initial plan was to set mutating machine-language 
organisms loose in a single computer and watch their evolution as they 
competed against one another for direct access to the computer's core 
memory, a strategy that might have evolved viruses superbly adapted to any 
system based on the same instruction set as the original petri chip. But 
Ray soon scrapped this idea - the risk of accidentally releasing his 
specimens into the wild seemed too great. Instead, he decided, he would 
evolve his organism inside a virtual computer, modeled inside a real one in 
much the same way some operating systems today can model working emulations 
of other OSes allowing DOS programs (for instance) to run in a Macintosh 
enviroment. The difference, in Ray's scheme, was that his simulated system 
would be the only enviroment of its kind; thus, any program that escaped 
into other computers would find itself a fish out of water, unable to 
function anywhere but in its birthplace.



While the security benefits of this approach were obvious, its contribution 
to the scientific effectiveness of the experiment was even more 
significant: now that Ray was working with an imaginary computer, he was 
free to shape the system's design to create an enviroment more hospitable 
to life: And there was one key change to be made in that regard, for as Ray 
had come to recognize (and Ludwig would later set down in hard math), 
today's digital enviroments simply weren't build with mutant programs in 
mind. Typical operating systems might let a program randomly move some of 
its algorithm around with impunity (as the polymorphic viruses do), but at 
the fine-grained level of individual bit-flipping most closely analogous to 
genetic variation, even a single chanse alteration almost always results in 
a system-crashing bug. Nature's tolerance of random code revisions is much 
greater, and if Ray wanted a more "natural" computer, then one way to get 
there would be to give an instruction set in which nearly any sequence of 
bits would make some kind of sense to the system's virtual CPU. 


[* Why wouldn't he just write his own Operating System called something 
   like VOS. "Viral-Operating-System", ofcos. *]



So he gave it that instruction. He also equpped his phantom computer with a 
death function, a "Reaper," which would terminate any individual program 
sooner or later - but would always get to the oldest or most error-prone 
program first. Thus primed to carry out the requisite natural selection, 
Ray's digital ecosphrere was nearly complete. He called it Tierra (Spanish 
for "earth") and started preparing the final touch: an inhabitant. Later 
dubbed "the Ancestor," it was the first worm Tom Ray ever created - an 
80-byte-long-self-replicating machine written in Tierra's quirky assembly 
language - and as it happens, it was also the last. Once loosed into the 
Tierra enviroment installed on Ray's laptop, the creature's offspring 
quickly spread to the new world's every corner, within minutes displaying 
the evolutionary transformations that would "write" Ray's organism from then 
on.



A 79-byte variation appeared, rapidly displacing its slightly clunkier 
predecessors, then smaller descendants followed - a 45-byte, a 51, 
eventually even a 22 - entering a taxonomy that would grow to accommondate 
hundreds of subspecies as Ray played with Tierra in the month and years to 
follow.



[* I don't quite know if his 80-byte program is a virus or a worm, but 
   to me, it sounds like a cheap overwriting virus. Also consider the 
   above named file-sizes. A 45-byte long virus is known to exist, and if 
   I'm not wrong it was written by TridenT years and years back (Actually, 
   the code was only 29 bytes, the rest was text). Memory Lapse of P/S 
   wrote a 22 byte infector and what Julian refers as evolution, I refer 
   as optimization (or functionality crippeling).



The swifts and drastic size repoductions of those first runs 
startled Ray, but even more remarkable were the survival strategies these 
variants encoded. The 45- and 51-byte creatures, it turned out, were not 
worms, but bona fide parasistic viruses, achiving their leanness by 
borrowing repoductive code from larger programs when they needed to copy 
themself.



[* Aha! They're overwriting viruses! Also, they would never borrow any 
   reproductive code from the host programs, they would just overwrite 
   the beginning of them with its own instructions, making the virus 
   execute rather than the real program. *]



In turn, host programs acquired an immunity from parasites by 
failing to register their location in the virtual computer's memory, thus 
foiling the parasite's attempts to find them.



To the casual students of computer viruses, it's interesting to observe 
that despite the wide-open neutral terrain into which the first Tierrans 
were placed, they swiftly and spontaneously adopted the same techniques 
built into wild viruses to ensure survival in an enviroment thick with 
hostile users and their software: parasitism and stealth. But to the 
serious scholar of biology who soon began to take note of Ray's work, such 
developments were more than just interesting. Out of the barest simulation 
of enviromental forces, some of life's more sophisticated inter- 
relationshops were emerging entirely unbidden, and while the Mark Ludwigs 
of the world might object that Ray's initial fine-tuning of Tierran 
"physics" tainted the experiment, Ray was more than satisfied with its 
scientific implications. Here, in the unexpectedly colorful diversity bred 
from a single simple program, was a compelling model of evolution's 
creative power.



"In my wildest dreams, that was what I wanted," Ray later told author 
Steven Levy. "I didn't write the Ancestor with the idea that it was going 
to product all this."



[* I won't even tell you what my wildest dream is :-). Hey, we got minors 
   reading this, don't we?? *]



As much as this bustling ecology-in-a-box thrilled and suprised Ray, however, 
it soon begam to dawn on him that the Anceston had produced something even 
more unexpected: high-quality software. Almost all of the Ancestor's 
progeny displayed some improvments in the efficiency of their code, but in 
a few cases, evolution seemed to have attained a level of tight-wound 
optimization difficult for even the most wizardly of human software 
engineers to achieve, and Ray couldn't help wondering if there was a way to 
yoke this inhuman skill to the devlopment of practial applications. 


[* Practial applications = using self-replicating code for good tasks? 
   Well, more of that in the Viral-morality article.. *]



It wasn't an unheard-of notion. As long ago as the early '60s, for 
instance, cutting-edge programmers had begun experimenting with what they 
called "genetic algorithms" - pools of software subroutines repeatedly 
multiplied, mutated and weeded according to how well they performed a given 
task.



Two decades later, in the same groundbreaking work that established the 
ability of digital viruses to penetrate nearly any system defenses, 
computer scientist Fred Cohen also proved that viruses are potentially 
useful as all-purpose computing devices. As Cohen later put it, "anything a 
Turing machine can compute, a virus can evolve." Since then, Coken has 
tested the proposition that viruses can create useful code in a number of 
applications. One notable experiment of his is a network-maintenace 
ecosystem in which survival of the most needed cleanup tasks ensures 
maximum efficiency - in which, for instance, self-replicating programs 
designed to delete unwanted files randomly mutate their file-chasing 
strategies, with those strategies least wasteful of system resources being 
spared the Reaper's blade.



[* That might even be considered a simply shape of artificial intelligence, 
   to learn itself via different tests. Err, or I don't know really how 
   to define A.I. *]



But the benefits realized in these experiments were limited, as Ray saw it, 
by their dependence on artificial rather than natural selection - that is, 
the software was allowed to evolve in the direction of a particular 
function chosen by the programmer. In Tierra, on the other hand, organisms 
evolved according to criteria that they themselves created colectively, 
constained only by the "natural" imperative to reward the thifties use of 
existing resources. Tierra gave evolution a free hand, in other words, and 
Ray felt certain that the creativity thus unleashed had the potential to 
tacke software-writing challenges far beyond the reach of human 
programmers. In particular, the difficulties involved in writing the most 
productive code for the parallel-processing machines that will take us into 
of the next century of computing seem to cry out for an evolutionary 
approach. "We will probably never be able to write such software, as it is 
way too complex," Ray observes. "Yet we know that evolution can handle that 
kind of problem."



The reason we know, of course, is that we - and all other multicellular 
organisms - are wetware embodiments of frightfully complex parallel 
processes. But that fact posed a new challenge for Ray. Despite the great 
variety of digital forms Tierra had generated, it remained an ecology of 
one-celled organisms, none much larger or much complicated than the 80-byte 
Ancestor. In fairness it should be pointed out that the terristrial 
biosphere spend its first 3 billion years or so in a similar state before 
finally exploding into multicellular diversity at the dawn of the Cambrian 
era (a mere 600 million years ago). Yet if Tierra was ever to prove its 
full value as a software-writing machine - or indeed as a scientific model 
of evolution - sooner or later it would have to cough up a Cambrian 
explosion of its own. And since they key to this burst of complexity seemed 
to Ray to lie in challenging his evolving creatures with more intricate 
problems than the simple bit-copying tasks they'd grappled with thus far, 
he  decided that the explosion wouldn't happen nearly soon enough if Tierra 
remained stuck inside conventional computers, and he began looking into the 
possibility of installing Tierra on a parallel-processing system. 


But then one day in early 1994, Ray had a minor epiphany: "I realize that 
the global network is just a loosely connected parallel computer, and much 
larger and more powerful than anything that will ever exist as a single 
machine. "



[* Smart ass.. Is thousands of computers really more powerful than one 
   single machine? It doesn't take much brains to figure that out.. *] 


And thus was born Ray's plan to colonize the Net. He wrote it up soon 
thereafter in a document plain-spokenly entitled "A Proposal To Create a 
Network-Wide Biodiversity Reserve for Digital Organisms" (See Wired 2.08, 
page 33), the text of which outlines a vast collective enterprise devoted 
to hastening the arrival of the digital Cambrian. Ray envisions a Tierran 
subnetwork spread across thousands of volunteer Net nodes, each of them 
running the environment as a low-priority background process sustained only 
by unused (and otherwise wasted CPU cycles). He is confident that once his 
"one-celled" simple self-replicating organism encounter the immensity, the 
topological intricacy, and the fluid instability of the Net, they will 
quickly rise to the occasion and evolve into tightly coordinated 
multicellular conglomerates, thus setting off the dreamed-of Big Bang of 
comlex digi-biotic diversity.



[* How to make a Big-Bang then? Smash the computer with a sledgehammer, 
   thereby damaging the computers HD, or what? *]



Ray foresees digital naturalists like "modern day tropical biologists 
exploring our organic jungles. However, occasionally these digital 
biologists will spot an interesting information process for which they see 
an application. At this point, some individuals will be captured and 
brought into laboratories for closer study, and farms for freeding. 
"Harvested, domisticated and then neutered of their self-replicating 
properties, these prize specimens of code could then be translated from 
Tierran language into standard programming languages and set to work at any 
number of tasks. Ray suspects some form of intelligent network agents would 
be the likeliest first applications to be culled, but he prefers to 
emphasize that the most useful products of the digital jungle would be as 
difficult to predict as rice, pigs, penicillin, and silkworms might have 
been for an observer of the pre-Cambrian ooze of early carbon-based life. 


There's a whift of science fiction rising from all this, of course, but Ray 
is hardly indulging in idle speculation. Already a team of computer 
scientist has gathered under his supervision to work full-time on hammering 
out the technical details of the plan. He's accustomed by now to dealing 
with his listener's occasional anxieties about the prospect of Tierran 
viral-like pests infiltrating the workaday network inviroment. "I explain 
why the things can't escape," he says, "and that quiets the nervous people 
but some of them continue to look nervous."



[* Not very strange consider how evil the word 'virus' sounds to most 
   folks.. *]



But when the time comes to put their systems where their mouths are, how 
many site administrators will do so? Not enough, fears Danny Hillis, 
founder and chief scientist of Thinking Machines Coropration, the former 
manufactuer of massively parallel computers that had been supporting Ray's 
work. For all the tricky engineering involved in running Tierra on a 
Netwide scale, Hillis believes, the greatest challenge facing Ray "turns 
out to be more of a political issue than a technical issue. People are not 
necessarily going to want to give up their processing cycles for this" - 
even if those cycles will otherwise rot of the vine - simply because of a 
deep-seated reluctance to cede to much as a fragment of adminsistrative 
control over system resources to aprogram whose internal processes serve no 
immediate ends but their own.



But even if computer users ultimately reject the deliberate presence of a 
global wilderness reserve for computer viruses woven neatly into the fabric 
of the Net, they may yet fail to keep the computer landscape from turning 
to jungle. After all, the same personal and sub-cultural imperatives that 
drove Hellraiser's career will continue to inspire underground virus 
writers. And the digital terrain continues to get more interesting. If the 
Darwinian innovations intrucuded Mark Ludwig are any indication of coming 
trends in viral technique, then it's not inconveivable that a vital ecology 
might someday flourish in the midst of our daily routines, unplanned, 
uncontained, illcomprehended, and irresponsible. It's an unnerving 
prospect. Yet it wouldn't have to be - not if we prepared for it by 
actively cultivating a digital biodiversity of the sort Tom Ray proposes. 
This is a niche that will be filled, wheter we fill it deliberately or not. 


"We're just gong to have to live with them," artificial life researcher 
Chris Langton says of computer viruses. Our global web of digital systems, 
he predicts, is fast unfolding towards a degree of complexity rich enough 
to support a staggering diversity of autonomously evolving programs. 


Viruses in a suit and tie

-------------------------

But the future of beneficial viruses is not only in the hands of eccentrics 
such as Hellraiser, Ludwig, or Ray. The good folks at General Magic 
corporation are eager to put viral code on a firmer and decidedly more 
lucrative footing. Not that they like to hear it said that they have 
anything to do with viruses, mind you.



General Magic manufactures a hand-help communication device that relies on 
a nifty new network-streamling program language called Telescript. 
Announced earlier this year with the very visible backing of such 
info-dollar heavyweights as AT&T, Apple, Sony and Matushita, Telescript 
proposes to do good things. Its intelligent agents, General Magic 
co-founder Bill Atkinson promises, will soon be flitting about cyberspace 
on your behalf, visiting remove commercial sites to busy, sell, and trade 
information for you, and generally behaving themselves with all the decorum 
you'd expect from a personal digital valet.



Still despite rather severe restrictions on the agents' ability to 
replicate, it's hard to deny certain broad similarities between intelligent 
agents and the offering of your typical Vx board. Both wild viruses and 
Telescript agents routinely copy themselves on the computers they travel 
to, and, for those same reaons, raise differing degrees of concern about 
their security. "A virus net does anything good for you, it only does 
things to you," says hacker legend Bill Atkinson, nervously reaching for a 
fine semantic distinction between computer wildlife and Telescript's 
semi-autonomous "intelligent agent" programs.



[* Well, even if we see some good self-replicating program, I doubt 
   it will stay good forever. I'm quite sure some evil-minded person 
   (like myself) would modify it and make it horrible dangerous. Then 
   a new problem arises. How to distinguish the good program from the 
   bad one if they work in an equal matter? Hmm.. think Vesselin has 
   written a high-quality article about this, so just read that if you're 
   open for debating.. *]



More intriguing, though, are Telescript's close similarities with Tom Ray's 
diversity reserve and experiments of Fred Cohen. Cohen, now happily 
self-exiled from academia and in business for himself as a 
computer-security guru, is experimenting with a distributed database in 
which self-reproducing query agents scurry throught a network, much like 
the Telescript scheme. And like the spawling biosphere of global Tierra, 
Telescript's bustling marketplace depends on a broad base of local 
interpreter programs installed wherever its agents go to do their business. 
This has two significant implications. For one thing, the fact that the 
mobile organisms of both Telescript and Tierra interact only with their 
interpreters, incapable of functioning in their absence or of bypassing 
them to directly affect the host inviroment, obviates many of the security 
concerns surrounding their autonomy (Telescript, additionally, makes use of 
a battery of cryptographically secured restructions to ensure that its 
agent don't subvert control of the host machine, either by accident of by 
malicious design).



And for another thing, the fact that all the interpreters speak the same 
programming language regardless of the unerlying operating system and 
hardware means that, as the base of interpreters approaches omnipreence on 
the world's computer network, the Net approaches the condition of a single, 
vast, and unmappable supercomputer, with each wandering digital organism a 
process in one worldwide parallel computation.



Taken togheter, these two features represent something of a watershed in 
the history of computing. It has long been observed, rather wistfully, that 
in principle the world's computers sum up to one gigantic parallel 
processor, and that the crushing bulk of that metacomputer's CPU cycles 
goes to waste, unused. Only now, however, with the advent of protocols like 
Telescript and Tierra, do we have the means to deploy such processes that 
treat the Net as one machine, safetly and sensibly. This, then, is the real 
significanse of these endeavors.



The dark side of benefits

-------------------------

Trying to imagine the marvels that pour forth once you've successfully 
tapped a computer as elaborate as the Net is a futile as trying to map the 
future of a society, or of a life - or of life itself.



Of course, trying to foresee the risks that could emerge from that same 
computer is an equally hopeless task. But as it happends, we are bound to 
face those risks whether or not we seek to harness the full power of the 
Net, since the teeming and inevitable population of uncaged digital 
organisms will in any case plow forward with its own relentless exploration 
of the Net's capabilities. All we would miss by failing to orchestrate a 
more manageable viral exploration of our own, therefor, would be the 
potential benefits including quite possible some antidotes to the worst 
depredations visited on us by the viruses of the wild. And including also, 
perhaps, something even more precious. For if there is any purpose legible 
at all in the millennia of human history, it is the unflagging persistence 
with which we add to the complexity of the universe. So, if we were to 
shrink from the chanse to actively partifipate in transforming the Net into 
the single most complex information entity since the emergence of the human 
brain, would we not then be shirking a duty of almost cosmic propositions? 


[* I really have no comments.. *]



It could happen. It's hard to say which is really the most 
characteristically human trait - our drive toward complexity or our 
sometimes irrational fear of it. In the matter of computer viruses, fear 
could well gain the upper hand. It has already shown itself, afterall, in 
our human tendency to overly reduce the multifaceted motivations of the 
virus writer to a caricature of hooliganism. Likewise it seems to lurk 
behind the urge to deny that viruses can be anything but lethally 
dangerous. But we'd better think long and hard before we let it stand 
between us and the epic opporrunities that globally distributed virual 
programming presents us with. Because in the end, the meaning of our 
long-term coexistence with computer viruses may prove difficult to 
distinguish from the meaning of our own existence.



Final comments:



   The last sentence really screwed things up.. I think he *really* wanted a 
   powerful ending, but failed miserable in that task! Or did he? A virus 
   goal is to replicate. Humans, also wants to spread their offspring in 
   the meaning "It's good to have sex, it's practise in making babies". The 
   mans host is a female. A virus host is a file.. Is the virus the male 
   and media which can infect a female? And what about sexual diseases 
   then?



   Hahah! This is just getting too much.. I better stop writing such things 
   before I really phreak out ;).



   Okay, now about the general comments about this article. Personally, I 
   don't like it very much because it didn't serve any purpose really. It 
   didn't described the virus-scene for shits. It was too focused on a few 
   peoples weird thoughts and beside the fact that typical media-hype 
   was inserted on various places all over the article, I didn't like his 
   conclusions at all.



   Obviously he did a lot of research about the article, (to find things to 
   write about) he just didn't manage to turn information into knowledge, or 
   to relate the things written about with eachother. He just wrote about a 
   lot of topics without understanding them, making the whole article look 
   messy and uncompleted.



   Furthermore, the reporter also seemed to have totally splitted opinions 
   about everything, which perhaps might indicate that he had no opinions at 
   all. Just writing what he thought people would like to read, would in my 
   opinion describe his writing style quite well. Or to put it this way, 
   it's sad to see the truth being colored dollar-green.



   The overall impression is that a lot of things could've been done better, 
   and maybe it was just a bit too filled with meaningless ramble. Any 
   idiot could've written a way better article in 16 pages. Anyhow, this is 
   what you got, so deal with it..



                                              ___ The Unforgiven ___ 


==================================================================
============== 
This article comes from Computer Sweden (12/9-1995) (Day=12, Month=9) 
Free (and bad) translation by The Unforgiven.

(C) 1995 Immortal Riot.

(ha-ha!)

==================================================================
============== 


"MICROSOFT SEND DISK WITH VIRUS"



þ It came a disc from Microsoft. With a virus. The poor

  custumor of Microsoft was then infected by another customers 
  computer.



þ "Impossible, we do check every disc" says Microsoft.



þ But the virusexpert encourages all users always to check

  the disc, no matter from where it comes from.



By Rolf van den Brink. [a.k.a. Incontent Arse]



- Some discs to Microsoft Office didn't work. We called our support 
  on Swedish Microsoft, who send replacment discs. One of our customers 
  got his computer infected by the Junkie virus. It [Junkie] is a swedish virus 
  which causes little damage. We traced its origin and we came to the 
  conclusion that it [the disc] was delivered from Microsoft. 


The source to Computer Sweden wants to be anonymous. The incident was 
"very embarrasing".



Swedish Microsoft don't know how any virus could have been spread 
from their main office in Kista.



- "We virus-check every disc which are being send out", says 
  Anna S”derblom, support-chief for Microsoft. "I've never heard 
  anything about a virus".



According to S”derblom all discs are being delivered from a 
mastermachine, never from an employers PC.



HAS SCREWED UP



"We've had atleast 15 swedish software-suppliers who has screwed up", 
says Mikael Larsson, an expert on viruses working for QA Informatik. He's 
concerned about his customers reputation and feel uncomfortable with 
giving out any name of his them.



Software suppliers have nowadays better routines, thinks Mikael Larsson. 
It's worse with companies who sells software for another company, and 
other who sends out price lists and other information via discs. 


 Apologize the customers and garantee that the victims that it never 
  will be repeated.



 Send out a disc with an anti-virus program and instructions. 
  "You can't trust on any disc", says Mikael Larsson. No matter 
  where it comes from.



- Always check new discs. Then you don't have to worry is Mikael's 
  best advice.



==================================================================
============== 


        þ YET ANOTHER WORD-6-VIRUS-FOUND! þ



[  Found in "The Micro-Computer quite some time ago...          ] 
[  Written by Mats L”vgren, translated and stuff by no          ] 
[  other than the one sitting behind the keyboard right         ] 
[  now.. ! So, sue me..                                     ] 


As a more annoying sort of objection against the french nuclear 
tests, someone has written a new Word-6-virus. The virus is known 
under these aliases: "Winword-Nuclear , Wordmacro-Nuclear or Wordmacro- 
Alert. It does itself reminded by adding this text to the end of 
every 12th document which are printed:



"And finally I would like to say STOP ALL FRENCH NUCLEAR TESTING IN THE
PACIFIC" 


Furthermore, the virus tries to create a DOS-file with the name "ph33r" if you 
starts Word between 17:00 and 17:59. The worst thing is though that the virus 
erases your system-files, io.sys, msdos.sys and command.com the 5th of April. 


You do easily discover if your machine is infected by look in the macro-list 
for names such as DropSuriv and InsertPayload.



==================================================================
============== 
This little article comes from the french magazine "PC Expert" 
issue 43 - December issue 95. It's a fast little translation that I whipped 
up while spell checking this file :)     -rb



After the Word virus Concept, two new viruses of the

same kind (relatively harmless) have been found: the first, 
Colors, modifies the colors under Windows. The second, Nuclear, 
contains a protest against the french nuclear tests and installs 
a traditional binary virus in the DOS directory. All the editors 
of Anti-virus software are working on versions that check DOC 
files at the same time that it checks the executables.



(Wow! these Word viruses sure are getting a lot of media attention, 
 and I bet we'll be seeing a whole flock of Word viruses because of 
 that :))



==================================================================
============== 
- "FREEZONE OVERDOZE - ANARCHY IN MY ROOM !"



                                             ___ The Unforgiven ___