Insane Reality issue #8 - (c)opyright 1996 Immortal Riot/Genesis - REALITY.029

Article: Future Thoughts
Author: Members of [IRG]

% Future Thoughts - by IRG %
____________________________

What's due for the future? Who can say? I know I can't. I like the format of
IR#8 as compared to other mags. This is for many reasons. Firstly, unlike
some mags, we have ALL types of material: AV/Vx, new code, old code, 
technical articles, non-technical articles, interviews - IR#8 really is an
all-purpose virus magazine. The magazine is available as a series of text
files so you can look at it with your favourite text browser, yet at the same
time it has a browser for those who want one (all we need now is to put it in
HTML format). But just because I'm happy with the mag, doesn't mean you are. 
We want feed back from YOU, telling us what you want more of, and what can be
improved. Anyway, over to Rajaat.

- _Sepultura_


% Ideas for the future %

We virus writers are being viewed upon as old-fashioned, even by antivirus
researchers. They think we are binary barbarians, still writing viruses in
ASM, even for Win95 infection, and they can use 32 bit compilers and shit
like that. This has to end. My idea was to start with the magazine, but we
need YOUR opinion about it. We have plans to release the next magazines in
HTML format, including pictures and other stuff HTML is capable to do. We
discovered HTML can make big improvements to clarify things, we can have
articles discussing technical topics, and including pictures to clarify
things. We even can write a virus generator with HTML and JAVA. They only
question is... Do the most of our readers have a HTML browser? We'd like to
receive comments from YOU!

Mail them to one of the IR/G members and please explain why should we or
should we not use HTML format next time?


The advantages
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Only data to be sent, no magazine viewer needed to include.

Most new office products can read HTML and print them.

Online WWW magazine without any conversions.

Readability, no plain ASCII, but bold, underlined and italics and even
graphics to make things easier to read and understand.


The disadvantages
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Needs a WWW browser or other viewer that supports HTML (and maybe JAVA)

Requires a computer that has a GUI installed (Windows family or X Windows)

Not easy readable with plain ASCII viewers.

Can have unpredictable results with other configurations (resolution,
colours, frames in HTML pages and so on...)

- Rajaat.