🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Mar12.160731.16300@nas.nasa.gov> eugene@wilbur.nas.nasa.gov (Eugene N. Miya) writes:
>In article <pmq6sINNoau@agate.berkeley.edu> chiachi@soda.berkeley.edu
>(Chiachi Hung) writes:
>>About all kind of viruses happened these years, why there is nobody can
>>develop a viruslike "anti-virus" which will transfer and spread itself all 
>>over the computers just like what normal virus does, but attacking the other
>
>1) You must realize that the "biological" analogy and terminology are bogus.
>Sorry no bacteriophages, no antibodies (maybe, the users are the antibodies),


well not quite some people have released 'harmless' forms of some virii 
a lot of virii will not infect you if they think you are already infected.
(I think that nvirA/B on the mac are one of these - nvirB - the harmless one
is the one you see around since if you have the harmfull one you probably are
more likely to get rid of it - natural selection works against harmfull variants
over harmless ones - I believe that nvirA was one of the first Mac virii
that turned up when most people didn't know much about them - it was very buggy
one of the first people who figured out what was going on produced the 
not-so-buggy varient as an act of desperation - I may have got some of the
details a little wrong here - anyone who knows better please speak up).

This is sort of like putting a harmless live vaccine (like the live polio
vaccine) into the population at large to create antibodies to a similar
varient (the harmfull polio varient).

Another thing that happens in the Mac world is to put a dummy resource in
your system file to make it look to an incoming virus like your system is 
already infected - this is sort of like injecting anti-bodies directly into
your machine.

I agree that you can't push the virus/infection/human physiology similarities
too far - but it's suprising how far you can go

	Paul


-- 
Paul Campbell    UUCP: ..!mtxinu!taniwha!paul     AppleLink: CAMPBELL.P
"In the future in the new world order if we don't like your trade policies we
will puke on you ..." "The problem with the market economy is that it delivers
the most efficient quality of life" "Jennifer Fitz. comes clean, news at 11 ..."