Viruses by William F. Lantry We need to do some research on viruses. Yesterday, for the first time, we faced a malicious virus in the lab, and it got me thinking about them. First, we need to decide what a virus is. A few bytes of code, which are troublesome, written by evil people. That's the usual definition. And like most usual definitions, it's completely inadequate. A virus is a created thing. Some argue that the desire to create life is one of our strongest urges. A virus is something that exists, and that continues to exist. It reproduces itself. and, lately, they've begun to mutate. Many people divide the general field of viruses into several catagories. There are trojan horses, worms, and true viruses. Trojan horses sit on your machine and do something... they collect passwords as they go by, they log your keystrokes. But in general they don't replicate. A worm is entirely different. It doesn't *do* anything... it just exists, and multiplies itself. It burrows into your system, and lives there. The most famous case is Robert Morris' Internet worm. When Morris wrote the worm, he was in a bit of a hurry. He had the impatience of youth. And he was worried someone would close the hole in the system his worm used to first enter each machine. So, one night, he rushed it, and got its reproductive engine wrong. The thing bred like the proverbial rabbit. Or rather, it cloned itself way too fast. He put it out on the network one evening, and by morning it was everywhere. It reproduced fast enough to bring a machine to its knees. And not just a single machine: it infected every unix computer it could find. By dawn, the entire net had crashed. Every sysop in the country scrambled to find a cure, and implement it. In a few days, the worm was dead, a victim of its own reproductive rate. Like a too successful microbe in a petri dish, it underwent a population explosion. And just as happens in the 'natural' world, it outproduced the sustainability of its environment, and the population crashed. But viruses are different. Their writers have learned to hide them, to make them reproduce slowly. Odds are, you have several on the machine you're working on right now. If they make too much trouble, you'll find a way to get rid of them. So they sit there quietly, looking for a chance to reproduce... The killer viruses are the ones who get the most notice. They're rare, but people can make quite a bit of money by selling cures... so these people drum up some hysteria, and rake in the cash. After all, do you want all your data erased? But do you know anyone who's ever had all her data erased? I don't. And I've come around to admiring the people who can write a good virus. We're always trying to get these machines to *do* something for us, and we've all experienced frustration when we can't get it to work. That's part of the fascination. Imagine writing code that won't just work, but that actually lives, in a very real sense. You would be a creator. As long as the virus existed, so, in some ways, would you... It's not that different from what we were taught in the writing schools. We were told that our goal is immortality. If we could write a poem which people would read long after we're gone, we would still be alive. But what is poetry, except linguistic code? And what is language, after all, except an operating system. And what does a successful poem do? It enters the operating system, and lives there. A user 'reads' it. And if she likes it, she passes it on to another user. To be successful, it has to subvert, and even replace, previous poems. After awhile, it becomes part of the system. A few strings of its code become part of other viruses: Shakespeare quotes Ovid. Eliot makes allusions to both. In my writing are echoes of Eliot. In other words, the virus Ovid wrote is still active, and successfully replicates itself in you, if you read and remember my poems... For the last several years, people have been talking about cultural viruses. The ecology movement is a good example. An idea, a string of code, enters the existing system, and subverts it. The old operating system was designed to efficiently cut down trees for economic gains. Then came the idea that some things should be protected, that spotted owls may be important. Imagine the frustration of people who made their money off logging. They had a purpose, they wanted to get something done. And the virus stopped them from doing it. Is that any different from people in a writing center, wanting to get a paper written and printed... and being stopped by a virus? So the people who owned the logging companies searched furiously for a virus cure, a few strings of code that would kill the invading code. They came up with slogans, bumper stickers, signs by the roadside, all with the same purpose: to kill the troublesome virus. And, so far, they haven't found a cure. Which brings me to my situation. For many teachers, things were going along just fine. They had jobs. They had strings of code which worked. They talked and they wrote on the chalkboard, and students wrote it all down, because they had to, and students reproduced those strings of code in exams, or in portfolios... and some of them became teachers, and got students to reproduce those same strings of code. Some of them even used word processors and stand alone computers as a more efficient way to reproduce those same strings of code. Then came the net. Then people like me came along. And suddenly, students were connecting to each other, on different levels. Listserves expanded the classroom, and soon things were completely out of the teachers control. Students wrote, not to the teacher, but to each other. And they wrote whatever they felt like writing. And along came the MOO, and students could write their own world. Even I try to censor some of the things they write, but it's impossible to censor much in this environment. At some point, one has to just let them go, believe in what they're doing, let them explore and create. The writing, the classroom, the operating system, goes completely out of control. No wonder a few colleagues are searching furiously for a way to stop this virus! Its going to infect their whole operating system! If they let it go, their 'programs' will crash, and they know it. What they don't know is that its too late. The virus is there, on the educational system's hard drive... and there's no way to get rid of it now. Oh, they may succeed in getting rid of a copy or two. But eventually, they'll have to adapt to it, or die off. Adapt or you're toast, they say in the business world, and the same is true here. Colleagues are worried, and they're right to be worried... thanks for reading, Bill