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[glow=yellow,2,300]ATTENTION[/glow]

If everybody here is interested in hackers and viruses. then read the book The Blue Nowhere by Jeffrey Deaver. It's about this super-hacker named Phate that sends a virus to people, hacks into their systems, finds out where they are, and kills them. It's pretty scary.

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elias wrote: just a theory, but soon enough when im better with assembler, im gonna try it out. and tom, virii wont protect your comp, cuz their sole purpose is to survive. Mark Ludwig thinks that they are the start of AI, because they grow and evolve to survive. this obscure branch of computer science is one of my favorite. its ashame its gotten such a bad rap by destructive virii

Haven't you ever seen Terminator or the Matrix?? AI with self preservation complexes can be a very very bad thing.

Scary...I think exactly what you are thinking :-\

yea but thats complex AI that can do things like think. this is simple so its basically like a rat, but not so complex. like a rat, it hides in your house, always moving(except it multiplies). actually its not like a rat. well hoipefulyl you get the picture. but then theres the problem that it can become something more. what if its contained, not on a network, but somehow, through simpel instructions, it becomes somethign more, after many times of running. i doubt it but anythings possible.

rat is not a good example. the best example is a biological virus (hence computer virus). that would be very intresting...a pet computer virus...that accually cleans up your system. it finds problems, and fixes them. wait, thats kinda like nortan system works, but not a cool.

Virus programming is dark-side. Once you let the dark side gain control, forever your destiny it will dominate ...

That being said, maybe you'll find the concept of "agents" interresting: this is a new way of programming that involves migrable software to go from one node to another to achieve complex actions like system maintenance and monitoring, etc.

They can replicate themselves, leave tracks like ants etc.
BUT where it differs from viruses is that :
- they're executed into some sand-boxed environment
- the node explictly contains software to execute them, so this is not system intrusion
- the API and informations they can get can be controlled by system administrators.

I'm about to release a network simulator based on ANTS (david wetherall) i'm using for my research on active networking (a special use of agents to improve the Internet)

ph34r th3 n3><7 g3n3r4t10n

Pype.Clicker wrote: Virus programming is dark-side. Once you let the dark side gain control, forever your destiny it will dominate ...

Yea...I was almost caught in hacking and virus programming once....not good...if you want to make a virus...I have a file you(anyone) can install on your computer and lets see if you want to program viruses any more ( and that file was emailed to me! )

no, not hacking. jst virus programming, and not for malicious reasons either. i keep forgetting abt this thread, but coudl you tell me more about agents>? and Solar, is this file a safe text file? if it is, can you e-mail it to me?

..

no. its not about destroying peoples comps. that part is called teh "bomb". virus's just replicate and survive. look up MArk Ludwig. its an unnrecognized branch of comp. sci.

I wounldn't say it is unrecognized; it falls into the area of self-replicated automata. As such, it is related, however distantly, to cellular automata (The Game of Life, linear tapestry automata, etc.), a traditional area of study with interesting implications regarding computability (GoL is in fact a Turing-complete computation system, as it can be used to simulate a UTM), chaos theory, cryptography, and optimization theory, among other things.

If you want to experiment with self-replicating systems as a hobby, well, I'd do so under very specific conditions: to wit, I would get into playing CoreWars and write my designs for that. It's clean, easier to work with that a real machine, and there's no risk of accidentally releasing something with unpredictable side effects (e.g., the RTM worm, which has a minor bug in it that caused each dupicate copy to replicate out of control instead of suiciding) out onto the Net.

I would be very wary of programming live viruses and worms for real machines: the Richard Morris example shows that a worm or virus can be dangerous even without a payload. This is especially risky today, when the US government is in a paranoid frenzy over 'hackers', seeing threats that don't exist everywhere while often ignoring the real ones. Currently propsed legislation in many US States (i.e., the UCITA) would make it illegal to even own tools that could potentially be used to retro-engineer software (such as, say, DEBUG.EXE or gdb - betcha didn't know you were in possession of an illegal cracking tool, did you?). Given certain clauses of the DMCA, ven if you never crack a program or write a virus which gets loose, you are putting youself into legal jeopardy just by studying exploits and system flaws, even if your intention is to report the bugs in question - at least one bug-hunter has been suppressed in this manner already (at least I recall such a case being reported, but I can't seem to find the link). Be careful with any experiments you go ahead with.

does Core Wars still exist? i thought it was dead.

It certain does. I understand that the King of the Hill game site is a popular venue for Corewarriors.

The only virus I've ever made was an olden school batch file one - pop a batch file named "dir.bat" with FORMAT C: \Y into the c:\dos\command directory. Windows made it extinct, of course...

hate to rain on your parade mr t.. but that would be a trojan horse.. a dodgy program mocked up to look like something else.

- Nick