Bringing a little levity to the hacker/virus debate... http://www.xkcd.com/350/
On Nov 29, 2007 4:40 PM, John G. Rose <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > From: BillK [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > > > > This discussion is a bit out of date. Nowadays no hackers (except for > > script kiddies) are interested in wiping hard disks or damaging your > > pc. Hackers want to *use* your pc and the data on it. Mostly the > > general public don't even notice their pc is working for someone else. > > When it slows down sufficiently, they either buy a new pc or take it > > to the shop to get several hundred infections cleaned off. But some > > infections (like rootkits) need a disk wipe to remove them completely. > > This is very true the emphasis is on utilizing victims PCs instead of the > old ego thing of crashing systems. Storm botnet could easily go on a > decimating attack but it has been very selective especially in the defense > of itself. > > Creation of the botnet was not a trivial undertaking. How many times do we > complain on this list about not being able to run AGI because of resource > limitations, yet millions of PCs are lying around on the internet idle? > > The internet is a sitting duck at this moment in time. There are many ways > of setting up botnets legal or illegal and they will slowly be discovered > and utilized. > > Personally I think that this situation could be the birthplace of an AGI. > Any networked application running on your PC connected to the internet is > a > potential botnet host node. The design of the AGI needs to "work" with the > network topology, resource distribution, and resource availability of the > internet host "grid". > > Typical networked applications running on PCs are extremely narrow > function. > Yeah there has been a lot of research and code on all of this, there are > many open source tools and papers written, etc. but who has really taken > the > full advantage of the available resources and capabilities? Most of the > work > has been on the substrate but not on the capability of potential > applications. There are a few interesting apps like peer to peer search > engines but nothing that I know of that more than scrapes the surface of > the > capabilities of those millions of networked computers. > > John > > ----- > This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email > To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: > http://v2.listbox.com/member/?&; > ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=70513968-197f21
