On Mon, Nov 28, 2005 at 11:42:56AM +0100, Dave Long wrote: > Unless SETI is as bad as Outlook et al, the concerns should be > dismissed.
The idea is not SETI but susceptibility of our culture as a whole
to alien trojans ("here's a nice blueprint, build it, and it
will do something wonderful").
> The issue is not that writing a virus requires knowledge of a computer
> system, the issue is that being infectable requires running code, not
> just processing data. (buffer overruns occur because of missing
Being infectable requires being smart enough to follow orders.
> terminators -- the data is not being handled strictly as data, but is
> in effect "interpreted" and hence trusted to be well-formed) [0]
>
> Given that there's no way for the SETI processing to be interpreting a
> given data format, much less executing arbitrary attachments, they'd
> have to have written their clients in a very byzantine fashion to have
> any hope of being a virus vector.
>
> If it were April, I'd wager this physicist was playing a joke on the
> Grauniad. [1]
No, it's just a rehash of a really old idea. (Which doesn't fly: why
should I spent time on remote exploits if I can travel relativistically
for about the same energetic footprint?).
> -Dave
>
> A possible explanation for the Fermi Paradox: the galaxy is chock full
> of sentient beings, but they don't wish to have any contact with us for
> fear of having 86% of their matryoshka clusters devoted to forwarding
I see Robert Bradbury's coinage is making rounds. Given that we can still
see stars (either because there are stars in the sky or because we're
there to see them) there are none.
> interstellar 419 spam and offers for organic topological deformations.
--
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org";>leitl</a>
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