Telecom/1996-04-telecom-walnutcreek.iso/book.reviews/computer.virus-ludwig

Text File | 1995-01-05 | 9KB | 172 lines

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Date: 31 Jan 94 15:24:24 EST
From: Urnst Kouch/Crypt Newsletter <[e-mail]>
Subject: File 3--Review: "Computer Viruses, Artificial Life & Evolution"

Just after Christmas, on December 27th, Addison-Wesley France
was served with a temporary legal notice prohibiting the
distribution of its recently published French language
edition of Mark Ludwig's "Little Black Book of Computer Viruses,
Volume 1." Entitled "Naissance d'un Virus," or "Birth of a Virus," the
French edition was selling for about $50 cash money. The company is
also distributing a disk containing copies of Ludwig's TIMID,
INTRUDER, KILROY and STEALTH viruses separately for a few dollars
more.

However, before the ink was dry on the paper a French judge dismissed
the complaint, said Ludwig between laughs during a recent interview.
Addison-Wesely France, he said, subsequently worked the fuss into good
publicity, enhancing demand for "Naissance d'un Virus."

Almost simultaneously, Ludwig has published through his American Eagle
corporation, its follow-up:  "Computer Viruses, Artificial Life and
Evolution," which will come as a great surprise to anyone expecting
"The Little Black Book of Computer Viruses, Part II."

For those absent for the history, "The Little Black Book of Computer
Viruses," upon publication, was almost uniformly denounced - by the
orthodox computer press - as the work of someone who must surely be a
dangerous sociopath.

Most magazines refused to review or mention it, under the working
assumption that to even speak about viruses for an extended length -
without selling anti-virus software - only hastens the digital
disintegration of the world.  Ludwig found himself engaged in a
continued battle for advertising for his book, losing contracts
without notice while the same publications continued to stuff their
pages with spreads for cosmological volumes of pornography.  This has
always been a curious, but consistent, hypocrisy. The real truth, for
the entirety of the mainstream computer press, is that it has _always_
been OK for anyone among the citizenry - including children - to
potentially rot their minds with various digital pictographic
perversions; it is not OK for the same audience to have the potential
to electronically rot their computers' files with Ludwig's simple
viruses, none of which are in the wild over a year after publication
of the book.  Another consideration the mainstream journals must deal
with is that if they were to suddenly and unilaterally control
pornographic advertising, the loss in revenue would cause some of them
to fail. In the end, it's always been a money thing. Pornographers
have it. Mark Ludwig is only one account.

[This has gotten more interesting since one of the larger computer
porn advertisers, the manufacturer of the CD-ROM "For Adults Only
(FAO) Gold" collection, has also entered the virus business, selling
issues of the virus-programming journal 40HEX on its "Forbidden
Secrets" CD-ROM. The "Forbidden Secrets" disk has been advertised in
the same full-page ads as the "FAO Gold" collections.]

Not surprisingly, the controversy has kept sales of "The Little Black
Book" brisk since its initial printing and financed the expansion of
American Eagle.

Which brings us, finally, to "Computer Viruses, Artificial Life and
Evolution," a book which takes a hard scientific look at life and the
theory of evolution, and only incidentally contains working viruses.

To grapple with the underlying philosophy behind "CVAL&E," its helpful
to know Ludwig was a physics major at Caltech in Pasadena, CA, at a
time when Nobel-laureate theoretical physicists Richard Feynman and
Murray Gell-Mann were in residence.  The ruthlessness with which these
scientists dealt with softer disciplines not up to the task of
thorough theoretical analysis coupled with the academic meat-grinder
that is Caltech's reputation, casts its shadow on "CVAL&E."

Ludwig writes in the introduction:

". . . Once I was a scientist of scientists.  Born in the age of
Sputnik, and raised in the home of a chemist, I was enthralled with
science as a child. If I wasn't dissolving pennies in acid, I was
winding an electromagnet, or playing with a power transistor, or . . .
freezing ants with liquid propane.  When I went to MIT for college I
finally got my chance to totally immerse myself in my first love.  I
did rather well at it too, finishing my undergraduate work in two
years and going on to study elementary particle physics under Nobel
laureates at Caltech.  Yet by the time I got my doctorate the spell
was forever broken . . . I saw less and less of the noble scientist
and more and more of the self-satisfied expert."

And this sets the tenor for the rest of the book, as Ludwig analyzes
Darwinian evolution and, by the standards of intellectual rigor
imposed by post-War theoretical physics, declares it even more squishy
than theories of quantum gravity and black holes; the answer as to how
present day life came from the primordial soup of biopolymers is
always skittering away out of reach in an impenetrable fog of
hypothetical bullshit.

It's not clear at all how a mixture of even the most complex
biomacromolecules resulted in predecessors of _E. coli_, the simplest
algae or any precursors of the archaebacteria, without resorting to
creationism or spontaneous generation.  Ludwig - using some heavy math
- chews the probabilities up and spits them out as miraculous, not
very helpful when you're wearing the traditional scientist's hat.
Then he does the same for the simplest of computer viruses - using as
examples a disk copying program which, if altered in one line of
instructions, can be made into a primitive boot sector virus.

To understand the material fully is a tough job; if you don't have
some experience with statistical thermodynamics, probabilistic studies
and differential equations, frankly, it will take you a while to get
up to the speed where the lion's share of "CVA&E" doesn't lose you.

Ludwig's science is good, his understanding of basic biochmemistry and
microbiology solid enough to support any arguments made as he works
his way through the inadequacies of evolution.  Unlike Steven Levy's
"Artificial Life," Ludwig makes no chirpy assertions that such as the
Brain virus are a mere step away from animation.  Instead, in "CVA&E"
he asks the reader to concede that Darwinian theory doesn't seen
likely to explain anything about genesis satisfying to pure
determinists.  And, outside of whole-heartedly buying into astronomer
Fred Hoyle's ideas about freeze-dried virus and bacterial suspensions
frozen in cometary ice and dropped into the atmosphere as seed from
the depths of space, research into the dawn of life of Earth is going
nowhere fast. So Ludwig asks us not to discard computer viruses and
computerized artificial life as potential tools to look at the
problem.

By the finish Ludwig, of course, hasn't come up with the answer
either.  And, he admits, you have to fudge a bit
 - maybe a lot - to swallow the contemporary ideas about artificial
life.  And then he takes another risk by asking readers to entertain
the fancy that if we don't get a handle on some fresh ideas about
evolution and the origins of life, sooner or later something will show
up in our backyard and get a handle on us. It's a wild ride, but an
enjoyable one.

"CVAL&E" also includes some interesting programs, most notably
SLIP-Scan, a variably encrypting virus which uses the Trident
Polymorphic Encryptor and a code construct Ludwig calls the Darwinian
Genetic Mutation Engine.  This engine, which Ludwig has written to
mimic a simple gene, encodes constantly changing information within
the virus that is used to modulate the operation of the Trident
encryptor, thus confering on the virus a directed evolution in
successive generations sensitive to the presence of anti-virus
software elimination of replicants in large numbers of infections.

SLIP-Scan replicates and places a segment of information produced by
the Darwinian Engine in an unused portion of computer memory, where it
is read by a different member of the SLIP-Scan population and used to
hybridize the data carried in the subsequent progeny.  Ludwig has made
this a computerized mimic of one of the simplest ways in which
bacteria exchange genetic information, via small connecting tubes
through the medium called pili. In SLIP-Scan's case, computer RAM is
the bridge through the environment along which the "genetic" material
is transferred between virus offspring.  The result of this is that
polymorphic progeny of SLIP-Scan not caught by anti-virus software
slowly are selected in a Darwinian manner for offspring which cannot
be detected.  While this might sound threatening, the population of
viruses required to demonstrate the effect is such that it is unlikely
it would be a factor on real world computers, even if the virus were
in the wild.

The winning program in Ludwig's First International Virus Writing
Contest is also in "CVAL&E."  Written by a virus programmer known as
Stormbringer, the Companion-101 virus is used by the author to work
out the probability of viruses evolving into different variations
through faults in computer memory and translation.

"Computer Viruses, Artificial Life and Evolution" is an intriguing,
thorough read.  If you go looking for it, be prepared to spend some
time.

[American Eagle, POB 41401, Tucson, AZ  85717]