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VIRUS-L Digest Friday, 27 Jan 1989 Volume 2 : Issue 29
Today's Topics:
Re: [MASROB@UBVMS.BITNET: Mac Virus?]
Why "virus"? (longish)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri, 27 Jan 89 10:13:54 EST
From: Joe McMahon <XRJDM@SCFVM.GSFC.NASA.GOV>
Subject: Re: [MASROB@UBVMS.BITNET: Mac Virus?]
>From: CNSM CCR - Rob Rothkopf <MASROB@UBVMS.BITNET>
>
>I have a MAC-SE that I *thought* was eradicated from all viruses
>(virii pl?). It seemed free of nVIR and SCORES and all the others and
>yet the system crashes periodically and I need to reload it from the
>original.
>Any advice?
Rob, I've sent you VirusDetective(tm) 2.0. Try it against your System
and see if you get any hits. If not, what INITs and CDEVs are you
using? You may have a conflict unrelated to any virus at all.
- --- Joe M.
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 25 Jan 89 09:18:32 EST
From: Steve Cavrak <SJC@UVMVM.BITNET>
Subject: Why "virus"? (longish)
The following was grabbed from "comp.sys.misc" over usenet this
morning. I heard the broadcast and had similar concerns. The first
part is William's LeFebvre's posting; the second is my reply
(hopefully follow-up, but usenews is still somewhat of a mystery to
me.) Perhaps the concerns are of broader interest and might make
worthwhile reading in virus-l ? (I've edited the headers and tab
characters out for my IBM account ...)
- ----------------------- Original Message ------------------------
From: phil@titan.rice.edu (William LeFebvre)
I heard someone on the news today more or less state that computer
viruses were a very recent thing (within the last 5 years). I have a
very strong feeling that this is wrong. Can anyone tell me when the
term "virus" was first used in the context of computers? Can you give
me references?
In an interview on NPR's "All Things Considered", this author, Susan
Sontag (sp?), was trying to point out how America currently has an
obsession with medical diseases, given the current AIDS problem. She
pointed to the usage of the term "computer virus" as one indication of
this. She went on to say that if this type of computer activity had
happened 5 or 10 years ago, it would have been called something else.
Anyone got any refuting information? Anyone also hear the interview
and think that I'm off base or that I misheard her?
William LeFebvre
Department of Computer Science
Rice University
<phil@Rice.edu>
- --------
Follow up:
From: Steve Cavrak <SJC@UVMVM.BITNET>
I heard the interview and share her reactions.
Sontag was being interviewed in relation to her new book "Aids as
Metaphor". (Her book reviewed in either last Sunday's NYTimes Book
Review section or the week before, and which was excerpted a few
months back in the New York Review of Books.) She has written an
earlier book called "Illness as Metaphor", written after her bout with
cancer. Before that she wrote a book entitled "Beyond Interpretation"
- --- which grew in some part out of her role as a film critic for the
New Yorker.
One of her concerns is how our word choices drag along with them a lot
of cultural baggage. This baggage, or connotation, sometimes creates
it own problems. (Cf the "War on drugs", the "War on poverty",
"animal rights", etc.) Why, she wondered, was Watergate a "cancer on
the presidency?"
The comment about computer virus was in this vein. Why is a computer
virus called a "virus" (or why is "FORTRAN" called a programming
"language" if you want to desensitize the metaphor), rather than, for
example, a "parasite". And how does this choice of metaphor affect
the way people understand what is happening around them. And how does
this change when the virus in the news is HIV-IV rather than a mere
rhinovirus or tobacco mosiac virus.
(For that matter how do people understand "computers", but that is way
beyond this list?)
My own reaction to the interview was that simile, metaphor, and
allegory are not nicely separable. A virus, and DNA in general, IS
LIKE a computer program (and almost vice versa, especially if you
accept William Burroughs comment that "Language is a virus".)
Certainly a computer virus IS more LIKE a virus than a computer worm
IS LIKE a real worm, or a computer trojan horse IS LIKE a real Trojan
horse.
Of course the original question of WHERE DO THESE WORDS COME FROM is
left unanswered. I'm certainly interested in finding out.
Steve Cavrak
Academic Computing Services
University of Vermont
------------------------------
End of VIRUS-L Digest
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