virus n.
[from the obvious analogy with biological viruses, via SF] A
cracker program that searches out other programs and `infects'
them by embedding a copy of itself in them, so that they become
Trojan horses. When these
programs are executed, the embedded virus is executed too, thus
propagating the `infection'. This normally happens invisibly to
the user. Unlike a worm, a virus
cannot infect other computers without assistance. It is
propagated by vectors such as humans trading programs with their
friends (see SEX). The virus may do
nothing but propagate itself and then allow the program to run
normally. Usually, however, after propagating silently for a
while, it starts doing things like writing cute messages on the
terminal or playing strange tricks with the display (some viruses
include nice display hacks).
Many nasty viruses, written by particularly perversely minded
crackers, do irreversible damage,
like nuking all the user's files.
In the 1990s, viruses became a serious problem, especially
among Windows users; the lack of security on these machines
enables viruses to spread easily, even infecting the operating
system (Unix machines, by contrast, are immune to such attacks).
The production of special anti-virus software has become an
industry, and a number of exaggerated media reports have caused
outbreaks of near hysteria among users; many lusers tend to blame everything that
doesn't work as they had expected on virus attacks. Accordingly,
this sense of `virus' has passed not only into techspeak but into
also popular usage (where it is often incorrectly used to denote
a worm or even a Trojan horse). See phage; compare back
door; see also Unix
conspiracy.
Node:visionary, Next:VMS, Previous:virus, Up:= V
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visionary n.
1. One who hacks vision, in the sense of an Artificial
Intelligence researcher working on the problem of getting
computers to `see' things using TV cameras. (There isn't any
problem in sending information from a TV camera to a computer.
The problem is, how can the computer be programmed to make use of
the camera information? See SMOP,
AI-complete.) 2. [IBM] One who
reads the outside literature. At IBM, apparently, such a penchant
is viewed with awe and wonder.