Word: viruses
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...announced last week that they would no longer use prison inmates on road gangs. Penal reform? No. In part, at least, a fear of AIDS. If a citizen caught the incurable disease from a prisoner, explained Commissioner Ray Moore, the county might be sued. Despite evidence that the AIDS virus can be transmitted only through an exchange of blood or semen, Moore claimed that "the danger was great," even though the likelihood of anyone's having intimate contact with convicts on a road crew would seem slight...
Efforts to contain the social cost of AIDS are increasingly widespread. Earlier this month the Defense Department announced it will screen all 2.1 million active-duty military personnel for exposure to the AIDS virus. Last week Transamerica Occidental Life Insurance Co. began requiring AIDS tests for large-policy applicants in five "high-risk" states: California, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey and Texas, as well as in Washington, D.C. The company explained that $2.5 million of its life-insurance claims this year have involved AIDS victims...
Programs called "worms" are capable of altering a system's fundamental operations or shutting it down entirely. They delete specific portions of a computer's memory, thus creating a hole of missing information. Another type of software demon, called a "virus," instructs the host machine to summon its stored files. Each time the machine does so, the program copies itself onto the software. The computer's memory can soon turn into a mass of confusion...
...these destructive miniprograms occupy only a few hundred bytes of memory and are therefore virtually invisible among the millions of lines of code contained in a large computer. Worse still, they are ominously easy to create. Says Security Consultant Ian Murphy, 28: "Any decent programmer can write a virus in six hours. A novice can write one in 20 hours with assistance and 30 hours without assistance." The perpetrators are frequently disaffected engineers and computer technicians. Says Security Consultant Sanford Sherizen of Natick, Mass.: "A lot of people grew up in data processing, spent years holding computers together with Scotch...
...albeit menacing. In a program called the Cookie Monster, the screen suddenly goes blank. Seconds later, the words "I want a cookie" appear. If the user types "cookie," the machine returns to normal. A few years ago, Richard Skrenta Jr., an 18-year-old Northwestern University student, wrote a virus program called Cloner. Every 30th time a disk containing the program is used, the virus harmlessly flashes a few verses across the screen; then the interrupted task resumes where it left off. "I wrote it as a joke to see how far it would spread," says Skrenta...