VIRUSES ARE GOOD FOR YOU
                                       
   
   
   Spawn of the devil, computer viruses may help us realize the full
   potential of the Net.
   
   By Julian Dibbell
     _________________________________________________________________
   
   
   
   What scares you most about getting that virus?
   
   Is it the prospect of witnessing your system's gradual decay, one
   nagging symptom following another until one day the whole thing comes
   to a halt? Is it the self-recrimination, all the useless dwelling on
   how much easier things would have been if only you'd protected
   yourself, if only you'd been more careful about whom you associated
   with?
   
   Or is it not, in fact, something deeper? Could it be that what scares
   you most about the virus is not any particular effect it might have,
   but simply its assertive, alien presence, its intrusive otherness?
   Inserting itself into a complicated choreography of subsystems all
   designed to serve your needs and carry out your will, the virus hews
   to its own agenda of survival and reproduction. Its oblivious
   self-interest violates the unity of purpose that defines your system
   as yours. The virus just isn't, well, you. Doesn't that scare you?
   
   And does it really matter whether the virus in question is a
   biological or an electronic one? It should, of course. The analogy
   that gives computer viruses their name is apt enough to make comparing
   bioviruses and their digital analogs an interesting proposition, but
   it falls short in one key respect. Simply put, the only way to fully
   understand the phenomenon of autonomously reproducing computer
   programs is to take into account their one essential difference from
   organic life forms: they are products not of nature but of culture,
   brought forth not by the blind workings of a universe indifferent to
   our aims, but by the conscious effort of human beings like ourselves.
   
   Why then, after a decade of coexistence with computer viruses, does
   our default response to them remain a mix of bafflement and dread? Can
   it be that we somehow refuse to recognize in them the traces of our
   fellow earthlings' shaping hands and minds? And if we could shake
   those hands and get acquainted with those minds, would their creations
   scare us any less?
   
   These are not idle questions. Overcoming our fear of computer viruses
   may be the most important step we can take toward the future of
   information processing. Someday the Net will be the summation of the
   world's total computing resources. All computers will link up into a
   chaotic digital soup in which everything is connected - indirectly or
   directly - to everything else. This coming Net of distributed
   resources will be tremendously powerful, and tremendously hard to
   harness because of its decentralized nature. It will be an ecology of
   computing machines, and managing it will require an ecological
   approach.
   
   Many of the most promising visions of how to coordinate the far-flung
   communication and computing cycles of this emerging platform converge
   on a controversial solution: the use of self-replicators that roam the
   Net. Free-ranging, self-replicating programs, autonomous Net agents,
   digital organisms - whatever they are called, there's an old fashion
   word for them: computer viruses.
   
   Today three very different groups of heretics are creating computer
   viruses. They have almost nothing to do with each other. There are
   scientists interested in the abstract behaviors of self-replicating
   codes, there are developers interested in harnessing the power of
   self-replicating programs, and there are unnamed renegades of the
   virus-writing underground.
   
   Although they share no common experience, all these heretics respect a
   computer virus for its irrepressible mobility, for the self-centered
   autonomy it wrests from a computer environment, and for the surprising
   agility with which it explores opportunities and possibilities. In
   short, virus enthusiasts relate to the virus as a fascinating and
   powerful life form, whether for the fertile creation of yet more
   powerful digital devices, as an entity for study in itself, or, in the
   case of one renegade coder, for reckless individual expression.
   
  Getting a buzz from the Vx
  
   
   
   One computer virus writer in his early 20s lives on unemployment
   checks in a white, working-class exurb of New York City. He tends to
   spend a fair amount of his leisure time at the local videogame arcade
   playing Mortal Kombat II, and would prefer that you didn't know his
   real name. But don't let the slacker r/sum/ fool you: the only
   credential this expert needs is the pseudonym he goes by in the
   computer underground: Hellraiser.
   
   Hellraiser is the founding member of the world-renowned virus-writers'
   group Phalcon/Skism. He is also creator of 40Hex, an electronic zine
   whose lucid programming tips, hair-raising samples of ready-to-run
   viral code, and trash-talking scene reports have done more to inspire
   the creation of viruses in this country than just about anything since
   Robert Morris Jr.'s spectacularly malfunctional worm nearly brought
   down the Internet.
   
   And as if all this weren't enough, Hellraiser also comes equipped with
   the one accessory no self-respecting expert in this cantankerous field
   can do without - his very own pet definition of computer viruses.
   Unlike most such definitions, Hellraiser's is neither very technical
   nor very polemical, and he doesn't go out of his way to make it known.
   "Sure," he'll say, with a casual shrug, as if tossing you the most
   obvious fact in the world: "Viruses are the electronic form of
   graffiti."
   
   Which would probably seem obvious to you too, if you had Hellraiser's
   personal history. For once upon his teenage prime, Hellraiser was also
   a hands-on expert in the more traditional forms of graffiti perfected
   by New York City youth in the 1980s. Going by the handle of Skism, he
   roamed the city streets and train yards with a can of spray paint at
   the ready and a Bronx-bred crew of fellow "writers" at his side,
   searching out the sweet spots in the transit system that would give
   his tag maximum exposure - the subway cars that carried his identity
   over the rails, the truck trailers that hauled it up and down the
   avenues, and the overpasses that announced it to the flow of travelers
   circulating underneath.
   
   In other words, by the time Hellraiser went off to college and
   developed a serious interest in computers, he was already quite cozy
   with the notion of infiltrating other people's technology to spread a
   little of himself as far and wide as possible. So when he discovered
   one day that his PC had come down with a nasty little digital
   infection, his first thought was not, as is often customary, to curse
   the "deviant hackers," "sociopaths," and "assholes" who had written
   the program, but to marvel at the possibilities this new infiltration
   technique had opened up. Street graffiti's ability to scatter tokens
   of one's identity across the landscape of an entire metropolis looked
   provincial in comparison. "With viruses," Hellraiser remembers
   thinking, "you could get your name around the world."
   
   He was right. The program that had infected his own computer in late
   1990, the so-called Jerusalem virus, had spread from Italy to Israel
   to North America before finally making its way into the pirated copy
   of the Norton Utilities that brought it to Hellraiser's hard drive.
   And though Jerusalem's author remained uncredited, other programmers
   from nearly every corner of the globe were pulling off feats of
   long-distance self-aggrandizement that dwarfed anything within the
   reach of America's spray-paint commandos. A kid who called himself Den
   Zuk had launched a virus that was flashing his handle on computer
   screens all over Europe, the US, and South America. Early speculation
   placed its origin in Venezuela, but the virus was eventually tracked
   to its true source in Bandung, Indonesia, when a researcher in Iceland
   guessed that some enigmatic characters in the source code were in fact
   a ham-radio call sign; they made contact with the call sign's
   registered operator, who immediately copped to his authorship of the
   program.
   
   Equally far-ranging was the journey of the Joshi virus, which spread
   from India to parts of Africa and on to the rest of the world, popping
   up every January 5th to command computer users to type "Happy Birthday
   Joshi" if they wanted control of their systems back.
   
   What impressed Hellraiser as much as the vast geographic distances
   covered by viruses, however, was their long range over time. After
   all, a painted graffiti tag would only last as long as it took to fade
   away or be painted over, but viruses, it seemed, might replicate
   forever in the wild. Indeed, the Jerusalem virus had been doing so for
   three years before Hellraiser encountered it, and four years later it
   remains one of the world's most commonly reported viruses. Likewise,
   Den Zuk is still reproducing on computers worldwide six years after it
   first left the island of Java; Joshi continues for the fifth year in a
   row to extort international birthday wishes. Dozens of other viruses
   from the US, Canada, Eastern Europe, Taiwan, Australia, Turkey, Malta,
   and other far-flung locales thrive globally (This despite that the
   antivirus industry spends tens of millions of dollars a year to
   eradicate them.) Bearing encoded bits of their authors' souls - clever
   jokes, crude graphics, friendly greetings, and, of course,
   occasionally, malicious intentions (though in fact the majority of
   viruses found in the wild are designed to do no damage) - viruses roam
   the earth in apparent perpetuity.
   
   For Hellraiser, steeped as he was in graffiti culture's imperative to
   "get the name across," there was only one possible response to this
   new technology of self-projection: he had to get in on the action. But
   how? Virus writing wasn't exactly a standard subject in
   computer-science courses, and even the computer underground - with its
   loose-knit network of bulletin boards and e-zines proffering
   instruction in the illicit arts of hacking and phone phreaking -
   wasn't the most dependable source of virus lore. Occasionally, a hack
   and phreak board might offer a small collection of cryptic viral
   source code for brave souls to experiment with, but as far as
   Hellraiser knew, the only system exclusively devoted to viruses at the
   time was a place called the Virus Exchange, operating out of what was
   then the world's epicenter of virus production: post-Communist
   Bulgaria, where the Cold War's endgame had left a lot of overtrained
   programmers with time on their hands and anarchy on their minds.
   
   Lacking the money or the phreaking skills to dial in to the Virus
   Exchange, Hellraiser made do with what he did have: a live specimen of
   the Jerusalem virus, replicating furiously inside his desktop system
   and poised to trash every program file he tried to run on any upcoming
   Friday the 13th. Carefully, Hellraiser extracted all copies of the
   virus from the computer and holed up in his dorm room to examine its
   workings. He studied it for weeks, and then finally, tentatively, he
   produced a virus of his own. It was a shameless hack really,
   essentially just the Jerusalem code with the tag line "SKISM-1"
   inserted in place of a few of the original characters. But after
   infecting as many computers as he could and subsequently finding his
   creation enshrined in antivirus literature as the "Skism-1" virus,
   Hellraiser swelled with a pride he would later recall with some
   amusement: "Shit, I thought I was the man back then."
   
   Hooked on that buzz, he dove deeper into his studies, aiming for
   proficiency in DOS assembly language, the formidably austere low- down and dirty zine [which] gives examples on writing
   viruses and ... contains code that can be compiled to viruses," wrote
   Hellraiser in the introductory file of 40Hex's March 1991 premiŠre.
   "If you are an antivirus pussy, who is just scared that your hard disk
   will get erased so you have a psychological problem with viruses,
   erase these files. This aint for you."
   
   The warning scared off no one, of course, least of all the alleged
   pussies of the antivirus industry, who took to scouring every new
   issue for a peek inside the mind of the enemy, getting up close and
   personal at last with the phantoms they'd been battling for years. Not
   that the life of the virus hunter was a lonely one. In fact, the
   antivirus community was already in many ways a more advanced
   subculture than that of the virus writers, complete with local color
   and a mystique all its own: the industry pioneer and media darling
   John MacAffee was famed for his giddy morning-after overestimation by
   a factor of 10 of the Internet worm's damage; then there were those
   Bulgarians, the notorious and proud Dark Avenger - who signed, and
   even dedicated, his viruses - and his driven nemesis, Vesselin
   Bontchev. Endlessly revising and debating the burgeoning taxe circulation of the zine while slowly
   steering it toward something suspiciously like respectability.
   Available now in a crisp, desktop-published paper edition as well as
   good old-fashioned e-text, today's 40Hex still brims with the
   gnarliest of viral code and remains a feisty defender of the right to
   create and publish viruses. But it frowns on anyone who looses viruses
   into the wild and is more likely to solicit guest editorials from
   antivirus types than to hurl obscenities at them.
   
   The young hellion who founded the zine would probably not approve -
   that is, if the same young hellion were still around to say anything
   about it. But he isn't. Not really. Hellraiser has undergone some
   changes of his own lately. Once quite cavalier about releasing viruses
   that intentionally deleted files or otherwise "fucked people's shit
   up" (after all, what better way to make your tag linger on in their
   memory?), he eventually decided that creating destructive programs
   just gave virus writing a bad name and resolved thenceforth to produce
   viruses with more or less benign payloads only. And then one day, not
   too long ago and without much fanfare, he simply called it quits.
   Partly, he was starting to chafe at the limited range of programming
   challenges involved in virus creation, he says, but more to the point,
   his evolving young world view had somehow gotten infected by a
   creeping respect for the right of others to control what goes into
   their own digital back yards. Destrsignal a human being can send. "Remember
   my name," the virus says, which - after all - is another way of
   saying: "I'm alive."
   
   This is about as far as most discussions of virus writing get:
   ignorant kids thrashing about in codes, creating horribly simple but
   efficient digital bombs. And even if you take a very generous view
   that the underground virus writers are inadvertently creating new
   forms of life, the discussion of beneficial viruses would have to stop
   here if it weren't for folks like Dr. Mark A. Ludwig.
   
  The mutator in the desert
  
   
   
   Mark Ludwig lives in a desert, and compared to Hellraiser's
   background, seems to hail from an entirely different planet. But
   Ludwig, too, is chasing the elusive nature of computer viruses.
   
   A married man with three young children, Ludwig lives in Tucson,
   Arizona, where barrens of sand and sun and saguaro cactus shimmer not
   too far beyond the sump-cooled confines of his home. But the desert
   where he wanders is someplace else entirely: it's the lonely
   intellectual wilderness reserved for those who practice science on the
   fringe, outside the cozy realms of institutional affiliation,
   professional consensus, or methodological decorum.
   
   He doesn't have to be there. With his PhD in physics from the
   University of Arizona (and his prior course work at Cal Tech and MIT),
   Ludwig could easily return to the fold of respectable researchers if
   he chose. All he'd have to do is let go of his somewhat obsessive
   scholarly pursuit of the wild computer virus, and pick a slightly more
   conventional object of study. Or maybe just pursue his present subject
   with a little more sober attention to devising antivirus
   countermeasures and a lot less gleeful fascination with virusest of the hard-sci
   grind and into a job working with computers, a field that at least
   provided some of the wide-open pioneering spirit that the textbook
   histories of science had promised, even if it moved him further from
   pure science's intimacy with the mysteries of nature.
   
   But not long after that, around 1988, he started picking up reports of
   contagious programs running loose among the machines he now made his
   living from, and the course of his life changed yet again. For Ludwig,
   viruses came bearing the same mind-expanding message-in-a-bottle they
   would not much later be bringing to Hellraiser. Except that Ludwig
   decoded the message a little differently. Where Hellraiser heard the
   signal "I'm alive" coming from the virus's creator, Ludwig understood
   the message as coming directly from the virus itself. Viruses behaved
   like living things: self-reproducing and autonomous. Might we not
   understand life a little better, he wondered, if we can create
   something similar, and study it, and try to understand it? The
   mysteries of nature, in other words, now loomed closer than ever -
   right there on the wide-open technological frontier to which he'd fled
   from the wreckage of his scientific aspirations - and Ludwig couldn't
   resist the temptation to go questing after them once more.
   
   His initial attempts to acquire specimens to observe were frustrating.
   Today's teeming ecology of one-stop Vx trading posts didn't exist.
   When Ludwig approached the antivirus community for access to its
   shareing it with the infectious source code
   intact.
   
   But Ludwig has remained undaunted in the face of the world's
   virophobia. If anything, its vehemence has only sharpened his
   determination to share the wealth of his knowledge. "People think of
   viruses as an invasion from Mars," he says, "and that hurts research
   into these things. My aim is to change people's attitudes, to cut down
   some of the fear."
   
   To that end he has established an annual international virus-writing
   competition, flying cheerfully in the face of the "swarming hordes of
   antivirus developers." (One year's contest rewarded the smallest
   functional DOS virus submitted.) Ludwig also publishes a newsletter
   now, Computer Virus Developments Quarterly, in which he mingles
   detailed technical discussion of viral code with rants against the
   tyrannical tendencies of American government, the moral bankruptcy of
   contemporary Western culture, and (last but not least) the evils of
   repressing detailed te The first
   two volumes of the Santa Fe Institute's Proceedings on Artificial Life
   published in 1989 and 1992 devote several papers to the idea of
   computer viruses as synthetic life. But taking the idea further,
   Ludwig argues that computer viruses, unlike such other forms of
   artificial life as cellular automata, mobots, or genetic programming,
   are the only form of artificial life not biased by the hope of their
   creators. Because computer viruses must exist in an environment (DOS
   in particular) that was designed without any thought of the digital
   organisms that might come to inhabit it, they are free from any
   accusation that the environment's "physics" were written to support
   the emergence of their lifelike behavior. Or to put it more bluntly,
   feral viral ecologies (versus the controlled experiments in university
   labs) represent the only known simulation of life that does not
   implicitly (and quite unscientifically) build God into the system.
   
   Having carefully consf
   encryption impenetrable to scanners. But since the built-in
   subroutines that decrypt the programs for execution cannot themselves
   be enciphered, antivirus programmers simply retooled their scanners to
   look for the decryption code. Later, in step two, the legendary
   Bulgarian writer Dark Avenger came up with a clever innovation known
   as a mutating, or polymorphic, virus. A mutating virus randomly
   reorganizes its decryption algorithm every time it replicates to
   outsmart the policing of the scanner. In step three, antivirus
   engineers devised "heuristic" scanners, built to sniff out all but an
   insignificant percentage of a virus' mutants through educated pattern
   recognition.
   
   Surveying the fossil record of this game, Ludwig found himself
   pondering a logical next move: what if someone were now to develop a
   strain of polymorphs with a genetic memory, so that rather than
   completely reshuffling their structure with every generation, the few
   mutants that escape discovery by heuristics could pass their
   undetectable code on to their offspring?
   
   The prospect of virus populations able to autonomously build up
   immunity to any scanning techniques thrown at them thoroughly
   depressed antivirus programmers. To Ludwig, however, the possibility
   proved too intriguing to wait around for some random underground
   hacker to realize it, and he resolved to do the job himself. The
   result: Ludwig's "Darwinian Genetic Mutation Engine," a programming
   utility that turns any normal DOS virus into a souped-up, genetically
   evolving polymorph, complete with an option for sexual gene-swapping
   between individuals that come into contact in the wild. Curious
   hackers can find the Darwinian Genetic Mutation Engine's complete
   source code in the pages of Computer Viruses, Artificial Life, and
   Evolution, along with detailed experimental results demonstrating the
   ability of Darwinian Genetic Mutation Engine-enhanced viruses to run
   rings around existing scanners. But the program's deeper sig lifelike wonder could be useful if
   we but understood it, rather than the casting of it as the ultimate
   technological taboo.
   
   Ludwig managed a remarkable intellectual shift. He elevated the
   computer virus from the digital equivalent of a can of spray paint to
   an object capable of perhaps infinite variations and almost lifelike
   behavior. He transformed a tool of vandals into a field of scientific
   study by emphasizing a computer virus' biological affinity. But by the
   time Ludwig began publishing, the computer virus was already well on
   its way from the fringes of science to the seat of honor at research
   symposiums.
   
  Booting up the Cambrian explosion
  
   
   
   "I'll be out at my place in the jungle over the weekend," said the
   message, posted in May 1994 from an obscure Internet site in Central
   America, "so I'll be out of e-mail contact till Monday."
   
   And just like that, University of Delaware ecologist Tom Ray (now
   visiting scholar at the Advanced programmers - infusing the vast unused spaces
   of the global computer networks with a roiling digital ecology as
   complex, as fascinating, and ultimately as beneficial to humankind as
   the rain forests that he has long sought to protect and understand.
   
   In short, by infecting the Net with self-replicating code, Ray aims to
   turn it into a jungle.
   
   He didn't start out so ambitious. In the beginning there was just a
   lone drive of a Toshiba laptop to populate, one tiny digital germ to
   do it with, and a hunch Ray had been kicking around for a decade or so
   to spur him on. The hunch was that experiments with self-replicating
   programs (Ray had first heard about them as a Harvard undergrad in the
   late '70s) might add some theoretical rigor to eco-science's
   essentially anecdotal attempts at explaining the abstract processes
   that gave rise to the complex interspecies relationships he had
   observed in the field. "I was frustrated," he would later tell a group
   of colleagues, "because I didn't want to study the products of
   evolution - vines and ants and butterflies. I wanted to study
   evolution itself."
   
   In this, Ray's attraction to self-reproducing programs differed little
   from that of Mark Ludwig (who in fact was not unfamiliar with Ray's
   work by the time he set out to write his magnum opus on computer
   viruses and evolution). Unlike Ludwig, however, Ray felt neither
   philosophically obliged nor ethically disposed to work with viruses
   able to thrive in already existing computer environments. Not that he
   never considered the option. In fact, his initial plan was to set
   mutating machine-language organisms loose in a single computer and
   watch their evolution as they competed against one another for direct
   access to the computer's core memory, a strategy that might have
   evolved viruses superbly adapted to any system based on the same
   instruction set as the original petri chip. But Ray soon scrapped this
   idea - the risk of accidentally releasing his specimens into the wild
   seemed too great. Insteaputer, then one way to get there would be to give it an instruction
   set in which nearly any sequence of bits would make some kind of sense
   to the system's virtual CPU.
   
   So he gave it that instruction. He also equipped his phantom computer
   with a death function, a "Reaper," which would terminate any
   individual program sooner or later - but would always get to the
   oldest or most error-prone programs first. Thus primed to carry out
   the requisite natural selections, Ray's digital ecosphere was nearly
   complete. He called it Tierra (Spanish for "earth") and started
   preparing the final touch: an inhabitant. Later dubbed "the Ancestor,"
   it was the first worm Tom Ray ever created - an 80-byte-long
   self-replicating machine written in Tierra's quirky assembly language
   - and as it happens, it was also the last. Once loosed into the Tierra
   environment installed on Ray's laptop, the creature's offspring
   quickly spread to the new world's every corner, within minutes
   displaying the evolutionary transformations that would "write" Ray's
   organisms from then on.
   
   A 79-byte variation appeared, rapidly displacing its slightly clunkier
   predecessors, then smaller descendants followed - a 45-byter, a 51,
   eventually even a 22 - entering a taxonomy that would grow to
   accommodate hundreds of subspecies as Ray played with Tierra in the
   months and years to follow. The swift and drastic size reductions of
   those first runs startled Rt dreams, that was what I wanted," Ray later told author
   Steven Levy. "I didn't write the Ancestor with the idea that it was
   going to produce all this."
   
   As much as this bustling ecology-in-a-box thrilled and surprised Ray,
   however, it soon began to dawn on him that the Ancestor had produced
   something even more unexpected: high-quality software. Almost all of
   the Ancestor's progeny displayed some improvement in the efficiency of
   their code, but in a few cases, evolution seemed to have attained a
   level of tight-wound optimization difficult for even the most wizardly
   of human software engineers to achieve, and Ray couldn't help
   wondering if there was a way to yoke this inhuman skill to the
   development of practical applications.
   
   It wasn't an unheard-of notion. As long ago as the early '60s, for
   instance, cutting-edge programmers had begun experimenting with what
   they called "genetic algorithms" - pools of software subroutines
   repeatedly multiplied, mutated, and weeded according to how well they
   performed a given task.
   
   Two decades later, in the same ground-breaking work that established
   the ability of digital viruses to penetrate nearly any system
   defenses, computer scientist Fred Cg seem to cry out for an
   evolutionary approach. "We will probably never be able to write such
   software, as it is way too complex," Ray observes. "Yet we know that
   evolution can handle that kind of problem."
   
   The reason we know that, of course, is that we - and all other
   multicellular organisms - are wetware embodiments of frightfully
   complex parallel processes. But that fact posed a new challenge for
   Ray. Despite the great variety of digital forms Tierra had generated,
   it remained an ecology of one-celled organisms, none much larger or
   much more complicated than the 80-byte Ancestor. In fairness it should
   be pointed out that the terrestrial biosphere spent its first 3
   billion years or so in a similar state before finally exploding into
   multicellular diversity at the dawn of the Cambrian era (a mere 600
   million years ago). Yet if Tierra was ever to prove its full value as
   a software-writing machine - or indeed as a scientific model of
   evolution - sooner or later it would have to cough up a Cambrian
   explosion of its own. And since the key to this burst of complexity
   seemed to Ray to lie in challenging his evolving creatures with more
   intricate problems than the simple bit-copying tasks they'd grappled
   with thus far, he decided that the explosion wouldn't happen nearly
   soon enough if Tierra remained stuck inside conventional computers,
   and he began looking into the possibility of installing Tierra on a
   parallel-processing system.
   
   But then one day in early 1994, Ray h
   breeding." Harvested, domesticated and then neutered of their
   self-replicating properties, these prize specimens of code could then
   be translated from Tierran language into standard programming
   languages and set to work at any number of tasks. Ray suspects some
   form of intelligent network agents would be the likeliest first
   applications to be culled, but he prefers to emphasize that the most
   useful products of the digital jungle would be as difficult to predict
   as rice, pigs, penicillin, and silkworms might have been for an
   observer of the pre-Cambrian ooze of early carbon-based life.
   
   There's a whiff of science fiction rising from all this, of course,
   but Ray is hardly indulging in idle speculation. Already a team of
   computer scientists has gathered under his supervision to work
   full-time on hammering out the technical details of the plan. He's
   accustomed by now to dealing with his listeners' occasional anxieties
   about the prospect of Tierran viral-like pests infiltrating the
   workaday network environment. "I explain why the things can't escape,"
   he says, "and that quiets the nervous people, but some of them
   continue to look nervous."
   
   But when the time comes to put their systems where their mouths are,
   how many snded, and irrepressible. It's an unnerving
   prospect. Yet it wouldn't have to be - not if we prepared for it by
   actively cultivating a digital biodiversity of the sort Tom Ray
   proposes. This is a niche that will be filled, whether we fill it
   deliberately or not.
   
   "We're just going to have to live with them," artificial life
   researcher Chris Langton says of computer viruses. Our global web of
   digital systems, he predicts, is fast unfolding towards a degree of
   complexity rich enough to support a staggering diversity of
   autonomously evolving programs.
   
  Viruses in a suit and tie
  
   
   
   But the future of beneficial viruses is not only in the hands of
   eccentrics such as Hellraiser, Ludwig, or Ray. The good folks at
   General Magic corporation are eager to put viral code on a firmer and
   decidedly more lucrative footing. Not that they like to hear it said
   that they have anything to do with viruses, mind you.
   
   General Magic manufactures a hand-held communication device that
   relies on a nifty new network-streamlining program language called
   Telescript. Announced earlier this year with the very visible backing
   of such info-dollar heavyweights as AT&T, Apple, Sony, and Matsushita,
   Telescript proposes to do good things. Its intelligent agents, General
   Magic co-founder Bill Atkinson promises, will soon be flitting about
   cyberspace on your behalf, visiting remote commercial sites to buy,
   sell, and trade information for you, and generally behaving themselves
   with all the decorum you'd expect from a personal digital valet.
   
   Still, despite rather severe restrictions on the agents' ability to
   replicate, it's hard to deny certain broad similarities between
   intelligent agents and the offerings of your typscript,
   additionally, makes use of a battery of cryptographically secured
   restrictions to ensure that its agents don't subvert control of the
   host machine, either by accident or by malicious design).
   
   And for another thing, the fact that all the interpreters speak the
   same programming language regardless of the underlying operating
   system and hardware means that, as the base of interpreters approaches
   omnipresence on the world's computer networks, the Net approaches the
   condition of a single, vast, and unmappable supercomputer, with each
   wandering digital organism a process in one worldwide parallel
   computation.
   
   Taken together, these two features represent something of a watershed
   in the history of computing. It has long been observed, rather
   wistfully, that in principle the world's computers sum up to one
   gigantic parallel processor, and that the crushing bulk of that
   metacomputer's CPU cycles goes to waste, unused. Only now, however,
   with the advent of protocols like Telescript and Tierra, do we have
   the means to deploy such processes that treat the Net as one machine,
   safely and sensibly. This, then, is the real significance of these
   endeavors.
   
  The dark side of benefits
  
   
   
   Trying to imagine the marvels that pour forth once you've successfully
   tapped a computer as elaborate as the Net is as futile as trying to
   map the future of a society, or of a life - or of life itself.
   
   Of course, trying to foresee the risks that could emerge from that
   same computer is an equally hopeless task. But as it happens, we are
   bound to face those risks whether or not we seek to harness the full
   power of the Net, since the teeming and inevitable population of
   uncaged digital organisms will in any case plow forward with its own
   relentless exploration of the Net's capabilities. All we would missprove difficult to distinguish from the meaning of our own
   existence.
   
  Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Viruses (But Were Afraid to Ask)
  
   
   
   Little Black Book of Viruses ($14.95) and Computer Viruses, Artificial
   Life, and Evolution ($22.95) by Mark Ludwig are available from
   American Eagle Publications Inc., PO Box 41401, Tucson, AZ, 85717.
   
   Tom Ray can be found at ray@hip.atr.co.jp. A copy of his proposal for
   the networkwide biodiversity project can be found at
   ftp://tierra.slhs.udel.edu/ tierra/doc/reserves.tex, and the source
   code for the Tierra program is
   ftp://tierra.slhs.udel.edu/tierra/tierra.tar.z.
   
   For executable DOS code on disk send a check for $US50 (payable to
   "Virtual Life") to: Virtual Life, 25631 Jorgensen Road, Newman, CA,
   95360.
   
   Fred Cohen's book It's Alive! The New Breed of Living Computer
   Programs (Wiley & Sons, $39.95) is a nice introduction to the question
   of viruses as a-life. The book includes a disk of reproducing
   Macintosh programs.
   
   To find out more on 40 Hex, e-mail fortyhex@phantom.com.
   
   
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   Julian Dibbell is a New York-based writer who contributes regularly to
   the Village Voice.
   
   
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