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 Subject: Re: [MASROB@UBVMS.BITNET: Mac Virus?] >From: CNSM CCR - Rob Rothkopf > >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 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 - -------- Follow up: From: Steve Cavrak 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 ********************* Downloaded From P-80 International Information Systems 304-744-2253