Virology is Virology

[J]

I admit right away that biology is not my specialty. I'm a computer person and studying cells was never as appealing as packet sniffing. However, thanks to my friends I know a good bit about it (more than I'd like), and it amazes me just how much it is like computing. Both try to find specific ways in either without notice (computing - backdoors, biology - simple contact/breathing) or through more active measures (brute force, insect/animal bites).

I think the most interesting part is how IT security and Doctor's are running into the same problem, mutation. Mutations by any virus keep it alive by making the once useful vaccine (antivirus) useless. It usually takes something simple, such as using a different receptor(port) or perhaps mimicking another process by the (human/computer) system. This is what is keeping some of the most well known human and computer infections alive to this day. What is most important to know is that the main difference is USUALLY that the computer virus needs help to mutate whereas the human virus does not. Though this will most likely not be the case soon. This all makes me wonder what the future of technology will bring, if one person were to let a self mutating virus onto the web, infecting all computers that share with eachother... which should make small work of our large infrastructures. Would be an interesting and scary thing to see.

*picture from www.gizmodo.com

[Ambrianna]

Good convo.. This echoes some thinking I have done in the past and only this evening was wondering what the equivalent term for PhD in computer techie world would be... I know! Already, I'll look it up! loll.....

In reading that post, I also considered that human viruses do need help, even if only in the form of an amenable environment, or method of transmission. In terms of size, size generally relates to power for either, right? .But, rather than porportion being the issue, I'm thinking prevalence of either.

[J]

Yes download time would become an issue. I'm not saying to try, I would rather such a thing didn't exist. The theory of it amuses me, but until you can download like 5 Gbps without being noticed, I wouldn't see it worthwhile :)

[mindcorrosive]

The size thing is important, if it is supposed to spread fast - if it takes several minutes or hours to just download the whole thing, it's not going to be very useful. And you are probably right about the random mutations in real viruses - although it might as well be a mechanism we don't yet understand and call it "random" instead.

[J]

Not necessarily. Human viruses, just like humans, can have random mutations that are caused completely by mathematical chance. I know because my friends work with these mutations for a living. Sometimes people just get screwed so to speak.

As for the computers, I never said that one did exist, I was saying that mutation is the biggest difference between them. And I seriously doubt it would be made anytime soon if it were created. But if you were going to build a self mutational virus, why would you worry about size? Even if it were noticed it could change itself, so whats the point in hiding?

[mindcorrosive]

Strictly speaking, human viruses *does* need help to mutate - it is caused by a change of environment, e.g. lifespan of infected individuals, infection rate, etc.

Thanks to the imperfect programming paradigms we have these days, a highly adaptive virus does not exist yet. The reason is simple - the amount of complexity required to achieve proper self-mutation behaviour (not randomly, but with respect to the environment) is huge, and you'd probably want to keep it simple and small.. What kind of virus would be that of size several hundred megs anyway?