Open Virus

[Will Smith]

I thought others might enjoy this bit of humor:

Will
wilsmith at iglou.com
   Thursday,  August 28 12:01 AM EDT

   Open Source Community
   Developing Their Own Viruses
   By [15]Brian Briggs

   Helsinki, Finland - Open source developers plan to challenge
   Microsoft's dominance in the world of viruses by developing their own
   through the Open Virus Project (OVP), and unlike proprietary Microsoft
   viruses, the open source versions will infect across all platforms.

   [biohazard.jpg] Heading the development of the OVP is Jukka Koskelin.
   He explained, "We took a look at the virus marketspace and realized
   that Microsoft has over a 95% share of all viruses developed. I don't
   think the Linux community can be taken seriously if we don't increase
   our share in that area."

   "The viruses we're developing will work cross-platform unlike
   Microsoft viruses which only work on Windows systems. There are ports
   to Linux, *BSD, Solaris, and yes, even Windows. We should have a Mac
   port in a couple of months," Koskelin continued.

   The OVP currently has two viruses in beta: "eyespy" and "GPLdaemon."
   Eyespy installs a spyware checking program, and notifies OVP, so they
   can inform the user that they're being spied on. GPLdaemon uses spare
   CPU cycles to check every file on an infected users hard drive
   bit-by-bit to see if it contains any software that violates the GPL.

   The viruses will arrive as .tar.gz attachments and will use automake.
   Both eyespy and GPLdaemon will need to be compiled and executed by the
   user for them to be infected. The viruses can use any e-mail program
   to propagate, and do not require Outlook or Outlook Express.

   "We had a lot of arguments on the OVP mailing list about whether to
   send it out as source code or as an executable, but eventually we
   decided that source would spread much more rapidly as it would be
   optimized for each system," said Koskelin. "I know a few programmers
   outside the project have already created .rpm and .deb packages,
   however."

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