Letters.In defense of computers In your article "Beyond virtual vaccinations" (SN: 7/31/99, p. 77), you mentioned that the first computer virus was a 1987 bug called "Brain." I also remember a virus named "Scores" that attacked Macintosh systems around the same time. Steve Dana Irvine, Calif. The July 31 issue contained an interesting summary of research into antiviral antiviral /an·ti·vi·ral/ (-vi´ral) destroying viruses or suppressing their replication, or an agent that so acts. an·ti·vi·ral adj. strategies for computer systems. One consequence of such elaborate immune systems could be autoimmune diseases Autoimmune diseases A group of diseases, like rheumatoid arthritis and systemic lupus erythematosus, in which immune cells turn on the body, attacking various tissues and organs. Mentioned in: Complement Deficiencies, Premature Menopause and resistance to "transplants." Imagine an operating system's immune system attacking itself because the patterns of its users change (maybe in a school computer at the beginning of a new year). Or imagine having to supply immunosuppressive Immunosuppressive Any agent that suppresses the immune response of an individual. Mentioned in: Antirheumatic Drugs, Graft-vs.-Host Disease, Immunosuppressant Drugs immunosuppressive 1. pertaining to or inducing immunosuppression. 2. software in order to add a hard drive and not have it be rejected. Imagine viruses with the ability to snare snare (snar) a wire loop for removing polyps and tumors by encircling them at the base and closing the loop. snare n. and present "self" tags from the host to avoid detection. I'm sure that researchers will overcome this fox-and-rabbit arms race after a few more iterations, but one can't help but be impressed by the depth of the biological metaphor. David Honig Irvine, Calif. Mainframe computer operating systems Operating systems can be categorized by technology, ownership, licensing, working state, usage, and by many other characteristics. In practice, many of these groupings may overlap. provide safeguards that prevent a program from addressing areas of memory outside a specified region or writing to data sets critical to the system. The Microsoft Windows operating system used by virtually all personal computers provides none of these safeguards. Windows is inherently incapable of protecting itself, which, in my opinion, is a fatal flaw in the design of the operating system. Instead of resorting to methodologies that are inordinately complex, computationally expensive, and probably temporary, researchers should be working to build safeguards into the PC operating system itself. Virgil H. Soule Frederick, Md The research done by Steve R. White at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center The Thomas J. Watson Research Center is the headquarters for the IBM Research Division. The center is on three sites, with the main laboratory in Yorktown Heights, New York, 45 miles north of New York City, a building in Hawthorne, New York, and offices in Cambridge, seems almost identical to that attributed to computer scientist Jeffrey O. Kephart at that same facility, as reported in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN and DISCOVER in 1994. Is this research in any way related to that now being reported? Roberto De Leon San Juan, Puerto Rico San Juan (IPA: [saŋ hwaŋ]) (from the Spanish San Juan Bautista, "Saint John the Baptist") is the capital and largest municipality on Puerto Rico. Yes. Kephart works with Steve White's team at IBM (International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY, www.ibm.com) The world's largest computer company. IBM's product lines include the S/390 mainframes (zSeries), AS/400 midrange business systems (iSeries), RS/6000 workstations and servers (pSeries), Intel-based servers (xSeries) . The work we reported is the latest version of IBM's digital immune system, of which Kephart's work was a part. In fact, in an earlier report in SCIENCE NEWS (SN: 7/23/94, p. 63), we spoke to Kephart. --D. Christensen Send communications to: Editor, SCIENCE NEWS 1719 N Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20036 or scinews@sciserv.org All letters subject to editing. |
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