Friday, March 14, 2008

Viruses: from Dibbell 2/95 to CNN 3/08

The front page of CNN.com reads, “From iPods to navigation systems, some of today's hottest gadgets are landing on store shelves with some unwanted extras from the factory -- pre-installed viruses that steal passwords, open doors for hackers and make computers spew spam.”
The full article, entitled “Electronic gadgets latest sources of computer viruses,” blames workers in China for the cyber pandemic: “…a careless worker [plugs in] an infected music player into a factory computer used for testing…” and voila. This sheds light on the invisibility and quick and easy dissemination of today’s virus which could potentially come “from anywhere,” which is not controlled, and which penetrates the distributed network that we read about in Galloway.

In a related article on phishing (“Cyberthieves go phishing to rob banks”), CNN says that the essential characteristic of computer viruses has morphed from chaos-causing to somber crime-propagating. This transformation has made viruses more dangerous to users, with the number of “‘high-severity vulnerabilities’ up by 28 percent in 2007 compared with 2006.” Moreover, viruses are becoming harder to detect, according to CNN: for example, “Most users, even the savvy ones, wouldn't know that their server settings have been hijacked.” This is quite at odds with Dibbell’s portrayal of viruses in “Viruses are Good for You” as extensions of individuals’ street graffiti into cyberspace—graffiti, after all, is neither high-risk nor invisible.

It is difficult to take seriously Dibbell’s naïve, messianic end of cyber-history in which the fear of computer viruses will be overcome and in which we will shake “fellow earthlings’ shaping hands” (1). Dibbell characterizes the virus simply as a violator of the unity of purpose that defines one’s computer system, or as “noise on the line” (5). This characterization is outdated in light of the transformation of virus nature aforementioned. The motivation behind a virus is less to violate unity of purpose than it is to infringe on privacy and infiltrate loci of important information, and this is more villainous than “bad attitude” (4).

After making lame comparisons of viruses to cockroaches (eloquently put as “little boogers you can’t see”) and guns, CNN’s “Electronic gadgets…” calls for stricter (more centralized) quality control in factories and urges users to update their antivirus software. This is only a small step to managing the ever-evolving hazards in a distributed network. Ecological management of a “chaotic digital soup” (Dibbell 2) is of course a laborious topic and I don’t intend on expounding on it here.

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