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When I first heard of computer viruses, I figured they were like UFO's -- a paranoid fantasy from the same loony-tunes who blame the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations for universal product codes that come in three groups of six bar-code sequences, thus producing 666, the mark of the beast, and thereby enslaving us forevermore to the Bilderburgers, the Bavarian Illuminati and the Knights Templar.
Later some third-hand virus reports seemed credible, and then last week, real people whom I know got hit by the Michelangelo virus. So I developed my own dark paranoid theory. Consider two facts:
1. It is a blatant lie that computer expertise guarantees you a challenging, well-paid career. Don't believe the ads for correspondence schools, or those politicians who promise that laid-off steel workers will prosper if they can just be retrained to maintain stack frames, redirect vectored interrupts and install Windows.
In truth, you can struggle to be reasonably fluent in BASIC, C, SPITBOL and assembly language, as I did, and still be dead broke. My phone does not ring constantly with people offering work. Nor am I unique. The master programmer who taught me most of this, a genius who can port a 680x0 Unix program to a RISC platform in a weekend, just called to borrow my log chains for moving some heavy equipment. He's setting up a forge so that he can sell blacksmithing in addition to compilers and consultation.
2. The route to wealth in America is to create a disease
and sell the cure. Listerine may be the best example. Its
promoters fabricated the word halitosis.
Their ads
made people afraid they might suffer from this dread
affliction. Then the company sold the cure and got rich.
General Motors used to buy city streetcar systems and junk
them, thereby creating the problem of no way to get from
here to there.
The cure was for everybody to buy cars
from General Motors.
Now, take a computer wizard who feels angry because he
devoted years to mastering the intricacies of the bizarre
80x86 segmented architecture and undocumented MS-DOS
functions, and he still has no money. So the hacker invents
a disease -- a computer virus which will spread and garner
lots of publicity. Then he sells the cure -- a
virus-inoculation program,
or for those who didn't
get it in time, expensive data recovery
services.
It's such a good idea that I hate myself for not thinking of it first. I knew everything I needed to know in order to provide well for my family, and yet I lacked that good old American entrepreneurial spunk that built the greatest economy in the world.
But I'm disappointed with the virus hackers. The IRS has computers. The DEA has computers. The White House has computers. Why couldn't the virus-makers provide a benefit to society, instead of picking on the little guys?
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