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." References Visible links 1. http://www.bbspot.com/index.html 2. http://www.bbspot.com/politics/ 3. http://www.bbspot.com/Legal/support_faq.html 4. http://www.bbspot.com/Log/index.html 5. http://www.guptamedia.com/f-ad.php?BBspot.com
