Monday, 15 May 2000
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(Editor's Note: It seems that many readers of this article believe that emailing it to another person will cause that person's computer to become infected with a computer virus. That is totally false. Emailing this article to someone will not infect that person's computer with any kind of computer virus. It is astonishing that so many people have taken the article to mean that it can achieve viral propagation. It is even more astonishing that so many people, having reached this totally false conclusion, then reach the morally suspect conclusion that infecting another person's computer with a virus is morally praiseworthy. But that appears to be, alas, the world we live in.)
In nature, virii sometimes cross species. For example, some researchers posit that HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, may have begun as the Simian Immunodefficiency Virus in some great ape species, and may have either jumped to humans through the practice of eating monkeys, or through the use of ground monkey organs as a substrate for growing the polio vaccine. In other examples, pigs transmitted a deadly virus to humans in Malaysia, and West Nile Virus Encephalitis was transmitted from birds to humans in New York, both just last year. Many strains of influenza are also passed from livestock to humans.
According to this short item in the New York Times, in at least one case the LoveBug virus jumped the species barrier. Reporters received a FAX that contained not only the now-famous text of the Trojan ("Kindly check the attached LOVELETTER coming from me"), but two pages of Visual Basic source code of the virus itself.
The Times piece compares it to the virus in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. Of course, it's not so big a deal yet; there's no way for this virus to cross to our own bodies. But what if, one day, in addition to simple bitmaps of printed pages, FAX machines started sending more complex instructions to each other? Or perhaps they already do, and the first great FAX epedemic is waiting to erupt?
This is LoveBug Virus Crosses the Species Boundary <http://monkeyfist.com/articles/515>