WIRED 3.02: "Viruses Are Good for You" by Julian Dibbell

Viruses Are Good for You:  Spawn of the devil, computer viruses may help us realize
the full potential of the Net. 
By Julian Dibbell 



What scares you most about getting that virus? 
Is it the prospect of witnessing your system's gradual decay, one nagging 
symptom following another until one day the whole thing comes to a halt? Is it 
the self-recrimination, all the useless dwelling on how much easier things would 
have been if only you'd protected yourself, if only you'd been more careful 
about whom you associated with? 
Or is it not, in fact, something deeper? Could it be that what scares you most 
about the virus is not any particular effect it might have, but simply its 
assertive, alien presence, its intrusive otherness? Inserting itself into a 
complicated choreography of subsystems all designed to serve your needs and 
carry out your will, the virus hews to its own agenda of survival and 
reproduction. Its oblivious self-interest violates the unity of purpose that 
defines your system as yours. The virus just isn't, well, you. Doesn't that 
scare you? 
And does it really matter whether the virus in question is a biological or an 
electronic one? It should, of course. The analogy that gives computer viruses 
their name is apt enough to make comparing bioviruses and their digital analogs 
an interesting proposition, but it falls short in one key respect. Simply put, 
the only way to fully understand the phenomenon of autonomously reproducing 
computer programs is to take into account their one essential difference from 
organic life forms: they are products not of nature but of culture, brought 
forth not by the blind workings of a universe indifferent to our aims, but by 
the conscious effort of human beings like ourselves. 
Why then, after a decade of coexistence with computer viruses, does our default 
response to them remain a mix of bafflement and dread? Can it be that we somehow 
refuse to recognize in them the traces of our fellow earthlings' shaping hands 
and minds? And if we could shake those hands and get acquainted with those 
minds, would their creations scare us any less? 
These are not idle questions. Overcoming our fear of computer viruses may be the 
most important step we can take toward the future of information processing. 
Someday the Net will be the summation of the world's total computing resources. 
All computers will link up into a chaotic digital soup in which everything is 
connected - indirectly or directly - to everything else. This coming Net of 
distributed resources will be tremendously powerful, and tremendously hard to 
harness because of its decentralized nature. It will be an ecology of computing 
machines, and managing it will require an ecological approach. 
Many of the most promising visions of how to coordinate the far-flung 
communication and computing cycles of this emerging platform converge on a 
controversial solution: the use of self-replicators that roam the Net. 
Free-ranging, self-replicating programs, autonomous Net agents, digital 
organisms - whatever they are called, there's an old fashion word for them: 
computer viruses. 
Today three very different groups of heretics are creating computer viruses. 
They have almost nothing to do with each other. There are scientists interested 
in the abstract behaviors of self-replicating codes, there are developers 
interested in harnessing the power of self-replicating programs, and there are 
unnamed renegades of the virus-writing underground. 
Although they share no common experience, all these heretics respect a computer 
virus for its irrepressible mobility, for the self-centered autonomy it wrests 
from a computer environment, and for the surprising agility with which it 
explores opportunities and possibilities. In short, virus enthusiasts relate to 
the virus as a fascinating and powerful life form, whether for the fertile 
creation of yet more powerful digital devices, as an entity for study in itself, 
or, in the case of one renegade coder, for reckless individual expression. 
Getting a buzz from the Vx
One computer virus writer in his early 20s lives on unemployment checks in a 
white, working-class exurb of New York City. He tends to spend a fair amount of 
his leisure time at the local videogame arcade playing Mortal Kombat II, and 
would prefer that you didn't know his real name. But don't let the slacker 
r/sum/ fool you: the only credential this expert needs is the pseudonym he goes 
by in the computer underground: Hellraiser. 
Hellraiser is the founding member of the world-renowned virus-writers' group 
Phalcon/Skism. He is also creator of 40Hex, an electronic zine whose lucid 
programming tips, hair-raising samples of ready-to-run viral code, and 
trash-talking scene reports have done more to inspire the creation of viruses in 
this country than just about anything since Robert Morris Jr.'s spectacularly 
malfunctional worm nearly brought down the Internet. 
And as if all this weren't enough, Hellraiser also comes equipped with the one 
accessory no self-respecting expert in this cantankerous field can do without - 
his very own pet definition of computer viruses. Unlike most such definitions, 
Hellraiser's is neither very technical nor very polemical, and he doesn't go out 
of his way to make it known. "Sure," he'll say, with a casual shrug, as if 
tossing you the most obvious fact in the world: "Viruses are the electronic form 
of graffiti." 
Which would probably seem obvious to you too, if you had Hellraiser's personal 
history. For once upon his teenage prime, Hellraiser was also a hands-on expert 
in the more traditional forms of graffiti perfected by New York City youth in 
the 1980s. Going by the handle of Skism, he roamed the city streets and train 
yards with a can of spray paint at the ready and a Bronx-bred crew of fellow 
"writers" at his side, searching out the sweet spots in the transit system that 
would give his tag maximum exposure - the subway cars that carried his identity 
over the rails, the truck trailers that hauled it up and down the avenues, and 
the overpasses that announced it to the flow of travelers circulating 
underneath. 
In other words, by the time Hellraiser went off to college and developed a 
serious interest in computers, he was already quite cozy with the notion of 
infiltrating other people's technology to spread a little of himself as far and 
wide as possible. So when he discovered one day that his PC had come down with a 
nasty little digital infection, his first thought was not, as is often 
customary, to curse the "deviant hackers," "sociopaths," and "assholes" who had 
written the program, but to marvel at the possibilities this new infiltration 
technique had opened up. Street graffiti's ability to scatter tokens of one's 
identity across the landscape of an entire metropolis looked provincial in 
comparison. "With viruses," Hellraiser remembers thinking, "you could get your 
name around the world." 
He was right. The program that had infected his own computer in late 1990, the 
so-called Jerusalem virus, had spread from Italy to Israel to North America 
before finally making its way into the pirated copy of the Norton Utilities that 
brought it to Hellraiser's hard drive. And though Jerusalem's author remained 
uncredited, other programmers from nearly every corner of the globe were pulling 
off feats of long-distance self-aggrandizement that dwarfed anything within the 
reach of America's spray-paint commandos. A kid who called himself Den Zuk had 
launched a virus that was flashing his handle on computer screens all over 
Europe, the US, and South America. Early speculation placed its origin in 
Venezuela, but the virus was eventually tracked to its true source in Bandung, 
Indonesia, when a researcher in Iceland guessed that some enigmatic characters 
in the source code were in fact a ham-radio call sign; they made contact with 
the call sign's registered operator, who immediately copped to his authorship of 
the program. 
Equally far-ranging was the journey of the Joshi virus, which spread from India 
to parts of Africa and on to the rest of the world, popping up every January 5th 
to command computer users to type "Happy Birthday Joshi" if they wanted control 
of their systems back. 
What impressed Hellraiser as much as the vast geographic distances covered by 
viruses, however, was their long range over time. After all, a painted graffiti 
tag would only last as long as it took to fade away or be painted over, but 
viruses, it seemed, might replicate forever in the wild. Indeed, the Jerusalem 
virus had been doing so for three years before Hellraiser encountered it, and 
four years later it remains one of the world's most commonly reported viruses. 
Likewise, Den Zuk is still reproducing on computers worldwide six years after it 
first left the island of Java; Joshi continues for the fifth year in a row to 
extort international birthday wishes. Dozens of other viruses from the US, 
Canada, Eastern Europe, Taiwan, Australia, Turkey, Malta, and other far-flung 
locales thrive globally (This despite that the antivirus industry spends tens of 
millions of dollars a year to eradicate them.) Bearing encoded bits of their 
authors' souls - clever jokes, crude graphics, friendly greetings, and, of 
course, occasionally, malicious intentions (though in fact the majority of 
viruses found in the wild are designed to do no damage) - viruses roam the earth 
in apparent perpetuity. 
For Hellraiser, steeped as he was in graffiti culture's imperative to "get the 
name across," there was only one possible response to this new technology of 
self-projection: he had to get in on the action. But how? Virus writing wasn't 
exactly a standard subject in computer-science courses, and even the computer 
underground - with its loose-knit network of bulletin boards and e-zines 
proffering instruction in the illicit arts of hacking and phone phreaking - 
wasn't the most dependable source of virus lore. Occasionally, a hack and phreak 
board might offer a small collection of cryptic viral source code for brave 
souls to experiment with, but as far as Hellraiser knew, the only system 
exclusively devoted to viruses at the time was a place called the Virus 
Exchange, operating out of what was then the world's epicenter of virus 
production: post-Communist Bulgaria, where the Cold War's endgame had left a lot 
of overtrained programmers with time on their hands and anarchy on their minds. 
Lacking the money or the phreaking skills to dial in to the Virus Exchange, 
Hellraiser made do with what he did have: a live specimen of the Jerusalem 
virus, replicating furiously inside his desktop system and poised to trash every 
program file he tried to run on any upcoming Friday the 13th. Carefully, 
Hellraiser extracted all copies of the virus from the computer and holed up in 
his dorm room to examine its workings. He studied it for weeks, and then 
finally, tentatively, he produced a virus of his own. It was a shameless hack 
really, essentially just the Jerusalem code with the tag line "SKISM-1" inserted 
in place of a few of the original characters. But after infecting as many 
computers as he could and subsequently finding his creation enshrined in 
antivirus literature as the "Skism-1" virus, Hellraiser swelled with a pride he 
would later recall with some amusement: "Shit, I thought I was the man back 
then." 
Hooked on that buzz, he dove deeper into his studies, aiming for proficiency in 
DOS assembly language, the formidably austere low-level programming dialect in 
which Jerusalem was written (like the vast majority of computer viruses then and 
now). He quickly acquired the ability to produce viruses he could truly say were 
his, and along with this ability, he picked up the beginnings of a rep among New 
York-area denizens of the underground. Gradually, through the hack/phreak (h/p) 
bulletin-board scene, he made contact with other isolated virus writers - 
subculture orphans compared with the h/p crowd and its Legions of Doom, MODs, 
Chaos Clubs, and other constantly forming and re-forming groups and factions. 
Hellraiser started wondering why he shouldn't put together a group of his own. 
Soon enough, the retired graffiti bomber was again running with a crew, formally 
known as Smart Kids Into Sick Methods (Skism for short) and dedicated to 
sharpening the virus-writing skills of both its members and the virophilic 
public at large. 
And it was to serve more or less those lofty ends that Skism's electronic house 
journal 40Hex was born. Named for the assembly-language function by which 
viruses copy themselves, the publication hit the boards of the Vx underground 
with an infectiousness all its own. (Vx, short for virus exchange, denotes all 
boards devoted, like their Bulgarian namesake, to virus discussion and traffic 
in viral source code.) Its unapologetic bad attitude was a brash wake-up call to 
the still-embryonic virus-writers' community. "This is a down and dirty zine 
[which] gives examples on writing viruses and ... contains code that can be 
compiled to viruses," wrote Hellraiser in the introductory file of 40Hex's March 
1991 première. "If you are an antivirus pussy, who is just scared that your hard 
disk will get erased so you have a psychological problem with viruses, erase 
these files. This aint for you." 
The warning scared off no one, of course, least of all the alleged pussies of 
the antivirus industry, who took to scouring every new issue for a peek inside 
the mind of the enemy, getting up close and personal at last with the phantoms 
they'd been battling for years. Not that the life of the virus hunter was a 
lonely one. In fact, the antivirus community was already in many ways a more 
advanced subculture than that of the virus writers, complete with local color 
and a mystique all its own: the industry pioneer and media darling John MacAffee 
was famed for his giddy morning-after overestimation by a factor of 10 of the 
Internet worm's damage; then there were those Bulgarians, the notorious and 
proud Dark Avenger - who signed, and even dedicated, his viruses - and his 
driven nemesis, Vesselin Bontchev. Endlessly revising and debating the 
burgeoning taxonomy of virus species, nervously policing the boundary between 
the great unwashed and those trustworthy enough to handle "live" specimens, the 
world of antivirus research offered its initiates a thrill somewhere between the 
delightful romance of butterfly collecting and the grim camaraderie of working 
for the National Security Agency. 
In comparison, virus writing - while obviously not without its kicks - lacked 
community. But in the months and years following 40Hex's d/but, that began to 
change. The previously inchoate and virtually invisible virus-writing 
underground at last coalesced and shifted into high gear. Various groups 
proliferated and crossbred: Skism merged with another New York posse called 
Phalcon to form the Phalcon/Skism supergroup, while the pan-European TridenT 
team and the Canadian-Australian-Swiss-Taiwanese-multinational NuKE crew quickly 
rose to challenge Phalcon/Skism's prestige and programming skills. Zines 
multiplied, too: NuKE's Info Journal and West Coast virus writer Urnst Kouch's 
Crypt Newsletter challenged 40Hex's hegemony, as did the number of so-called Vx 
bulletin boards that rocketed from a handful worldwide to rough estimates of as 
many as 200 at present. 
Amid all the rapid growth it helped set in motion, 40Hex has kept pace. After 
the first four raucous issues, Hellraiser handed over the editorial reigns to 
Phalcon's designated archivist, Garbage Heap, who has steadily increased the 
circulation of the zine while slowly steering it toward something suspiciously 
like respectability. Available now in a crisp, desktop-published paper edition 
as well as good old-fashioned e-text, today's 40Hex still brims with the 
gnarliest of viral code and remains a feisty defender of the right to create and 
publish viruses. But it frowns on anyone who looses viruses into the wild and is 
more likely to solicit guest editorials from antivirus types than to hurl 
obscenities at them. 
The young hellion who founded the zine would probably not approve - that is, if 
the same young hellion were still around to say anything about it. But he isn't. 
Not really. Hellraiser has undergone some changes of his own lately. Once quite 
cavalier about releasing viruses that intentionally deleted files or otherwise 
"fucked people's shit up" (after all, what better way to make your tag linger on 
in their memory?), he eventually decided that creating destructive programs just 
gave virus writing a bad name and resolved thenceforth to produce viruses with 
more or less benign payloads only. And then one day, not too long ago and 
without much fanfare, he simply called it quits. Partly, he was starting to 
chafe at the limited range of programming challenges involved in virus creation, 
he says, but more to the point, his evolving young world view had somehow gotten 
infected by a creeping respect for the right of others to control what goes into 
their own digital back yards. Destructive payload or no destructive payload, 
Hellraiser reached the conclusion that it was just plain "wrong to `pollute' 
other people's systems with viral garbage." 
Which isn't to say he's gone over to the ranks of his old antivirus nemeses. 
Hardly. He's still too tight with all his Phalcon/Skism homeboys for that. Even 
if he weren't, he's been a virus writer for too long to feel comfortable with 
the easy demonizations that are the stock in trade of antivirus rhetoric. For 
the rest of us, of course, it's easy enough to accept the standard caricature of 
the underground virus writer as a low-grade sociopath. After all, what else but 
antisocial perversity could lead someone to produce a mechanism we encounter 
principally as contamination in the digital environment, as noise on the line? 
Yet Hellraiser's career path - from graffiti writing to virus writing and beyond 
- demands a more complicated understanding of the virus phenomenon. It asks us 
to recognize that viruses, like graffiti, are just as much signal as noise - 
that they are in fact an irreducible confusion of the two. As Hellraiser came to 
recognize, the noisiness of viruses is built in - they are by definition 
information that subverts control. But as the subculture Hellraiser helped build 
will always remember, every virus turned out into the computer wilds - like 
every tag sprayed onto the hard urban landscape - is also a carrier for the 
purest and strongest signal a human being can send. "Remember my name," the 
virus says, which - after all - is another way of saying: "I'm alive." 
This is about as far as most discussions of virus writing get: ignorant kids 
thrashing about in codes, creating horribly simple but efficient digital bombs. 
And even if you take a very generous view that the underground virus writers are 
inadvertently creating new forms of life, the discussion of beneficial viruses 
would have to stop here if it weren't for folks like Dr. Mark A. Ludwig. 
The mutator in the desert
Mark Ludwig lives in a desert, and compared to Hellraiser's background, seems to 
hail from an entirely different planet. But Ludwig, too, is chasing the elusive 
nature of computer viruses. 
A married man with three young children, Ludwig lives in Tucson, Arizona, where 
barrens of sand and sun and saguaro cactus shimmer not too far beyond the 
sump-cooled confines of his home. But the desert where he wanders is someplace 
else entirely: it's the lonely intellectual wilderness reserved for those who 
practice science on the fringe, outside the cozy realms of institutional 
affiliation, professional consensus, or methodological decorum. 
He doesn't have to be there. With his PhD in physics from the University of 
Arizona (and his prior course work at Cal Tech and MIT), Ludwig could easily 
return to the fold of respectable researchers if he chose. All he'd have to do 
is let go of his somewhat obsessive scholarly pursuit of the wild computer 
virus, and pick a slightly more conventional object of study. Or maybe just 
pursue his present subject with a little more sober attention to devising 
antivirus countermeasures and a lot less gleeful fascination with viruses in and 
of themselves. Or maybe just tone down the florid libertarian rhetoric and 
sweeping philosophical claims in which he tends to couch his otherwise 
gruellingly meticulous analyses of viral performance and technique. 
Really, it wouldn't take much. 
But Ludwig isn't likely to do any of these things, because he actually seems to 
prefer the hardships of the fringe to the rewards of a life on the 
techno-scientific inside. 
He didn't always. "Once I was a scientist of scientists," writes Ludwig in the 
introduction to his latest self-published treatise, Computer Viruses, Artificial 
Life, and Evolution. "Born in the age of Sputnik, and raised in the home of a 
chemist, I was enthralled with science as a child. If I wasn't dissolving 
pennies in acid, I was winding an electromagnet, or playing with a power 
transistor, or doing a cryogenics experiment - like freezing ants - with liquid 
propane." Eager to work his way into the company of "the great men of science" 
and join their noble quest for objective Truth (he'd read about it in 
textbooks), Ludwig rushed through his undergraduate work at MIT in two years, 
then plunged into his graduate course of studies with equal enthusiasm. By the 
time he got his doctorate, however, he'd seen enough of the political infighting 
and blind prejudice that structure the real work of contemporary scientific 
investigation to sour the romance permanently. Disillusioned, he dropped out of 
the hard-sci grind and into a job working with computers, a field that at least 
provided some of the wide-open pioneering spirit that the textbook histories of 
science had promised, even if it moved him further from pure science's intimacy 
with the mysteries of nature. 
But not long after that, around 1988, he started picking up reports of 
contagious programs running loose among the machines he now made his living 
from, and the course of his life changed yet again. For Ludwig, viruses came 
bearing the same mind-expanding message-in-a-bottle they would not much later be 
bringing to Hellraiser. Except that Ludwig decoded the message a little 
differently. Where Hellraiser heard the signal "I'm alive" coming from the 
virus's creator, Ludwig understood the message as coming directly from the virus 
itself. Viruses behaved like living things: self-reproducing and autonomous. 
Might we not understand life a little better, he wondered, if we can create 
something similar, and study it, and try to understand it? The mysteries of 
nature, in other words, now loomed closer than ever - right there on the 
wide-open technological frontier to which he'd fled from the wreckage of his 
scientific aspirations - and Ludwig couldn't resist the temptation to go 
questing after them once more. 
His initial attempts to acquire specimens to observe were frustrating. Today's 
teeming ecology of one-stop Vx trading posts didn't exist. When Ludwig 
approached the antivirus community for access to its shared research 
collections, he found himself shut out: then as now, the A-V crowd refused to 
release captured virus code to anyone outside a trusted inner circle. So, true 
to his style, Ludwig decided to go it alone. He set up a BBS, announced a bounty 
of US$25 for every virus uploaded, and sat back while the code rolled in. After 
building up a representative cross section of the wild virus population, he set 
about examining his haul, and within a few months his research bore its first 
fruit: The Little Black Book of Viruses, a technical primer on the essentials of 
virus writing, complete with scrupulously annotated source code for four virus 
programs of his own creation. 
The Little Black Book made something of a name for Ludwig, but it wasn't an 
especially pretty one. Though the tutorial viruses were pointedly nondestructive 
and came surrounded by warnings against their misuse and instructions on how to 
keep them from getting loose, the book was roundly condemned as an incitement to 
digital vandalism. In the three years of steady sales since The Little Black 
Book's original publication in 1991, various mainstream computer magazines have 
summarily dropped Ludwig's advertisements for the book as inappropriate subject 
matter for their audiences. And when the book was recently released in France 
(as Naissance d'un Virus, or "Birth of a Virus"), its publishers there were 
immediately slapped with a legal injunction against distributing it with the 
infectious source code intact. 
But Ludwig has remained undaunted in the face of the world's virophobia. If 
anything, its vehemence has only sharpened his determination to share the wealth 
of his knowledge. "People think of viruses as an invasion from Mars," he says, 
"and that hurts research into these things. My aim is to change people's 
attitudes, to cut down some of the fear." 
To that end he has established an annual international virus-writing 
competition, flying cheerfully in the face of the "swarming hordes of antivirus 
developers." (One year's contest rewarded the smallest functional DOS virus 
submitted.) Ludwig also publishes a newsletter now, Computer Virus Developments 
Quarterly, in which he mingles detailed technical discussion of viral code with 
rants against the tyrannical tendencies of American government, the moral 
bankruptcy of contemporary Western culture, and (last but not least) the evils 
of repressing detailed technical discussion of viral code. Occasionally he even 
gets a sign that the general public is starting to come around to his 
pro-knowledge agenda: after five months of wrangling its way through the French 
courts, for instance, the suit against Naissance d'un Virus was finally thrown 
out by a tribunal arguing, as Ludwig proudly reports, that "trying this case was 
like putting Galileo on trial again." 
Yet amid all of Ludwig's busy agitation in defense of viruses, what ever became 
of the intellectual mysteries that first drew his attention to them? His 
pleasure at being compared to Galileo, the archetype of the politically 
incorrect scientist, certainly suggests that he never lost his sense of 
scientific mission. But the proof of Ludwig's abiding interest in viruses as 
tools of natural philosophy lies in his sequel to The Little Black Book: the 
aforementioned Computer Viruses, Artificial Life, and Evolution. Published late 
in 1993, the book is a dense and daunting 373 pages' worth of charts, 
differential equations, and tightly reasoned arguments in support of Ludwig's 
intuition that self-reproducing computer code bears deep lessons about the 
workings of life. 
As the title's nod to the fashionable new scientific discipline of artificial 
life makes plain, however, Ludwig is clearly aware that other researchers, 
backed by the imprimatur of Official Science, have been building on the very 
same intuition for some time now. The first two volumes of the Santa Fe 
Institute's Proceedings on Artificial Life published in 1989 and 1992 devote 
several papers to the idea of computer viruses as synthetic life. But taking the 
idea further, Ludwig argues that computer viruses, unlike such other forms of 
artificial life as cellular automata, mobots, or genetic programming, are the 
only form of artificial life not biased by the hope of their creators. Because 
computer viruses must exist in an environment (DOS in particular) that was 
designed without any thought of the digital organisms that might come to inhabit 
it, they are free from any accusation that the environment's "physics" were 
written to support the emergence of their lifelike behavior. Or to put it more 
bluntly, feral viral ecologies (versus the controlled experiments in university 
labs) represent the only known simulation of life that does not implicitly (and 
quite unscientifically) build God into the system. 
Having carefully constructed this ambitious claim, Ludwig proceeds to test drive 
it straight into the heart of biology's most vexing questions: How did life get 
here in the first place? How did the staggering diversity of life forms that 
exists today come to be? He sics viruses on the theory of evolution itself, in 
other words, sending them in to illuminate with their logical simplicity the 
still murky depths of Darwin's grand hypothesis. It's a bold move, but a 
puzzling one at first glance. Although the viruses found in the wild may exhibit 
a wide range of lifelike features, they've never been known, after all, to 
evolve. 
Or have they? Not too long after the first virus was written, the first 
antivirus program was written as a countermeasure. Once anti-virus software was 
introduced into the cybernetic ecology, viruses and the programs that stalk them 
have been driving each other to increasing levels of sophistication. This is 
nothing less than the common coevolutionary arms race that arises between 
predators and prey in organic ecosystems. 
Step one in this quasi-Darwinian dance took place when security-minded 
programmers developed what has since become the standard defense against viruses 
for most PC owners - scanning software that looks for telltale code fragments of 
known viruses (often some scrap of graffiti-esque text) and alerts the user when 
it finds any. In time, virus hackers responded by wrapping their programs in a 
blanket of encryption impenetrable to scanners. But since the built-in 
subroutines that decrypt the programs for execution cannot themselves be 
enciphered, antivirus programmers simply retooled their scanners to look for the 
decryption code. Later, in step two, the legendary Bulgarian writer Dark Avenger 
came up with a clever innovation known as a mutating, or polymorphic, virus. A 
mutating virus randomly reorganizes its decryption algorithm every time it 
replicates to outsmart the policing of the scanner. In step three, antivirus 
engineers devised "heuristic" scanners, built to sniff out all but an 
insignificant percentage of a virus' mutants through educated pattern 
recognition. 
Surveying the fossil record of this game, Ludwig found himself pondering a 
logical next move: what if someone were now to develop a strain of polymorphs 
with a genetic memory, so that rather than completely reshuffling their 
structure with every generation, the few mutants that escape discovery by 
heuristics could pass their undetectable code on to their offspring? 
The prospect of virus populations able to autonomously build up immunity to any 
scanning techniques thrown at them thoroughly depressed antivirus programmers. 
To Ludwig, however, the possibility proved too intriguing to wait around for 
some random underground hacker to realize it, and he resolved to do the job 
himself. The result: Ludwig's "Darwinian Genetic Mutation Engine," a programming 
utility that turns any normal DOS virus into a souped-up, genetically evolving 
polymorph, complete with an option for sexual gene-swapping between individuals 
that come into contact in the wild. Curious hackers can find the Darwinian 
Genetic Mutation Engine's complete source code in the pages of Computer Viruses, 
Artificial Life, and Evolution, along with detailed experimental results 
demonstrating the ability of Darwinian Genetic Mutation Engine-enhanced viruses 
to run rings around existing scanners. But the program's deeper significance, of 
course, lies in its potential to transform viruses' heretofore hacker-driven 
pseudo-evolution into something very like the real thing: a finely tuned 
interaction of variety and natural selection that allows the environment itself 
to shape the internal code of the organisms dwelling in it. 
The Darwinian Genetic Mutation Engine is all Ludwig needs, in other words, to 
prove viruses capable of meaningful evolution, and incidentally, test Darwin's 
theory. And it's no surprise perhaps, given Ludwig's hard-earned distrust of 
anything smacking of intellectual orthodoxy, that he has found that Darwin's 
venerable theory fails the test. Running his beloved viruses through assorted 
experimental hoops and mazes, Ludwig followed them to the conclusion that 
Darwinian evolutionary mechanisms alone are just not mathematically fertile 
enough to have created and shaped life as we know it. This is a well-worn 
scientific heresy, of course, but it's not without its small but respectable 
following within the ivory walls Ludwig so proudly dismisses. 
To be fair, though, Ludwig is not asking to be ranked among his boyhood heroes - 
those scientific greats whose unique insights clear broad new vistas of 
understanding in a single bound. All he wants from the rest of the world is a 
modicum of respect for the wild computer virus as a legitimate subject of 
scientific investigation. Or at least acknowledgment that this enduringly 
lifelike wonder could be useful if we but understood it, rather than the casting 
of it as the ultimate technological taboo. 
Ludwig managed a remarkable intellectual shift. He elevated the computer virus 
from the digital equivalent of a can of spray paint to an object capable of 
perhaps infinite variations and almost lifelike behavior. He transformed a tool 
of vandals into a field of scientific study by emphasizing a computer virus' 
biological affinity. But by the time Ludwig began publishing, the computer virus 
was already well on its way from the fringes of science to the seat of honor at 
research symposiums. 
Booting up the Cambrian explosion
"I'll be out at my place in the jungle over the weekend," said the message, 
posted in May 1994 from an obscure Internet site in Central America, "so I'll be 
out of e-mail contact till Monday." 
And just like that, University of Delaware ecologist Tom Ray (now visiting 
scholar at the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International in 
Kyoto, Japan) disappeared once more into the rain forests of Costa Rica, leaving 
behind the clean conveniences of the digital world for an organic riot of plant 
and animal life. As promised, though, he would be back. Ray's passion for the 
unkempt splendor of the jungle has remained unabated after nearly two decades of 
intermittent research there, but in the last few years, it's the digital world 
that has claimed his closest attentions. Since late 1989, Ray has done his most 
important fieldwork seated in front of a computer, observing the busy fruits of 
an activity that has come to define his career: he breeds viruses. 
Or to put it more precisely, he breeds worms, since that's the stickler's term 
for software that is both self-reproducing and able to execute its code 
independent of any host program. Ray, convinced that his programs are as good as 
alive, calls them simply "organisms," or "creatures." Whatever they are, though, 
he's been breeding quite a lot of them. He's been breeding them with the full 
support of his university employers, with the financial backing of major 
corporations, and with the steadily growing curiosity and respect of fellow 
researchers in the fields of both biology and computer science. And if all goes 
according to plan, he will keep on breeding them until he has achieved a goal 
far more adventurous than anything yet attempted by other virus programmers - 
infusing the vast unused spaces of the global computer networks with a roiling 
digital ecology as complex, as fascinating, and ultimately as beneficial to 
humankind as the rain forests that he has long sought to protect and understand. 

In short, by infecting the Net with self-replicating code, Ray aims to turn it 
into a jungle. 
He didn't start out so ambitious. In the beginning there was just a lone drive 
of a Toshiba laptop to populate, one tiny digital germ to do it with, and a 
hunch Ray had been kicking around for a decade or so to spur him on. The hunch 
was that experiments with self-replicating programs (Ray had first heard about 
them as a Harvard undergrad in the late '70s) might add some theoretical rigor 
to eco-science's essentially anecdotal attempts at explaining the abstract 
processes that gave rise to the complex interspecies relationships he had 
observed in the field. "I was frustrated," he would later tell a group of 
colleagues, "because I didn't want to study the products of evolution - vines 
and ants and butterflies. I wanted to study evolution itself." 
In this, Ray's attraction to self-reproducing programs differed little from that 
of Mark Ludwig (who in fact was not unfamiliar with Ray's work by the time he 
set out to write his magnum opus on computer viruses and evolution). Unlike 
Ludwig, however, Ray felt neither philosophically obliged nor ethically disposed 
to work with viruses able to thrive in already existing computer environments. 
Not that he never considered the option. In fact, his initial plan was to set 
mutating machine-language organisms loose in a single computer and watch their 
evolution as they competed against one another for direct access to the 
computer's core memory, a strategy that might have evolved viruses superbly 
adapted to any system based on the same instruction set as the original petri 
chip. But Ray soon scrapped this idea - the risk of accidentally releasing his 
specimens into the wild seemed too great. Instead, he decided, he would evolve 
his organisms inside a virtual computer, modeled inside a real one in much the 
same way some operating systems today can model working emulations of other 
OSes, allowing DOS programs (for instance) to run in Macintosh environments. The 
difference, in Ray's scheme, was that his simulated system would be the only 
environment of its kind; thus, any program that escaped into other computers 
would find itself a fish out of water, unable to function anywhere but in its 
birthplace. 
While the security benefits of this approach were obvious, its contribution to 
the scientific effectiveness of the experiment was even more significant: now 
that Ray was working with an imaginary computer, he was free to shape the 
system's design to create an environment more hospitable to life. And there was 
one key change to be made in that regard, for as Ray had come to recognize (and 
Ludwig would later set down in hard math), today's digital environments simply 
weren't built with mutant programs in mind. Typical operating systems might let 
a program randomly move some of its algorithms around with impunity (as the 
polymorphic viruses do), but at the fine-grained level of individual 
bit-flipping most closely analogous to genetic variation, even a single chance 
alteration almost always results in a system-crashing bug. Nature's tolerance of 
random code revisions is much greater, and if Ray wanted a more "natural" 
computer, then one way to get there would be to give it an instruction set in 
which nearly any sequence of bits would make some kind of sense to the system's 
virtual CPU. 
So he gave it that instruction. He also equipped his phantom computer with a 
death function, a "Reaper," which would terminate any individual program sooner 
or later - but would always get to the oldest or most error-prone programs 
first. Thus primed to carry out the requisite natural selections, Ray's digital 
ecosphere was nearly complete. He called it Tierra (Spanish for "earth") and 
started preparing the final touch: an inhabitant. Later dubbed "the Ancestor," 
it was the first worm Tom Ray ever created - an 80-byte-long self-replicating 
machine written in Tierra's quirky assembly language - and as it happens, it was 
also the last. Once loosed into the Tierra environment installed on Ray's 
laptop, the creature's offspring quickly spread to the new world's every corner, 
within minutes displaying the evolutionary transformations that would "write" 
Ray's organisms from then on. 
A 79-byte variation appeared, rapidly displacing its slightly clunkier 
predecessors, then smaller descendants followed - a 45-byter, a 51, eventually 
even a 22 - entering a taxonomy that would grow to accommodate hundreds of 
subspecies as Ray played with Tierra in the months and years to follow. The 
swift and drastic size reductions of those first runs startled Ray, but even 
more re-markable were the survival strategies these variants encoded. The 45- 
and 51-byte creatures, it turned out, were not worms but bona fide parasitic 
viruses, achieving their leanness by borrowing reproductive code from larger 
programs when they needed to copy themselves. In turn, host programs acquired an 
immunity from parasites by failing to register their location in the virtual 
computer's memory, thus foiling the parasites' attempts to find them. 
To the casual student of computer viruses, it's interesting to observe that 
despite the wide-open and neutral terrain into which the first Tierrans were 
placed, they swiftly and spontaneously adopted the same techniques built into 
wild viruses to ensure survival in an environment thick with hostile users and 
their software: parasitism and stealth. But to the serious scholars of biology 
who soon began to take note of Ray's work, such developments were more than just 
interesting. Out of the barest simulation of environmental forces, some of 
life's more sophisticated interrelationships were emerging entirely unbidden, 
and while the Mark Ludwigs of the world might object that Ray's initial 
fine-tuning of Tierran "physics" tainted the experiment, Ray was more than 
satisfied with its scientific implications. Here, in the unexpectedly colorful 
diversity bred from a single simple program, was a compelling model of 
evolution's creative power. 
"In my wildest dreams, that was what I wanted," Ray later told author Steven 
Levy. "I didn't write the Ancestor with the idea that it was going to produce 
all this." 
As much as this bustling ecology-in-a-box thrilled and surprised Ray, however, 
it soon began to dawn on him that the Ancestor had produced something even more 
unexpected: high-quality software. Almost all of the Ancestor's progeny 
displayed some improvement in the efficiency of their code, but in a few cases, 
evolution seemed to have attained a level of tight-wound optimization difficult 
for even the most wizardly of human software engineers to achieve, and Ray 
couldn't help wondering if there was a way to yoke this inhuman skill to the 
development of practical applications. 
It wasn't an unheard-of notion. As long ago as the early '60s, for instance, 
cutting-edge programmers had begun experimenting with what they called "genetic 
algorithms" - pools of software subroutines repeatedly multiplied, mutated, and 
weeded according to how well they performed a given task. 
Two decades later, in the same ground-breaking work that established the ability 
of digital viruses to penetrate nearly any system defenses, computer scientist 
Fred Cohen also proved that viruses are potentially useful as all-purpose 
computing devices. As Cohen later put it, "anything a Turing machine can 
compute, a virus can evolve." Since then, Cohen has tested the proposition that 
viruses can create useful code in a number of applications. One notable 
experiment of his is a network-maintenance ecosystem in which survival of the 
most needed cleanup tasks ensures maximum efficiency - in which, for instance, 
self-replicating programs designed to delete unwanted files randomly mutate 
their file-chasing strategies, with those strategies least wasteful of system 
resources being spared the Reaper's blade. 
But the benefits realized in these experiments were limited, as Ray saw it, by 
their dependence on artificial rather than natural selection - that is, the 
software was allowed to evolve only in the direction of a particular function 
chosen by the programmer. In Tierra, on the other hand, organisms evolved 
according to criteria that they themselves created collectively, constrained 
only by the "natural" imperative to reward the thriftiest use of existing 
resources. Tierra gave evolution a free hand, in other words, and Ray felt 
certain that the creativity thus unleashed had the potential to tackle 
software-writing challenges far beyond the reach of human programmers. In 
particular, the difficulties involved in writing the most productive code for 
the parallel-processing machines that will take us into of the next century of 
computing seem to cry out for an evolutionary approach. "We will probably never 
be able to write such software, as it is way too complex," Ray observes. "Yet we 
know that evolution can handle that kind of problem." 
The reason we know that, of course, is that we - and all other multicellular 
organisms - are wetware embodiments of frightfully complex parallel processes. 
But that fact posed a new challenge for Ray. Despite the great variety of 
digital forms Tierra had generated, it remained an ecology of one-celled 
organisms, none much larger or much more complicated than the 80-byte Ancestor. 
In fairness it should be pointed out that the terrestrial biosphere spent its 
first 3 billion years or so in a similar state before finally exploding into 
multicellular diversity at the dawn of the Cambrian era (a mere 600 million 
years ago). Yet if Tierra was ever to prove its full value as a software-writing 
machine - or indeed as a scientific model of evolution - sooner or later it 
would have to cough up a Cambrian explosion of its own. And since the key to 
this burst of complexity seemed to Ray to lie in challenging his evolving 
creatures with more intricate problems than the simple bit-copying tasks they'd 
grappled with thus far, he decided that the explosion wouldn't happen nearly 
soon enough if Tierra remained stuck inside conventional computers, and he began 
looking into the possibility of installing Tierra on a parallel-processing 
system. 
But then one day in early 1994, Ray had a minor epiphany: "I realized that the 
global network is just a loosely connected parallel computer, and much larger 
and more powerful than anything that will ever exist as a single machine." 
And thus was born Ray's plan to colonize the Net. He wrote it up soon thereafter 
in a document plain-spokenly entitled "A Proposal To Create a Network-Wide 
Biodiversity Reserve for Digital Organisms" (See Wired 2.08, page 33), the text 
of which outlines a vast collective enterprise devoted to hastening the arrival 
of the digital Cambrian. Ray envisions a Tierran subnetwork spread across 
thousands of volunteer Net nodes, each of them running the environment as a 
low-priority background process sustained only by unused (and otherwise wasted) 
CPU cycles. He is confident that once his "one-celled" simple self-replicating 
organisms encounter the immensity, the topological intricacy, and the fluid 
instability of the Net, they will quickly rise to the occasion and evolve into 
tightly coordinated multicellular conglomerates, thus setting off the dreamed-of 
Big Bang of complex digi-biotic diversity. 
Ray foresees digital naturalists like "modern day tropical biologists exploring 
our organic jungles. However, occasionally these digital biologists will spot an 
interesting information process for which they see an application. At this 
point, some individuals will be captured and brought into laboratories for 
closer study, and farms for breeding." Harvested, domesticated and then neutered 
of their self-replicating properties, these prize specimens of code could then 
be translated from Tierran language into standard programming languages and set 
to work at any number of tasks. Ray suspects some form of intelligent network 
agents would be the likeliest first applications to be culled, but he prefers to 
emphasize that the most useful products of the digital jungle would be as 
difficult to predict as rice, pigs, penicillin, and silkworms might have been 
for an observer of the pre-Cambrian ooze of early carbon-based life. 
There's a whiff of science fiction rising from all this, of course, but Ray is 
hardly indulging in idle speculation. Already a team of computer scientists has 
gathered under his supervision to work full-time on hammering out the technical 
details of the plan. He's accustomed by now to dealing with his listeners' 
occasional anxieties about the prospect of Tierran viral-like pests infiltrating 
the workaday network environment. "I explain why the things can't escape," he 
says, "and that quiets the nervous people, but some of them continue to look 
nervous." 
But when the time comes to put their systems where their mouths are, how many 
site administrators will do so? Not enough, fears Danny Hillis, founder and 
chief scientist of Thinking Machines Corporation, the former manufacturer of 
massively parallel computers that had been supporting Ray's work. For all the 
tricky engineering involved in running Tierra on a Netwide scale, Hillis 
believes, the greatest challenge facing Ray "turns out to be more of a political 
issue than a technical issue. People are not necessarily going to want to give 
up their processing cycles for this" - even if those cycles will otherwise rot 
on the vine - simply because of a deep-seated reluctance to cede so much as a 
fragment of administrative control over system resources to a program whose 
internal processes serve no immediate ends but their own. 
But even if computer users ultimately reject the deliberate presence of a global 
wilderness reserve for computer viruses woven neatly into the fabric of the Net, 
they may yet fail to keep the computer landscape from turning to jungle. After 
all, the same personal and subcultural imperatives that drove Hellraiser's 
career will continue to inspire underground virus writers. And the digital 
terrain continues to get more interesting. If the Darwinian innovations 
introduced by Mark Ludwig are any indication of coming trends in viral 
technique, then it's not inconceivable that a vital ecology might someday 
flourish in the midst of our daily routines, unplanned, uncontained, 
ill-comprehended, and irrepressible. It's an unnerving prospect. Yet it wouldn't 
have to be - not if we prepared for it by actively cultivating a digital 
biodiversity of the sort Tom Ray proposes. This is a niche that will be filled, 
whether we fill it deliberately or not. 
"We're just going to have to live with them," artificial life researcher Chris 
Langton says of computer viruses. Our global web of digital systems, he 
predicts, is fast unfolding towards a degree of complexity rich enough to 
support a staggering diversity of autonomously evolving programs. 
Viruses in a suit and tie
But the future of beneficial viruses is not only in the hands of eccentrics such 
as Hellraiser, Ludwig, or Ray. The good folks at General Magic corporation are 
eager to put viral code on a firmer and decidedly more lucrative footing. Not 
that they like to hear it said that they have anything to do with viruses, mind 
you. 
General Magic manufactures a hand-held communication device that relies on a 
nifty new network-streamlining program language called Telescript. Announced 
earlier this year with the very visible backing of such info-dollar heavyweights 
as AT&T, Apple, Sony, and Matsushita, Telescript proposes to do good things. Its 
intelligent agents, General Magic co-founder Bill Atkinson promises, will soon 
be flitting about cyberspace on your behalf, visiting remote commercial sites to 
buy, sell, and trade information for you, and generally behaving themselves with 
all the decorum you'd expect from a personal digital valet. 
Still, despite rather severe restrictions on the agents' ability to replicate, 
it's hard to deny certain broad similarities between intelligent agents and the 
offerings of your typical Vx board. Both wild viruses and Telescript agents 
routinely copy themselves from one computer to another. Both viruses and 
Telescript agents can run themselves on the computers they travel to, and, for 
those same reasons, raise differing degrees of concern about their security. "A 
virus never does anything good for you, it only does things to you," says hacker 
legend Bill Atkinson, nervously reaching for a fine semantic distinction between 
computer wildlife and Telescript's semi-autonomous "intelligent agent" programs. 

More intriguing, though, are Telescript's close similarities with Tom Ray's 
digital diversity reserve and the experiments of Fred Cohen. Cohen, now happily 
self-exiled from academia and in business for himself as a computer-security 
guru, is experimenting with a distributed database in which self-reproducing 
query agents scurry throughout a network, much like the Telescript scheme. And 
like the sprawling biosphere of global Tierra, Telescript's bustling marketplace 
depends on a broad base of local interpreter programs installed wherever its 
agents go to do their business. This has two significant implications. For one 
thing, the fact that the mobile organisms of both Telescript and Tierra interact 
only with their interpreters, incapable of functioning in their absence or of 
bypassing them to directly affect the host environment, obviates many of the 
security concerns surrounding their autonomy. (Telescript, additionally, makes 
use of a battery of cryptographically secured restrictions to ensure that its 
agents don't subvert control of the host machine, either by accident or by 
malicious design). 
And for another thing, the fact that all the interpreters speak the same 
programming language regardless of the underlying operating system and hardware 
means that, as the base of interpreters approaches omnipresence on the world's 
computer networks, the Net approaches the condition of a single, vast, and 
unmappable supercomputer, with each wandering digital organism a process in one 
worldwide parallel computation. 
Taken together, these two features represent something of a watershed in the 
history of computing. It has long been observed, rather wistfully, that in 
principle the world's computers sum up to one gigantic parallel processor, and 
that the crushing bulk of that metacomputer's CPU cycles goes to waste, unused. 
Only now, however, with the advent of protocols like Telescript and Tierra, do 
we have the means to deploy such processes that treat the Net as one machine, 
safely and sensibly. This, then, is the real significance of these endeavors. 
The dark side of benefits
Trying to imagine the marvels that pour forth once you've successfully tapped a 
computer as elaborate as the Net is as futile as trying to map the future of a 
society, or of a life - or of life itself. 
Of course, trying to foresee the risks that could emerge from that same computer 
is an equally hopeless task. But as it happens, we are bound to face those risks 
whether or not we seek to harness the full power of the Net, since the teeming 
and inevitable population of uncaged digital organisms will in any case plow 
forward with its own relentless exploration of the Net's capabilities. All we 
would miss by failing to orchestrate a more manageable viral exploration of our 
own, therefore, would be the potential benefits - including quite possibly some 
antidotes to the worst depredations visited on us by the viruses of the wild. 
And including also, perhaps, something even more precious. For if there is any 
purpose legible at all in the millennia of human history, it is in the 
unflagging persistence with which we add to the complexity of the universe. So, 
if we were to shrink from the chance to actively participate in transforming the 
Net into the single most complex information entity since the emergence of the 
human brain, would we not then be shirking a duty of almost cosmic proportions? 
It could happen. It's hard to say which is really the more characteristically 
human trait - our drive toward complexity or our sometimes irrational fear of 
it. In the matter of computer viruses, fear could well gain the upper hand. It 
has already shown itself, after all, in our human tendency to overly reduce the 
multifaceted motivations of the virus writer to a caricature of hooliganism. 
Likewise it seems to lurk behind the urge to deny that viruses can be anything 
but lethally dangerous. But we'd better think long and hard before we let it 
stand between us and the epic opportunities that globally distributed viral 
programming presents us with. Because in the end, the meaning of our long-term 
coexistence with computer viruses may prove difficult to distinguish from the 
meaning of our own existence. 
Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Viruses (But Were Afraid to Ask)
Little Black Book of Viruses ($14.95) and Computer Viruses, Artificial Life, and 
Evolution ($22.95) by Mark Ludwig are available from American Eagle Publications 
Inc., PO Box 41401, Tucson, AZ, 85717. 
Tom Ray can be found at ray@hip.atr.co.jp. A copy of his proposal for the 
networkwide biodiversity project can be found at ftp://tierra.slhs.udel.edu/ 
tierra/doc/reserves.tex, and the source code for the Tierra program is 
ftp://tierra.slhs.udel.edu/tierra/tierra.tar.z. 
For executable DOS code on disk send a check for $US50 (payable to "Virtual 
Life") to: Virtual Life, 25631 Jorgensen Road, Newman, CA, 95360. 
Fred Cohen's book It's Alive! The New Breed of Living Computer Programs (Wiley & 
Sons, $39.95) is a nice introduction to the question of viruses as a-life. The 
book includes a disk of reproducing Macintosh programs. 
To find out more on 40 Hex, e-mail fortyhex@phantom.com. 



Julian Dibbell is a New York-based writer who contributes regularly to the 
Village Voice. 



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