From: Alfie Costa (agcosta@gis.net)
Date: Sun Oct 13 2002 - 21:41:35 CEST
On 13 Oct 2002, at 17:55, Michele Andreoli <mulinux@sunsite.dk> wrote:
> We have just to wait a little, and Alfie will post here
> a lot of etimological material about "virus" etc ... :-)
I, Pedant.
Gdict...
Virus Vi"rus, n. L., a slimy liquid, a poisonous liquid,
poison, stench; akin to Gr. ? poison, Skr. visha. Cf.
Wizen, v. i.
1. (Med.)
(a) Contagious or poisonous matter, as of specific ulcers,
the bite of snakes, etc.; -- applied to organic
poisons.
(b) The special contagion, inappreciable to the senses and
acting in exceedingly minute quantities, by which a
disease is introduced into the organism and maintained
there.
Note: The specific virus of diseases is now regarded as a
microscopic living vegetable organism which multiplies
within the body, and, either by its own action or by
the associated development of a chemical poison, causes
the phenomena of the special disease.
2. Fig.: Any morbid corrupting quality in intellectual or
moral conditions; something that poisons the mind or the
soul; as, the virus of obscene books.
Jargon File...
virus n. from the obvious analogy with biological viruses, via SF A
cracker program that searches out other programs and `infects' them by
embedding a copy of itself in them, so that they become Trojan horses.
When these programs are executed, the embedded virus is executed too,
thus propagating the `infection'. This normally happens invisibly to the
user. Unlike a worm, a virus cannot infect other computers without
assistance. It is propagated by vectors such as humans trading programs
with their friends (see SEX). The virus may do nothing but propagate
itself and then allow the program to run normally. Usually, however,
after propagating silently for a while, it starts doing things like
writing cute messages on the terminal or playing strange tricks with the
display (some viruses include nice display hacks). Many nasty viruses,
written by particularly perversely minded crackers, do irreversible
damage, like nuking all the user's files.
In the 1990s, viruses became a serious problem, especially among
Windows users; the lack of security on these machines enables viruses to
spread easily, even infecting the operating system (Unix machines, by
contrast, are immune to such attacks). The production of special
anti-virus software has become an industry, and a number of exaggerated
media reports have caused outbreaks of near hysteria among users; many
lusers tend to blame _everything_ that doesn't work as they had
expected on virus attacks. Accordingly, this sense of `virus' has passed
not only into techspeak but into also popular usage (where it is often
incorrectly used to denote a worm or even a Trojan horse). See
phage; compare back door; see also Unix conspiracy.
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