http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=102016

First, I'd like to thank the acad... er wrong speech... lemme start over.

First, I'll qualify my ramblings in that I have an hour's drive each way from work, therefore a lot of time to think up this cracked stuff... but I digress... onto the meat!
In thinking about the net (which I frequently do), I came up with a comparison. I keep trying to compare computer related things conceptually to a living organism (i.e. is a transistor like a neuron?) anyway, I was thinking about the net, and the thought came to me.

On a basic level, each PC (or whatever computer is connected to the net) represents a "cell" and the connections between them represent a "circulatory system".

Well, that got me pondering (this is a long drive by the way) that, like the human circulatory system, the net carries 'viruses' (though "we" create the viruses here). The human circulatory system has an auto-immune system.

When I get sick, I dont need to run my virus scanner to get better (thank god).

So why cant we do something similar? Set up a 'virus' to propigate itself throughout the net. this 'virus' isnt really a virus though, because it doesnt harm the end-user's systems.

It does however, function a la an antibody, latching itself onto a virus, and possibly sucking a little bit of code out of the virus.

Now here is (one) problem. In order to self-propigate, it needs to act just like a normal virus, and therefore would probably overload a lot of email servers.

This is a bad thing.

It also would either need a behavior recognition system (like our white blood cells have) that says 'hey, you are good code, but you are bad code' and this system needs to be really reliable, so that we dont up and delete the ms/windows virus *cough* kernel.

I also dont know anything about programming viruses (and, if anybody who does reads this, will probably laugh their tails off at my inane ramblings.) I dont know quite how things work, but would like to know more. Are there any resources that would aid me in my understanding of this cause?

Is this a complete waste of my time? Should it be done in some other language other than perl? (I really dont want to mess with vbscript, or something else)
I dont know. Thanks for listening though.



thanks!
E-Bitch