---------------------------- Date: 31 Jan 94 15:24:24 EST From: Urnst Kouch/Crypt Newsletter <70743.1711@COMPUSERVE.COM> Subject: File 3--Review: "Computer Viruses, Artificial Life & Evolution" Just after Christmas, on December 27th, Addison-Wesley France was served with a temporary legal notice prohibiting the distribution of its recently published French language edition of Mark Ludwig's "Little Black Book of Computer Viruses, Volume 1." Entitled "Naissance d'un Virus," or "Birth of a Virus," the French edition was selling for about $50 cash money. The company is also distributing a disk containing copies of Ludwig's TIMID, INTRUDER, KILROY and STEALTH viruses separately for a few dollars more. However, before the ink was dry on the paper a French judge dismissed the complaint, said Ludwig between laughs during a recent interview. Addison-Wesely France, he said, subsequently worked the fuss into good publicity, enhancing demand for "Naissance d'un Virus." Almost simultaneously, Ludwig has published through his American Eagle corporation, its follow-up: "Computer Viruses, Artificial Life and Evolution," which will come as a great surprise to anyone expecting "The Little Black Book of Computer Viruses, Part II." For those absent for the history, "The Little Black Book of Computer Viruses," upon publication, was almost uniformly denounced - by the orthodox computer press - as the work of someone who must surely be a dangerous sociopath. Most magazines refused to review or mention it, under the working assumption that to even speak about viruses for an extended length - without selling anti-virus software - only hastens the digital disintegration of the world. Ludwig found himself engaged in a continued battle for advertising for his book, losing contracts without notice while the same publications continued to stuff their pages with spreads for cosmological volumes of pornography. This has always been a curious, but consistent, hypocrisy. The real truth, for the entirety of the mainstream computer press, is that it has _always_ been OK for anyone among the citizenry - including children - to potentially rot their minds with various digital pictographic perversions; it is not OK for the same audience to have the potential to electronically rot their computers' files with Ludwig's simple viruses, none of which are in the wild over a year after publication of the book. Another consideration the mainstream journals must deal with is that if they were to suddenly and unilaterally control pornographic advertising, the loss in revenue would cause some of them to fail. In the end, it's always been a money thing. Pornographers have it. Mark Ludwig is only one account. [This has gotten more interesting since one of the larger computer porn advertisers, the manufacturer of the CD-ROM "For Adults Only (FAO) Gold" collection, has also entered the virus business, selling issues of the virus-programming journal 40HEX on its "Forbidden Secrets" CD-ROM. The "Forbidden Secrets" disk has been advertised in the same full-page ads as the "FAO Gold" collections.] Not surprisingly, the controversy has kept sales of "The Little Black Book" brisk since its initial printing and financed the expansion of American Eagle. Which brings us, finally, to "Computer Viruses, Artificial Life and Evolution," a book which takes a hard scientific look at life and the theory of evolution, and only incidentally contains working viruses. To grapple with the underlying philosophy behind "CVAL&E," its helpful to know Ludwig was a physics major at Caltech in Pasadena, CA, at a time when Nobel-laureate theoretical physicists Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann were in residence. The ruthlessness with which these scientists dealt with softer disciplines not up to the task of thorough theoretical analysis coupled with the academic meat-grinder that is Caltech's reputation, casts its shadow on "CVAL&E." Ludwig writes in the introduction: ". . . Once I was a scientist of scientists. 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 . . . freezing ants with liquid propane. When I went to MIT for college I finally got my chance to totally immerse myself in my first love. I did rather well at it too, finishing my undergraduate work in two years and going on to study elementary particle physics under Nobel laureates at Caltech. Yet by the time I got my doctorate the spell was forever broken . . . I saw less and less of the noble scientist and more and more of the self-satisfied expert." And this sets the tenor for the rest of the book, as Ludwig analyzes Darwinian evolution and, by the standards of intellectual rigor imposed by post-War theoretical physics, declares it even more squishy than theories of quantum gravity and black holes; the answer as to how present day life came from the primordial soup of biopolymers is always skittering away out of reach in an impenetrable fog of hypothetical bullshit. It's not clear at all how a mixture of even the most complex biomacromolecules resulted in predecessors of _E. coli_, the simplest algae or any precursors of the archaebacteria, without resorting to creationism or spontaneous generation. Ludwig - using some heavy math - chews the probabilities up and spits them out as miraculous, not very helpful when you're wearing the traditional scientist's hat. Then he does the same for the simplest of computer viruses - using as examples a disk copying program which, if altered in one line of instructions, can be made into a primitive boot sector virus. To understand the material fully is a tough job; if you don't have some experience with statistical thermodynamics, probabilistic studies and differential equations, frankly, it will take you a while to get up to the speed where the lion's share of "CVA&E" doesn't lose you. Ludwig's science is good, his understanding of basic biochmemistry and microbiology solid enough to support any arguments made as he works his way through the inadequacies of evolution. Unlike Steven Levy's "Artificial Life," Ludwig makes no chirpy assertions that such as the Brain virus are a mere step away from animation. Instead, in "CVA&E" he asks the reader to concede that Darwinian theory doesn't seen likely to explain anything about genesis satisfying to pure determinists. And, outside of whole-heartedly buying into astronomer Fred Hoyle's ideas about freeze-dried virus and bacterial suspensions frozen in cometary ice and dropped into the atmosphere as seed from the depths of space, research into the dawn of life of Earth is going nowhere fast. So Ludwig asks us not to discard computer viruses and computerized artificial life as potential tools to look at the problem. By the finish Ludwig, of course, hasn't come up with the answer either. And, he admits, you have to fudge a bit - maybe a lot - to swallow the contemporary ideas about artificial life. And then he takes another risk by asking readers to entertain the fancy that if we don't get a handle on some fresh ideas about evolution and the origins of life, sooner or later something will show up in our backyard and get a handle on us. It's a wild ride, but an enjoyable one. "CVAL&E" also includes some interesting programs, most notably SLIP-Scan, a variably encrypting virus which uses the Trident Polymorphic Encryptor and a code construct Ludwig calls the Darwinian Genetic Mutation Engine. This engine, which Ludwig has written to mimic a simple gene, encodes constantly changing information within the virus that is used to modulate the operation of the Trident encryptor, thus confering on the virus a directed evolution in successive generations sensitive to the presence of anti-virus software elimination of replicants in large numbers of infections. SLIP-Scan replicates and places a segment of information produced by the Darwinian Engine in an unused portion of computer memory, where it is read by a different member of the SLIP-Scan population and used to hybridize the data carried in the subsequent progeny. Ludwig has made this a computerized mimic of one of the simplest ways in which bacteria exchange genetic information, via small connecting tubes through the medium called pili. In SLIP-Scan's case, computer RAM is the bridge through the environment along which the "genetic" material is transferred between virus offspring. The result of this is that polymorphic progeny of SLIP-Scan not caught by anti-virus software slowly are selected in a Darwinian manner for offspring which cannot be detected. While this might sound threatening, the population of viruses required to demonstrate the effect is such that it is unlikely it would be a factor on real world computers, even if the virus were in the wild. The winning program in Ludwig's First International Virus Writing Contest is also in "CVAL&E." Written by a virus programmer known as Stormbringer, the Companion-101 virus is used by the author to work out the probability of viruses evolving into different variations through faults in computer memory and translation. "Computer Viruses, Artificial Life and Evolution" is an intriguing, thorough read. If you go looking for it, be prepared to spend some time. [American Eagle, POB 41401, Tucson, AZ 85717]