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OBFUSCATING CODE. "There are many reasons to protect a program’s implementation details. Commercial entities generally do so in an attempt to preserve the secrecy of algorithms and pro- tocols that are considered to provide a competitive advantage. While crackers and cyber criminals share this goal, they also seek to confound defense systems, postpone their detection and eventual tracing." https://lnkd.in/dHTSZ_H View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this two weekend noodling on the evolution of genetic and cultural complexity. For sure there are ancient creatures that have taken the path of outsourcing and streamlining their capacities, such as viruses, and thus appear deceptively simple. As usual, with nature there is rarely a single answer or a single path, but rather, a bewildering diversity of schemes that keep us forever fascinated with the flickering panoply of biology. View in LinkedIn

"SELF-MODIFYING CODE is used to build worms and viruses." https://lnkd.in/dcT_V2k View in LinkedIn

IS THE INFO TECH REVOLUTION not just an extension of our biological evolution and the increasing global information is a consequence of our genetics? View in LinkedIn

WIDELY USED. "Self-modifying code (SMC), in this paper, broadly refers to any program that loads, generates, or mutates code at runtime. It is widely used in many of the world’s critical software systems to support runtime code generation and optimization, dynamic loading and linking, OS boot loader, just-in-time compilation, binary translation, or dynamic code encryption and obfuscation." https://lnkd.in/dzAS74T View in LinkedIn

FASTER CHANGE. "Cultural evolution is expected to be faster than biological evolution because of its Lamarckian nature, and because cultural information is transmitted through different routes than genetic information." https://lnkd.in/du2rR_7 View in LinkedIn

"SELF-MODIFYING CODE is code that alters its own instructions while it is executing - usually to reduce the instruction path length and improve performance or simply to reduce otherwise repetitively similar code, thus simplifying maintenance." https://lnkd.in/ddCjHJk View in LinkedIn

NEW HUMAN ECOLOGY. "The internet is the decisive technology of the Information Age, and with the explosion of wireless communication in the early twenty-first century, we can say that humankind is now entirely connected." https://lnkd.in/dsHe6fk View in LinkedIn

AUTONOMOUS CODE. "Viv’s biggest secret is the technology to bring the different services together on the fly to respond to requests for which it hasn’t been specifically programmed. “It is a program that writes its own program, which is the only way you can scale thousands of services working together that know nothing about one another." Given inevitable errors, this is akin to genetic variation." https://lnkd.in/deszndk View in LinkedIn

ALTER COMMAND. "Although code can be generated by other code (metaprogamming), programs generally don’t change their own code as they run; this has the potential to devolve into a mess of difficult-to-track changes. However, some languages do allow programs to alter "their own script as it ran, such as with COBOL’s ALTER command.” https://lnkd.in/dScXnfT View in LinkedIn