Year: 2022

ANTI-VIRAL R&D. "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." https://lnkd.in/edrARjk View in LinkedIn

DECEPTIVE CHAOS. "Viruses, like graffiti, are just as much signal as noise – that they are in fact an irreducible confusion of the two." https://lnkd.in/edrARjk View in LinkedIn

COMPUTER MONOCULTURE. "Today, our computing infrastructure is more vulnerable than ever before due to a convergence of four key factors. First, the world population of computers is more homogeneous than ever before, creating a computing “monoculture;” if one machine is susceptible to a bug, the rest are too. Second, our computing systems are more connected than ever before, enabling a fast spreading virus to rapidly infect millions of machines. Essentially, each of our desktops have a genetically similar software and hardware makeup." https://lnkd.in/eV_mmFn View in LinkedIn

AGRICULTURAL MONOCULTURE is very susceptible to catastrophic viral collapse. "FAO estimates that since the beginning of this century about 75 percent of the genetic diversity of agricultural crops has been lost. We are becoming increasingly dependent on fewer and fewer crop varieties and, as a result, a rapidly diminishing gene pool." https://lnkd.in/d_bBGHi View in LinkedIn

IRISH POTATO FAMINE. "The basic problem with a monoculture is that it's all vulnerable to the same attack. The Irish Potato Famine of 1845--9 is perhaps the most famous monoculture-related disaster. The Irish planted only one variety of potato, and the genetically identical potatoes succumbed to a rot caused by Phytophthora infestans." https://lnkd.in/dvZvf8T View in LinkedIn

MONOCULTURES. "The vulnerability of monocultures to disease and insects...Pathogens spread more readily, and epidemics tend to be more severe, when the host plants (or animals) are more genetically uniform and crowded. The pathogens encounter less resistance to spreading than they do in mixed stands. Outbreaks of disease, invasions of insects, and climatic anomalies have caused many wholesale crop and animal failures in the past." https://lnkd.in/dcM4Wxq View in LinkedIn

OS MONOCULTURE. "If everyone is using the same operating system or the same applications software or the same networking protocol, and a security vulnerability is discovered in that OS or software or protocol, a single exploit can affect everyone. This is the problem of large-scale Internet worms: many have affected millions of computers on the Internet." https://lnkd.in/dvZvf8T View in LinkedIn

LIMITED OS CHOICES. "You can only get a limited amount of diversity by using two operating systems, or routers from three vendors. South American potato diversity comes from hundreds of different varieties. Genetic diversity comes from millions of different genomes." https://lnkd.in/dvZvf8T View in LinkedIn

"THE ENCRYPTED VIRUS conceals its presence by encrypting the bulk of its viral logic. When an infected program is launched, the virus usurps control of the system and then uses a simple decryption subroutine to decrypt the rest of the encrypted viral logic, thus the virus’ logic is only visible when it is actively running, but never when it is stored on the disk in an infected file." Just like biology. https://lnkd.in/eV_mmFn View in LinkedIn

COMPUTER HOST-VIRUS ARMS RACE, identical to biological viruses and their hosts. "In order to stay far from the anti-virus scanners, computer viruses gradually improve their codes to make them invisible. On the other hand, anti-virus technologies continually follow the virus tricks and methodologies to overcome their threats." https://lnkd.in/e2ErnC6 View in LinkedIn