I particularly enjoyed this reading because of the cross-curriculum it has with my computer science background. Albeit redundant to go back and learn the basics of a topic, it is great practice to give your foundations a refresher and especially if it can be from a different perspective. The additional reading that I chose to focus on was the text virus section. I was very intrigued by the Magistr virus story. We have all seen the email chains that go around that have instructions on how to "remove a virus" or some sort of step by step process that as a consumer we become so engulfed in the idea of reaching an end-goal (finishing the email) with the slight chance that there might be a magic trick that happens at the end(the lights will flash when you finish the following tasks, or you computer will be immune from all viruses). What made the story interesting was how one of the first of these "email chains" started.
It wasn't the works of a hacker who tried to take over peoples' computers, but rather it was a paranoid consumer who thought they knew what they were doing, going into the system files in their computer and deleting a file they thought was a virus. What happens when you throw the majority of computer users who all happen to be slightly computer illiterate into an infinite world of address books and electronic mail...you get a messy game of "telephone" over the ethernet wires that wasn't intended upon being malicious but turned out to hurt the consumers in the end in a mesmerizing world of confusion filenames and icons. The irony of this story is that it wasn't the direct work of a hacker that ended up crashing everyone's computers, yet there was just as a desirable effect from it.
My link is a short history of computer viruses and which ones are the worst.
Second link is about the Magistr virus.
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