Berkeley SETI PhD candidate Andrew Siemion talks about why your computer won't be getting an alien virus in this article on io9.com.

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@SETIEric@qoto.org (Mastodon)

You like your broken links Dr. Eric, huh? :-) I tried fixing it but no luck.

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#resist

LOL... I feel safe now...
(Unless they send something like the Transformer's "Spark", of course... Anyway, Im using Windows... any IA born from my computers will eventually slow down by itself to a useless state or will kill itself on its first try to update...)

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You like your broken links Dr. Eric, huh? :-) I tried fixing it but no luck.

That link opens fine here.

Claggy

Yeah go figure it does indeed work. Before I got a 404. weird.



Look at the comments at the end of the article. LMAO the proposed alien spam messages are priceless.

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#resist

I've just got an alert from ET Antivirus 2013 telling me my system is infected. They only want fifty klaygaars for a twenty leeptoo licence, sounds like a bargain :)

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Member of the People Encouraging Niceness In Society club.

Oh everything was ok

Berkeley SETI PhD candidate Andrew Siemion talks about why your computer won't be getting an alien virus in this article on io9.com.

OMG %) Whole article about really nothing

Hmm...

Why bother infecting computors when it would probebly be more intresting in controlling the human minds for an Alien interest in humanity.

At present aliens exist or not are sure, no computer virus?
Everything has a risk, it is inevitable. But still want to have been working on

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I'm more worried about viruses from people from earth then Aliens ;)

I've just got an alert from ET Antivirus 2013 telling me my system is infected. They only want fifty klaygaars for a twenty leeptoo licence, sounds like a bargain :)

So really, a Virus fell through a Wormhole in Space and recorded itself on a 360k floppy in the 1970s in a garage on a computer belonging to a couple of dropouts from Harvard who said "wow, we could make millions if we sold this rubbish"?

I've just got an alert from ET Antivirus 2013 telling me my system is infected. They only want fifty klaygaars for a twenty leeptoo licence, sounds like a bargain :)

So really, a Virus fell through a Wormhole in Space and recorded itself on a 360k floppy in the 1970s in a garage on a computer belonging to a couple of dropouts from Harvard who said "wow, we could make millions if we sold this rubbish"?

Yes, and when they saw that a portion of the population wanted nothing to do with that software, they decided to assist a college student from Finland to make a clone of their first virus attempt under the guise that it was an OS for geeks.

(PS - You're mixing your history there. Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs never went to Harvard, but they did work out of a garage. Paul Allen and Bill Gates did drop out of Harvard but they worked out of Bill's parent's house.)

So really, a Virus fell through a Wormhole in Space and recorded itself on a 360k floppy in the 1970s in a garage on a computer belonging to a couple of dropouts from Harvard who said "wow, we could make millions if we sold this rubbish"?

Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs never went to Harvard, but they did work out of a garage. Paul Allen and Bill Gates did drop out of Harvard but they worked out of Bill's parent's house.)

See thats the thing about the Schrödinger equation - you can never be quite sure who did what and when.

I do not know how this is going

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So really, a Virus fell through a Wormhole in Space and recorded itself on a 360k floppy in the 1970s in a garage on a computer belonging to a couple of dropouts from Harvard who said "wow, we could make millions if we sold this rubbish"?

Yes, and when they saw that a portion of the population wanted nothing to do with that software, they decided to assist a college student from Finland to make a clone of their first virus attempt under the guise that it was an OS for geeks.

...Oz, LOL.

(to get technical Linux is a Unix clone, not DOS.)

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#resist

So really, a Virus fell through a Wormhole in Space and recorded itself on a 360k floppy in the 1970s in a garage on a computer belonging to a couple of dropouts from Harvard who said "wow, we could make millions if we sold this rubbish"?

Yes, and when they saw that a portion of the population wanted nothing to do with that software, they decided to assist a college student from Finland to make a clone of their first virus attempt under the guise that it was an OS for geeks.

...Oz, LOL.

(to get technical Linux is a Unix clone, not DOS.)

I can see your confusion, but it wasn't DOS that I was referring to by the first failed attempt. Rather, I was suggesting that DOS was largely successful in getting most of the population, but the aliens decided to revive their first failed attempt (Unix) by cloning it into Linux to get the rest of the population.

As always, we are back at the point where we are trying to separate programs from data, are we not?

In order to be able to run specific programs, the central processing unit (CPU) of the computer is programmed to assume that certain bytes should be regarded as being code and therefore being allowed to be executed as software code.

The computer uses software in order to run (or execute) such programs in order to handle and manipulate data sets which should not be regarded as being software (code which may be run as software) on its own. However, such data sets could theoretically be software code on its own as well.

We therefore need to make a distinction between these two things all the time and keep them separate from each other.

In earlier days, when we had the Intel 8086/8088, computer architecture was 16/8 bits or 8/8 bits when it came to input/output.

Speed improved with the Intel 80286, but it was still 16 bits at most.

First when the Intel 80386 arrived, 32 bits processing as well as architecture became possible.

For all these processors, an additional co-processor (or maths processor) was possible also available, like the 8087, 80287 and 80387, but these processors were expensive and I have not been using such a processor myself for my earlier models.

With the Intel 80486, the 80487 processor (if any such name at all) was included in the main processor.

The Pentium was the first modern processor which integrated all the earlier ideas into one single processor.

It was replaced by the Pentium Pro, later the Pentium II, Pentium III, Pentium IV were available, before they were superseded by the Core i5, Core Quad and Core i7 processors. The most recent processor is the Core i7 Extreme, which is a rather expensive processor.

Also there are other brands, like AMD's series of processors as well as RISC processors.

Anyway, for a 16 bit (or 16-bit) processor like the 8086, you were supposed to be having four general registers, the CS, DS, SS, and ES registers, respectively.

For program control, also the BP and the SP registers were included and also the SI and DI registers.

These registers addressed 64 KB of RAM in one chunk. Data could be lying several places in 1 MB of RAM due to the
DS, SS, ES, as well as the SI and DI registers.

A 32 bits processor does the same as the previous 16/8 and 8/8 bits processors. The instruction set has been extended with several more assembly code choices and the speed is much higher than earlier.

For the newest 64 bits processors, which needs a 64 bits operating system and a processor capable of 64 bits software, the instruction set may possibly be different, although for Intel the general code set may be similar.

With my Windows Ultimate 32/64 bits versions, I do at least know that it is running. Further study will give me insight into 64 bits software architecture.

If you listen to the musicplayer backwards there are hidden messages in it,
I am shure i heard something . . . . .

Initially I thought the title of the thread had to do with why it is unlikely to get SETI work units. ;)

Thanks for an interesting and thought provoking discussion.

-Boomer

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