XKCD: It's more than a comic

Well, it would be great if most people could make that kind of distinction, but honestly it's hard enough to tell them that guessing a facebook password isn't the same as "hacking".

Unless you're a huge pedant I'd consider a person identifying adware or spyware as "a virus" to be pretty much correct.

So what kind of stuff would you expect a virus to do?

I had one once which filled a folder in my system files with random, roughly 32KB applications set to hidden with cool icons. Yeah, that was pretty weird. I tried deleting them and the folder automatically repopulated.

I also had a nastier Win32/Virut thing once. It replaced Windows Explorer (and broke it to which is how I noticed), injected itself into all my executable files and added a hidden frame to all my HTML files which I think probably re-downloads the virus or something. Complete reinstall needless to say, as well as re-downloading all my applications. I had to manually delete all the frames though, antiviruses just delete the whole files.

Silent data stealers are the scariest though.

edited 1st Mar '13 5:51:19 PM by UltimatelySubjective

Nowadays I expect malware to try and steal passwords and email addresses or open backdoor network ports to act as vectors for bigger attacks.

The three finest things in life are to splat your enemies, drive them from their turf, and hear their lamentations as their rank falls!

I thought it was a bit ironic that I saw this strip after Google complained about Something*Positive having a virus.

(I use a Firefox extension called "Morning Coffee", which allows you to open multiple tabs with a single button press and to schedule some sites to only load on certain days, like f'rex webcomics that aren't dailies. SP is in the open queue long before xkcd.)

All your safe space are belong to Trump

Not an expert, but I think a virus is defined by the fact that it spreads itself from computer to computer, and not by what it does on those computers. I read somewhere that the most successful and common viruses actually dont do anything to the PC's they infect.

Kind of like organic viruses, actually.

They assed first. I am only retaliating in an ass way. -The Dead Man's Life

Hence the name.

Okay, now we're into a terminology debate. Many people equate "virus" with "malware" in general, despite "virus" being a more specific and not perfectly overlapping term.

If, when I say "virus", I mean "malware", then the Venn diagram is inaccurate. It's only accurate if you get really pedantic about definitions.

edited 2nd Mar '13 7:50:11 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

And since this is the internet, being pedantic about definitions is normal.

Sort of a "memetic virus" if you will...

And then you have worms, which spread from computer to computer without the need for a user. It's like subcatagories... Malware > Virus > Worm etc. Though I probably missed something there.

Only terminology I get pedantic about is people who call hard drives "memory". That's a different part of the computer! Stop telling me you have 1 TB of memory when I ask how much you have!

"The fact that your food can be made into makeshift bombs alarms the Hell out of me, Scrye." - Charlatan

^ At least they're not calling the internet "the computer", like my mom does...

(Though, that is just about the only thing she uses her computer for.)

All your safe space are belong to Trump

http://xkcd.com/1181/

http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=100629

PGP, lol

The three finest things in life are to splat your enemies, drive them from their turf, and hear their lamentations as their rank falls!

I haven't seen a PGP-signed email in ages, but it used to be all the rage. Thousands of pimply-faced teenagers used to live in fear that vaguely evil people on the fringes of the Internet were trying to impersonate them by faking their mail headers.

Nowadays we know better. If they steal your identity they do far worse things to you than email all your friends in an attempt to sell them knockoff Viagra.

edited 4th Mar '13 6:00:26 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

So I'm not sure whether the joke is that PGP is easy to fake or if it's that nobody would actually bother to fake it.

Never seen a PGP email personally though. I'm not sure it'd actually contribute to security considering far more glaring weaknesses.

For PGP security to work, you have to run the email through your own PGP decoder which knows the sender's public key, thus verifying that they sent it — or that someone with access to their private key sent it, in any event.

The mere presence of a PGP signature on an email does not validate it, any more than the presence of a U.S. government seal on a piece of snail mail means that Uncle Sam sent it.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

And now for something new and different, what would happen if you cranked up an indestructible hairdryer to eleven.

Petawatt that is.

At this point I don't even know who is cranking it up.

Eh... Kind of getting stale with the random doomsday scenarios. Especially when it boils down to 'Heat stuff up and it gets hot.'

^_^ Loved the little kid, though.

Yeah, the kid was a good touch.

This reminds me of one of the few things that bugged me in The Adventures of Killroy and Tina (previous comic of the author of The Non Adventures Of Wonderella.) Killroy's laser eyes supposedly had an output of 100 terawatts. I can buy a character with the occupation of Galactic Despot being that powerful, but the actual effects shown in the comic were never anything like what would have been appropriate for such a high energy beam (it should have caused everything it touched to instantly detonate in a fusion explosion.)

...eventually, we will reach a maximum entropy state where nobody has their own socks or underwear, or knows who to ask to get them back.

I don't see it that way. It's not so much that disaster happens (I mean, it's always going to happen when you crank things up to 11 thousand), more like the speculation about what happens exactly.

Like, I would not have expected the box to bounce around. I thought it was just going to melt everything and sink into the earth.

edited 5th Mar '13 5:15:57 PM by KylerThatch

This "faculty lot" you speak of sounds like a place of great power...

Yeah and if you drop a teaspoon of white dwarf matter onto the surface of the Earth it'll make the planet into swiss cheese. So? Everything leading to a different version of DOOOOOM gets boring if that's all you do. That's why the kid was the best part of the strip and one of my favorite What Ifs? recently was one about the planes in different atmospheres.

White dwarf matter is electron-degenerate, which means that it's not as dense as neutronium is, but more pertinently it's still basically run by the interactions of electrons, which is also what makes ordinary matter solid. So it might be that electron-degenerate matter wouldn't simply fall through ordinary. I can't say for sure, not being a quantum physicist.

Actually, on doing a bit more research, degenerate matter of any kind should be violently unstable in quantities smaller than those required to keep them confined via gravity. So chunks of white dwarf matter, or even neutron star matter, wouldn't so much make hash of the Earth as just explode violently as soon as they were out of the extreme gravitational fields that held them stable. The resultant explosions should usually be subnuclear in yield, so far as I can guess, but they certainly wouldn't be anything you'd want to be near.

edited 5th Mar '13 6:44:40 PM by alethiophile

Shinigan (Naruto fanfic)