Should we be proud of what these guys did? Or ashamed of it?
Supposedly, Brain was the world’s first computer virus. Does that make it a technology marvel or another illegal act? On the one hand I think there is nothing smart or funny about messing up other’s computers. On the other hand, they seem to have acted in naivety rather than malice. What do you think?
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As an IT guy some corrections are due:
The major one is that Brain was not the first virus. It was the first virus for the MS-DOS operating system (damn, I am getting old).
Also, it was not a technology marvel nor was it illegal. Any competent person could have come up with something similar given the requirements. The industry was in such infancy that there were no laws covering viruses and malware. And since there was no destruction of private property, it would have been difficult to prosecute them.
If my recollection is correct, they had written it because some medical software they had written was being pirated and they wanted to stop that.
Honesty, I cannot just comprehend the “should we be ashamed or proud of these guys?”. In the grand scheme of things, this is just a footnote in history; an interesting tidbit to mull over. There are way bigger things in life that we should be ashamed of.
First of all its not a harmful virus ,or created for any bad purposes , The main reason of that is to stop piracy of there soft wears .
according to Wikipedia
”There are many minor and major variations to that version of the text. The virus slows down the floppy disk drive and makes seven kilobytes of memory unavailable to DOS. ©Brain was written by two brothers, Basit and Amjad Farooq Alvi, who lived in Chahmiran near Lahore Railway Station, Lahore, Pakistan. The brothers told TIME magazine they had written it to protect their medical software from piracy and it was supposed to target copyright infringers only. The cryptic message “Welcome to the Dungeon”, appeared after a year because the brothers licensed a beta version of the code, a safeguard and reference to an early programming forum on Dungeon BBS. The brothers could not be contacted to receive the final release of this version of the program. ”
Is it not ironical that Alfred Nobel, inventor of Dynamite is celebrated as a beacon of peace around the world despite the destruction his invention brought (and will always continue to bring) around the whole wide world???
The biggest terrorist act of history (twice in four days), unleashed upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki was carried out by today’s champion of human rights and she has never felt guilty or ashamed over it. Look at the ruling of International war crimes tribunal verifying the heinous crimes against humanity by so called civilized world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_War_Cri mes_Tribunal
And once again Tamashbeen is back with a new tamasha by creating a window of opportunity for the people always lustful for maligning Pakistani Nationalism. Did Tamashbeen ever question the validity of drone attacks under any local, foreign or international law? No. Why? Because Tamashbeen likes creating a Tamasha OF Pakistan.
I dont remember any Tamasha posted on this blog was appreciative of any facet of Pakistan. Either these tamasha’s were scornfully ridiculing innocent self-employed qulfi cart owner or were critical of a man marrying twice to satisfy his family wishes or were sniffing rats in bakery or thrashing media for exposing immaturity of politicians or lamenting Salman Taseer.
I feel pity when I realize that Tamashbeen, lacking positive attitude, is unable to afford a priceless sense of patriotism even for just a change of taste. But who knows??? May be I am proven wrong by any future tamasha!!!
I heard this about 3 years ago in a Korean language class. Our book had a chapter where it highlighted a Korean guy who made an ‘anti virus’ software against this Pakistani virus….!
It was a little embarresing but I wonder if their intentions were really ‘malicious’ because they had their personal information in it!
Anyhow, they have their contribution in job creation for ‘anti virus softwares’… :D
What they did was illegal then and illegal now. Nothing to be proud of here.