{"id":7,"date":"2007-04-23T17:22:00","date_gmt":"2007-04-24T01:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=7"},"modified":"2007-04-23T17:22:00","modified_gmt":"2007-04-24T01:22:00","slug":"another-step-towards-the-maelstrom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=7","title":{"rendered":"Another Step Towards the Maelstrom"},"content":{"rendered":"

Those of you who read Maelstrom<\/i> might remember what that book was named for: the frenetic chainsaw fast-forward jungle that the Internet had evolved into, infested by the virtual predators and parasites that evolved after we gave genes to spambots and let them breed at 50 generations\/sec. (Those of you who didn’t read Maelstrom<\/i> can still give it a shot<\/a>, if you’re up for the challenge.) Here’s<\/a> another benchmark on the way to that future: net bots competing for host machines to zombify, repairing the security holes that they themselves exploited so that competitors can’t get in the same way. Imagine a beast that actually installs necessary Windows patches onto your machine– but only after it’s already built anest behind your firewall. It’s vaguely reminiscent of those male insects with genitals that look like pedestals of dental instruments: once they inseminate the female, they secrete a kind of crazy glue and spatula it over her genital pore to keep competitors from messing with their sperm. Or the even cooler (albeit possibly apocryphal) case of reproductive homosexual rape in hanging flies; the really<\/i> successful males don’t even bother to inseminate females directly, they bugger other males. Their sperm then migrate to the gonads of their victim, and when said victim finally makes it with a female, he inseminates her with the sperm of the male who raped him.<\/i> (More than one clergyman has told me that you can learn a lot about the mind of God by studying His creations. I wonder what they’d make of these guys.)

Of course, this is still special creation, not evolution. The bots are intelligently designed; nobody’s given them genes yet (or perhaps the coders themselves are a kind of “extended genotyope”, albeit a Lamarkian one. Life always hits you upside the head with this recursive chicken\/egg stuff whenever you look too closely.) (Hey– maybe there’s a story in that…)

Still, it’s another step in the right direction. It’s part of the arms race. Only a matter of time before someone figures out that a random number generator and a tilt bit here and there can unleash these things to evolve on their own, without always having to get respawned from the shop.

Personally, I think they’re taking way too long. I can hardly wait to see what happens.
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(Thanks to Raymond Neilson and Alistair Blachford for the link.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Those of you who read Maelstrom might remember what that book was named for: the frenetic chainsaw fast-forward jungle that the Internet had evolved into, infested by the virtual predators and parasites that evolved after we gave genes to spambots and let them breed at 50 generations\/sec. (Those of you who didn’t read Maelstrom can […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,4,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-life","category-evolution","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}