living in the future, pt. 9

I'm occasionally struck by how close we are to living in the future. Today, the finalists for the second DARPA Grand Challenge were chosen, and 23 robotic vehicles will be autonomously racing away shortly. (Note for reesei: Looks like the OSU team, "Desert Buckeyes", came in 3rd in the qualifying rounds!)

Meanwhile, in a couple of weeks there's going to be a space elevator competition. And while the Sky Car hasn't, err, taken off yet, you can buy it from Neiman Marcus if you've got $3.5 million lying around.

But what brings this up today? An article which makes it sound like people are getting serious about releasing beneficial network worms into the wild. The article links to pros and cons, but I suspect people are going to buy this from the pro side:

"This tactic has been discussed in the security community before, and there are some strong arguments against the use of good worms. But in the face of zombie networks numbering tens of thousands of machines, which could be disabled in a single night by good worms, I'm willing to take these criticisms on."

I recently read The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner (recommended by harimad). I've liked Brunner ever since I read _Stand on Zanzibar_; even though he was writing in the 60s and 70s, the books always feel like they have a late-90s MTV-generation, post-Snow Crash sensibility. Anyhow, in _TSR_, one of the reasons the main character is able to maintain his identity-free existence, slipping from one persona to another every few years without being tracked by the all-seeing government computers, is because he's very good at using the system. In particular, he wrote what Brunner called a "tapeworm" which somehow helped to clear up his trail every time he needed to switch identities. (I'll forgive Brunner for not referring to hard drives, which were invented in the 50s, because I'm sure more people knew about tapes in 1975, and more importantly, "tapeworm" is more clever than anything I can come up with for disk. In fact, I wouldn't have thought "worms" were computer network lingo back then!) One of the major scenes towards the end involves the protagonist writing a new tapeworm which goes and careens through the net, on the lookout for information which the people ought to know that the government was hiding. Another beneficial worm helps protect an anonymous aid organization's records from outside snooping. (Don't worry, you're not forced to sit through a description of the writing or the technology. It just happens.)

So, with the "nematodes" from the above Good Worm article, it seems like we're close to entering the future once again. The future as seen from 60s/70s sci-fi, sure, but isn't that always what we've been headed towards?