Crazed ranting by a diseased Axel?  Cough medicine with a proof rating?  A recipe for danger!  Today, it’s computer viruses.

Hello, loving disease vectors.  It’s Tuesday, August 28, 2007.  I’m doped up on NyQuil.  Anything goes.  

I hate people.  I’m sure I’ve stated this in the past, but in case I haven’t, I’m making it clear.  It isn’t that I hate all people.  Like mosquitoes, of which only a negligible sliver of the population have actually caused me harm, an occasional few have caused me enough frustration to begin casting blanket statements about.  I don’t mean people like Hitler.  We all hate Hitler, but not in the same way I’m talking about.  He killed millions of people based on religion, origin, and other uncontrollable ways using inhumane means.  The history books said so, and we believe this, and we don’t like him.  But, if you weren’t there, it’s not really that deep, personal hate.  You nod and say, "Millions of people, tortured and burned for their beliefs, very bad, very bad," and you get hit with rocks if you don’t.  But, it can’t compare with that special hate you reserve for the guy who short changed you for your coffee yesterday morning, or the girl who cut you off on the highway while talking on her cell phone.  People you will never see again, chosen to represent the human race as a whole in our eyes.  If only I knew who these few people were, I wouldn’t hate "people" in general.

Today’s people I hate are you out there writing viruses.  I don’t know you personally, but I’m content to hate you as a group.  According to an interview with some really smart person, there have been roughly 137,000 PC viruses written over the 15 year period between 1991 and 2005.  That’s about 9133 viruses a year, or about 25 new viruses a day.  Since that started at about 300 known viruses in 1991, you can expect that that’s not a flat figure, but one starting small and growing.  Still, even at 25 viruses a day, that’s a lot.  Maybe it’s just one guy, the virus guy, getting up early every morning like the Dunkin’ Donuts guy.

Viruses are crafted for any reason ranging from attempting to gather credit card information, to over-zealous open-sourcers trying to bring about the downfall of Microsoft’s corporate rule, to people just being dicks.  For you technically pure out there, I use the term "virus" to also mean worms or Trojan horses, despite this being the incorrect terminology.

Some argue that by producing viruses, they expose security holes, allowing the software to be improved.  I have a slight problem with this mentality.  I could walk into an unlocked house and steal someone’s TV, encouraging them to lock their door in the future.  It still makes me a bastard.  Software has already become too paranoid for my liking.  I liked when a game could take full control of my hardware, without the need for a bulky, secure operating system.  If you remove that, do you know what you get?  Well, the Playstation 2 operates on a 299 MHz CPU, 147 MHz Graphics Processor, and 32 MB of RAM, and beats out a 1 GHz PC running Windows XP.  Other factors come into play, but still, I pay hundreds of dollars more, because I have to lock my doors.  As the new generation of consoles become online capable and more like PCs in functionality, I worry that they’ll be forced down the same path.  We have already begun to see cell phones being infected. 

And so it’s the world we live in.  Some good people have come from the wood work, and now we see a variety of anti-virus software packages that are free to home users, such as AVG or Avast.  Windows still doesn’t come packaged with anti-virus software, and we should be pretty well happy with that, else we’d have more viruses targeting our antivirus software too.

And now, I return to my bottle of NyQuil.

• If computers had NyQuil, they wouldn’t run any better, but the screen savers would be more fun.
• No, Axel isn’t making light of Hitler.  Don’t send him hate mail.  He doesn’t feel good.