He tends to spend a fair amount of his leisure time at the local videogame arcade playing Mortal Kombat II, and would prefer that you didn't know his real name. One computer virus writer in his early 20s lives on unemployment checks in a white, working-class exurb of New York City. In short, virus enthusiasts relate to the virus as a fascinating and powerful life form, whether for the fertile creation of yet more powerful digital devices, as an entity for study in itself, or, in the case of one renegade coder, for reckless individual expression. There are scientists interested in the abstract behaviors of self-replicating codes, there are developers interested in harnessing the power of self-replicating programs, and there are unnamed renegades of the virus-writing underground.Īlthough they share no common experience, all these heretics respect a computer virus for its irrepressible mobility, for the self-centered autonomy it wrests from a computer environment, and for the surprising agility with which it explores opportunities and possibilities. They have almost nothing to do with each other. Today three very different groups of heretics are creating computer viruses.
