It's a fun idea, but it could never work! For one thing, how do you guarantee that 100% of all the computers get patched by the worm? If you're going to send out a patch that 'does-it-all-for-you', people are going to expect it and expect it right away. Second, patches now are made available from a handful of trusty and reliable sources. Who's to say that a worm-patch isn't caught in the wild, altered and re-released to the detriment of all the users patiently waiting for the fit-it worm to find them? > rather then sell dodgy software and then try to convince people to keep > patching it every day or two, ..they should just write really good software and properly test and debug it before releasing it to the public. I have read somewhere that the concept of the computer virus was origninally conceived at Xerox as a means of unjamming their constantly clogged printer queues. Even in a closed environment it got out of control. Since you are considering writing Internet worms you should really understand the risks & consequences you put yourself under. Back in '88 a benign computer student discovered a bug in Sendmail (or whatever the popular Unix mail daemon was at the time) that allowed him to send an email to the mail daemon and force it to send an email back. The student thought it would be a great ideam to send a few emails out, exploit the mail daemons out in the wild to re-send his email to any of the other mail servers known to the mail daemon, and have a report sent back to the student. He honestly just wanted to see how far his email worm would travel. Due to an oversight in the code he ran, a bogus 'if' statement or something, the worm he wrote did not know when to stop sending emails. Within hours about 25% of the Internet had come to a complete stop as mail servers ran out of storage. The student spent several years in jail and he meant no harm, just like you! Programmers make mistakes, that's why there's a "Delete" key. Richie
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