Grant Edwards wrote: > On 2014-12-23, Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> > wrote: >> Chris Angelico wrote: >> >>> On Tue, Dec 23, 2014 at 12:15 AM, Roy Smith <r...@panix.com> wrote: >>>> If I really didn't trust something, I'd go to AWS and spin up one of >>>> their free-tier micro instances and run it there :-) >>> >>> How do you know it won't create console output that stroboscopically >>> infects you with a virus through your eyes? Because that's *totally* >>> what would be done in the town of Eureka. >> >> Anybody in IT who hasn't read Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" needs to >> hand in their Geek Card immediately. > > I tried, but I got so tired of the author doing stuff like pointing > out that there were 65536 of something or other (and that it's a power > of TWO, kids!) that I gave up. The annoying thing was that there was > no real technical reason why the quantity _needed_ to be a power of > two.
Neal Stephenson's technical chops, and his limits, are well established. He is a writer first and foremost and it is quite obvious that he's often showing off his technical knowledge even when it's not strictly relevant. Remember to that Snow Crash became a cult classic among hackers, but it was written for a science fiction and cyberpunk audience. To them, 2^16 is a strange and exotic concept: 10000, or 50000, or 100000 would be a round number, not 65536. > And even _with_ all the technical jibber-jabber, none of it explained > or justified the whole "writing a virus to infect the brain through > the optic nerve" thing which might just have well been magick and > witches. Any sufficiently advanced technology. I disagree. I think he did a good job of making such a thing seem plausible without getting bogged down with inventing a detailed mechanism which could only ever be wrong. But then I was easily convinced, because I already knew of various related facts and concepts which probably primed me to accept the concept of the Snow Crash virus: - Zombie ant fungus and various other parasites which manipulate the brains of organisms, including human beings (Toxoplasmosis, syphillis and others). - The optic nerve is technically not a nerve, but part of the brain, and there are deep and subtle connections between it and the rest of the brain, e.g. blind-sight. - The theory of memes, or perhaps I should say the meme of memes, since memetics has never been quite vigorous enough to count as an actual theory. - Super-stimuli. - The human brain considered as an information processor. - Julian Jaynes' book "The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind", a hypothesis so wonderful that it needs to be true (alas, it's probably rubbish). Personally, I don't believe that in this day and age of Java programming, anyone could be programmed by looking at a black and white animated bitmap, but back in the 1990s it was probably a bit more plausible that hackers would spend their time learning to read machine code. But there's always the chance that somebody will find a way a stimulus that crashes the human brain and lets them run the arbitrary code of their choice... -- Steven -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
