So, by way of experiment, we're going to put two naïve naked people, wired for curiosity, into a lush garden, tell them to eat anything except for one thing, and when they (predictably) eat the verboten thing, jump out from behind a bush and yell "gotcha!". Then let them be cursed with painful childbirth and early death. And not just them, the perpetrators . . . but also the countless generations of progeny they've been ordered to put forth (miraculously, since they have only themselves as a breeding population . . . oh, except for those unexplained people in Nodland to the East) until the experimenter gets tired of it all and wipes the program . . .

This sounds less like an experiment, and more like a soap opera written by the Marquis de Sade and directed by Alan Funt.

As for what an SDLC instructor would tell 'god'? Probably, "Do module testing instead of trying to debug the whole system."

This presupposes "intelligence" on the part of malware designers which, given the amount of script-kiddie nonsense out there, is not a universal fact. =)

Of course, I'm being entirely tongue-in-cheek and pointing out that as a design function, the nipples on men don't serve the same function as on women, even though all the same structures (e.g. from an OOP perspective, the object's methods) are still in place. Hormone therapy can cause men to lactate because of this, but there's no known condition in nature that would cause men to naturally lactate.

I could continue the flippancy with a reference to overload methods, but I think I'm already getting a bit obscure.

Nope.

Digital postage will only hurt people who aren't planning to make money from their e-mail.

Just as with DRM, the honest pay, and the dishonest either find a way around it, or are making so much off of it that it's a mere "cost of doing business".

Someday, they'll drill for old malware deposits that have metamorphosed over time, to refine it into an energy source to power the cars AI will drive in cyberspace.

Ha. Okay, but the PRIMARY method [lactation] is not being called unless you're into some serious hormone treatments.

The apt response can be found in the Wikipedia article for Natural Selection :

As opposed to artificial selection, in which humans favor specific traits, in natural selection the environment acts as a sieve through which only certain variations can pass.

The environment, in this case, is the realm in which Malware attempts to propagate, and the increasing effectiveness of the predators (Anti-virus, Firewalls, IDS/IPS, &c) which can curtail that propagation. The need for a random mutation capability is overstated in your response. In Darwinian selection, that is merely the proposed mechanism of phenotypic change. The same is accomplished here by a diverse body of malware authors adding their own flavor to the individual bits of code. This is still an environment of natural selection. The environment itself provides the selection pressure, rather than conscious arbitration on the part of humans, as to what variants are successful.

For your assertion that this is artificial selection to be true, humans would have to be making a conscious choice as to which kinds of malware is allowed to propagate in order to strengthen certain traits. That is to say, Symantec makes a conscious decision like "We're going to make our AV not eradicate foobar.A because we like the traits it has, and we want to see more malware like that." Clearly, that is not what is happening.

Being a decent human doesn't require this software. As for people ridiculing and trolling, well, consider Apple fanboys as your model here. Frequently, they bring it upon themselves.

So, 'god' is either a cargo cult programmer, or doesn't pay attention to his compiler warnings. Either way, I'm thinking he needs some time in a SDLC class, and maybe next time submit the code for peer review and maybe run a vulnerability scan or two.

Hmm... the problem here is that a lot is promised for the next release, but apart from some very shaky Gant charts at the end of the requirements doc, no actual detailed build plan has been revealed. I'm calling this Vaporware.

So 'god' is the original engineer, and 'the serpent' is the original malware hacker, and the apple is the original trojan. Suggesting that 'god' did not follow secure coding practices, and as far as anyone can tell, did not do a requirements review. (Nipples on men? A clear case of including an object without ever calling its methods.)

If you're talking about the electoral college, that and the Senate representation (two per state regardless of the size of the state) was a compromise to keep the big states from completely dominating the small states. That's part of the rulebook and it's necessary.

If however you're talking about electronic ballot fraud, hey man, right there with ya! Google my name with "Diebold" or the like.

Jim March
Member of the Board of Directors,
http://blackboxvoting.org/

Right, the "lying for security needs" argument. And it's valid, in a lot of cases.

But then a lot of non-security-related stuff gets shoved under the same rug.

The Wikileaks cables dump is FULL of such stuff. For example, you have high-level diplomats and other US government actors saying "hey, the Saudis are massively overstating their oil reserves". And that's considered "secret". Seriously? Sure, it's been suspected by insiders in the oil biz for some time now but those "theories" just got a huge bump. Well guess what? The US government plays the stock and commodities markets just like everybody else. If any other player in the oil biz had that sort of inside track on oil futures and kept it secret while playing the oil markets, there's a term for that: "insider trading".

WTF?

The rules need to be "use secrets for stuff that REALLY matters, like a downed pilot's fake ID behind enemy lines, and if the gov't screws up and uses secrecy laws either to prop up financial markets or cover their own fucktardedness, somebody like Manning steps up and releases it AND YOU DON'T JAIL THE WHISTLEBLOWER AS A RESULT".

Instead we see Manning basically in hell and weird-ass charges against Assange by the sockpuppets in Sweden...

There's a recent trend of prosecuting people for "unauthorized use of online systems" when all they did was violate the terms of agreement of Facebook or the like. It's a real stretch to call that "hacking" but they sure tried hard in the 2008 Lori Drew case:

http://hackaday.com/2008/05/27/violating-terms-of-service-equals-hacking/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Lori_Drew

They actually failed in that case:

http://www.burneylawfirm.com/blog/tag/hacking/ ...but it was *federal* prosecutors who argued that the same thing the Air Force wants to do is in fact illegal if private citizens do it. And that wasn't the only such case - two more are discussed on this 2010 page:

http://econsultancy.com/us/blog/6189-can-terms-of-service-turn-you-into-a-criminal

On top of all those issues, there might be something else illegal about this, something unique to government actors. Is it constitutional for the state to lie to influence public opinion? Seriously, are we a "democracy" (yeah, I know, technically a Constitutional Republic) anymore, if public opinion can be systematically shifted via...well, bullshit? We have "freedom of information" laws - doesn't that at least imply that information coming from government sources not be a total fraud from top to bottom?

If we let government actors spread BS at will...ummm...we have some really ghastly examples of where that leads. North Korea is probably the worst of the worst possible endgames there but there's a ton of others worldwide.

It said "Maternity Ward"...