Overlock Stitch

On Thursday we read Six Degrees, Ch. 6 Epidemics and Failures by Duncan Watts. The chapter explains that by understanding how epidemics like Ebola or HIV spreads we will be able to understand how computer viruses spread. First we must look at the spread of epidemics and then the spread of computer viruses.

Ebola has mainly stayed in small remote cities while HIV has spread all over the world. The reason for this is that Ebola “exhibits all the subtlety of a train wreck, revealing its true nature in a matter of days and killing shortly thereafter.” Once the victims exhibit the symptoms of the virus they become overwhelmingly ill that they are not able to move, making themselves quarantined without purposefully isolating them, so the virus has no way of spreading to new hosts. HIV on the other hand kills their victims slowly and doesn’t show signs of infection right away, so the victim is able to pass the virus on before realizing that they are infected. A good way to compare Ebola and HIV is to look at their efficiency. “The more contagious a virus is, and the longer it can keep the host in an infectious state, the more efficient it is at searching. Ebola, therefore, is more efficient than HIV in that it is significantly more infectious (HIV-infected patients don’t vomit blood in the emergency room), but is less efficient in that it kills so quickly.”

Computer viruses, “in terms of efficiency,” are more “contagious” than human viruses. “The function of computers is to execute instructions as efficiently as possible, regardless of where the instructions came from. So they are considerably more vulnerable to malicious bits of code than are people.” Since computers do not need to replicate a virus to the tee, they can take parts of the virus to pass it on; the virus is more capable of reproducing and infecting computers worldwide, which makes computer viruses more efficient. Computer viruses are more infectious than human viruses and continue to spread. Also, computers don’t have immune systems. Usually viruses (human) can be fought off but since computers don’t have immune systems they can not be fought off unless there is an antibody made for the virus.