There’s a new worm out there making the rounds that I actually approve of. Why? Because if you’re dumb enough to actually launch it you are greeted with this rousing chorus.
“I thought it was ingenious,” said Mark Price, technical director for Panda. “It doesn’t really do anything different from other viruses, but it shouts ‘You’re an idiot.’ Most of them don’t shout at you. That’s a new one on me.”
The worm travels as an email attachment called Project.exe. When opened, the file copies itself to the Windows registry and disables antivirus programs and firewalls, leaving computers more vulnerable to attack. It also stops variants of competing worms Bagle and Netsky from running. It then sends itself to contacts in the Outlook address book and looks for networked computers to infect.
It still poses a risk because it disables your antivirus software and firewalls, but chances are that if you’re dumb enough to launch this one then your antivirus and firewall have probably been disabled a long time ago by other more sinister viruses.
We need more viruses that tell you when you’ve been a dumbass, but we need them in other areas of life like the political arena when some idiot politician introduces legislation that’s just so stunningly stupid that it strikes people with normal brain functions temporarily blind. There should be a virus that latches onto the legislation and starts shouting at everyone who looks at it what an idiot they are for even considering such a stupid proposal and then it infects everyone who voted for that moron and renders them sterile so they won’t produce more idiot offspring.
OK, maybe that is a bit much, but still.
That one already exists. Its been most often sighted as commonsense.exe, though some variants also hide themselves as tolerance.scr.
However, politicians have long since evolved strong resistances.