Viral Cure Could 'Immunise' The Internet

Fri Dec 9 15:46:50 UTC 2005

Keep in mind the study was done by physicists, who while brilliant, cannot be bothered with operational realities that prevent their equations from being elegant.  

Still an interesting hypothesis on how to leverage network structure to fight infections - this assumes you buy into the whole Internet is "scale free" argument to begin with.

----- Original Message -----
From: Simon Waters <simonw at zynet.net>
Date: Friday, December 9, 2005 10:34 am
Subject: Re: Viral Cure Could 'Immunise' The Internet

> 
> On Friday 09 Dec 2005 14:57, you wrote:
> > 
> > a mathematical study is going to come up with a result that is more
> > meaningful.
> 
> The story is badly headlined. 
> 
> The study is saying how many "canaries" do we need to keep the 
> Internet safe, 
> or how big the immune system needs to be, not about a viral cure 
> as such.
> 
> It says to keep the infection rate of new malware down to a 
> fraction of a 
> percent we'd need about a million or so machines looking for 
> malware (on some 
> assumptions).
> 
> Should convince someone that we need to change the assumptions. 
> Hopefully the 
> modelling says something about what factors it is sensitive to.
> 
> It does however remind me of the comparison of engineering and 
> science, a 
> scientist will earn a living by taking a really difficult problem 
> and spends 
> many  years solving it, an engineer earns a living by finding 
> really 
> difficult problems and side stepping them.
> 