The Conficker Worm—Brilliance, Misplaced

The creators of the Conficker worm are clearly smart and clever. The worm has not only been infecting millions of computers, but is also spreading at an alarming rate. And while nothing spectacular happened on the first of April when it was scheduled to show force, that does not mean that that’s the end of it.

Lately, the Conficker worm had an upgrade. It now tries to connect to 50,000 internet addresses instead of just 250 like it did in the past. It also has a new peer-to-peer capability for updating itself and for other purposes. Doing all these take a lot of time, energy and intelligence on the part of the worm’s creators.

But such resources could have been used in better ways. There are still a lot of improvements and innovation that can be done in IT. So, why focus on destruction when you can apply the same talent to help fuel progress? Which do you think is better, spending a year developing a worm or the same amount of time and energy developing something useful and fun, like Mr. Nasser’s GeShout?

I think the answer will depend on how you want to be remembered. This is specially true in this day and age when Internet archives transcend both time and space. News articles and posts in blogs, forums, newsgroups, etc., will be available for quite a long time to come. It is also searchable and can be accessed from anywhere in the world.

From what I can remember during my childhood days, everyone wants to be the hero and no one wants to be the villain. When we role-play, all of us would like to be Batman or Superman and such. All of us ran around pretending to be the masked crusader. I just wonder at what point, in a child’s development toward adulthood, did it became OK and acceptable—and sometimes, even fashionable—to be an Emperor Palpatine and go over to The Dark Side.