Just like E-Bitch I have an hour+ drive to work, and I also think about computer behavior and patterns in relation to human behavior and patterns. I think that most of E-Bitch's idea's makes sense.
My only issue with his description of human viruses is this:
When I get sick, I dont need to run my virus scanner to get better (thank god).
Doesn't the human "virus scanner" get better? Doesn't it adapt
to new viruses and not allow the viruses to re-infect the body? (Not
perfectly, but the capability is there, eg. Chicken Pox 'should'
only infect you once.)
If I'm way off with this, then I'll apologize in advance, but If I'm not, I think that this is a way to improve on E-Bitch's ideas.
If we started the anti-virus virus with our current knowledge of virus definitions(like the MMR shots children are given), as a starting base. Then the virus can look for infectious behavior on the host system which indicates a hostile virus. Our 'good' virus replaces the hostile virus with a copy of the good virus. This would halt any damage due to the hostile virus. System performance would be impacted(like a human body feels tired, achy, sniffly(is that a word?) and other side effects of a high white blood count). The sys admin or user would then need to kill off the extra copies of the 'good' virus until the system returned to the normal state(Chicken soup, rest and fluids in humans.)
The above process works very much like the human body, which also leads to the problems that human bodies have.
The common cold is a virus, but humans still catch one many, many times, why? The common cold is actually a large amount of viruses, so that even though the human body will probably never get the same virus twice, it can catch each different varity. The same applies to our 'good' virus. It would need to be infected with each differnet virus to defend against it, unless it were smart enough to try and stop similar viruses(see below).
To see another issue we must look at the AIDS virus. There are problems with current treatments for the AIDS virus due to the virus becoming immune to the drugs used in the treatment. Imagine a computer virus that could activly detect our 'good' virus and when discovered would spawn a copy of itself that was modified so that the 'good' virus wouldn't properly identify the hostile virus. Another posibility is a virus that hid in files on the host system, causing our 'good' virus to overwrite infected files. As the hostile virus infected more files to avoid our 'good' virus, our good virus would eventually overwrite every file it could(all files it had permission to write to).
If our 'good' virus were smart, then we could avoid many of the drawbacks mentioned above. The smarter our virus would get the larger and more resource intensive it would become, which may be more harm then more traditional methods of dealing with viruses. Since we want the our virus to be able to automatically update its own virus definitions, then it would probably already be somewhat smart(already large and system intensive). Also if our 'good' virus was this smart, then what's to stop someone from reverse engineering our virus and turning it hostile?
I think that this idea is possible, but that it would need to be very, very, VERY well planned. If the negative aspects were overcome, then the positive aspects would work very well, but if the negative aspects were not delt with, then I can see this being more harm then good.
UPDATE: So I was wrong, please see dragonchild's response to this. If I have time tonight after work, I will try to update this to reflect the correct info.
--xPhase
In reply to Re: So I have this crazy idea about an 'anti-virus virus'
by xphase_work
in thread So I have this crazy idea about an 'anti-virus virus'
by E-Bitch
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