The computer virus has grown and matured over the past few decades. Its birth is considered by many to have been at the hands of John Walker in 1975. Walker created a subroutine called PERVADE as part of the program ANIMAL that ran on a UNIVAC. Animal was a computer program that would try to guess the animal you were thinking of by asking series of twenty questions. PERVADE was a subroutine that allowed ANIMAL to copy itself into another directory when played by someone. This sounds harmless enough. The only real potential for damage, so to speak, is that eventually the system would run out of space as more and more users played the game.

“Man arrested for accessing wireless network”, or something to that tune had been in the headlines a few times recently. Each time I read it, I question the validity of the laws used in these cases. I personally think the legal ignorance of technology is the problem. Around 6^th grade (stick with me here), I submitted a paper I had typed in Paperclip, my first word processor. I was stunned when my teacher wouldn’t accept it. I had printed it with a dot-matrix printer. Of course the paper’s computer generation was obvious and my teacher immediately conjured up the notion that my computer had clearly written my paper for me. My teacher’s position was that I need to do the paper myself, and consequently, she wouldn’t accept anything done by a computer. I reasoned that I had actually composed the paper, and the computer had not created the paper for me as she was implying. In the end I lost that battle but learned from the experience. She made a rule based in ignorance that was going to cost me – the price of a daisy wheel printer.