{"id":2763,"date":"2011-01-27T12:32:35","date_gmt":"2011-01-27T19:32:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/2011\/01\/william-gibsons-history-of-digital-vandalism\/"},"modified":"2011-01-31T09:54:11","modified_gmt":"2011-01-31T16:54:11","slug":"william-gibsons-history-of-digital-vandalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2011\/01\/27\/william-gibsons-history-of-digital-vandalism\/","title":{"rendered":"William Gibson&#8217;s History of Digital Vandalism"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2011\/01\/27\/opinion\/27Gibson.html\" target=\"_blank\">from The New York Times<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<h1>25 Years of Digital Vandalism<\/h1>\n<p><span class=\"Apple-style-span\" style=\"font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 12px; font-size: 10px; color: #808080\">By WILLIAM GIBSON<\/span><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2011\/01\/27\/opinion\/27Gibson.html\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Mark Pernice\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/graphics8.nytimes.com\/images\/2011\/01\/27\/opinion\/27oped1\/27oped1-popup.jpg\" border=\"0\" hspace=\"10\" width=\"244\" height=\"333\" align=\"right\" \/><\/a>IN January 1986, Basit and Amjad Alvi, sibling programmers living near the main train station in Lahore, Pakistan, wrote a piece of code to safeguard the latest version of their heart-monitoring software from piracy. They called it Brain, and it was basically a wheel-clamp for PCs. Computers that ran their program, plus this new bit of code, would stop working after a year, though they cheerfully provided three telephone numbers, against the day. If you were a legitimate user, and could prove it, they\u2019d unlock you.<\/p>\n<p>But in the way of all emergent technologies, something entirely unintended happened. The Alvis\u2019 wheel-clamp was soon copied by a certain stripe of computer hobbyist, who began to distribute it, concealed within various digital documents that people might be expected to want to open. Because almost all these booby-trapped files went out on floppy disks,\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1988\/05\/25\/business\/the-media-business-newspaper-s-computer-is-infected-with-a-virus.html\" title=\"Times article on Brain virus at newspaper\" style=\"color: #00325b; text-decoration: underline\">the virus spread at a pre-Internet snail\u2019s pace<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Still, it did wreak a certain amount of low-grade havoc, freezing computers across the world. The hobbyists did it because they could, or to proudly demonstrate that they could, or to see what would happen, or simply because they thought it was neat.<\/p>\n<p>[ <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2011\/01\/27\/opinion\/27Gibson.html\" target=\"_blank\">continue reading at The NY Times<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>from The New York Times 25 Years of Digital Vandalism By WILLIAM GIBSON IN January 1986, Basit and Amjad Alvi, sibling programmers living near the main train station in Lahore, Pakistan, wrote a piece of code to safeguard the latest version of their heart-monitoring software from piracy. They called it Brain, and it was basically [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2763"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2763\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}