[NetBehaviour] New developments - On Being/"exist.pl"

[Pall Thayer]

Hi Bob,It's not a virus that you can't get rid of. It will only recreate
itself if you delete it while it's running. If you delete it while it's not
running, it's gone. And even if you delete it while it's running, it
recreates itself and then stops running. Its not volatile in any way at all
and it's incapable of running itself. To run, it needs to be started by a
user with the correct command.

On Sat, Jul 26, 2008 at 8:19 PM, bob catchpole <bobcatchpole at yahoo.co.uk>
wrote:

> Thanks Pall. I haven't found the courage to run it because your description
> sounds a bit like a virus that I may never be able to get rid of!!...
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Pall Thayer <pallthay at gmail.com>
> Sent: Friday, 25 July, 2008 9:06:01 PM
> Subject: Re: [NetBehaviour] New developments - On Being/"exist.pl"
>
> Well, on the screen you don't see anything happen (that's why I warned jwm
> not to be disappointed). Once you give the command, it starts running so it
> drops from the command prompt but doesn't give you another because it's
> going through a consistent loop that is maintained by the existence of the
> exist.pl file. So as long as it exists in the same location, it just keeps
> looping but as I say, outwardly it doesn't appear to be doing anything.
> That's where the importance of the code comes in, if you look at the code
> (and I've included comments that explain to some degree what's going on,
> anything following a "#" is an explanatory comment that isn't executed as
> code), you can see that there is actually a lot going on. Within the loop
> (indicated with the "while" function) it continuously checks if the file is
> still there, whether the program is in fact running (which is sort of funny
> because it wouldn't be able to check if it weren't running), whether there
> are other programs running on the computer and if there are, it locates
> itself within the whole group of programs running on the same computer. It
> doesn't actually do anything with the information it gathers. It just keeps
> checking over and over again if the information is still there. If you try
> running it, it will exit if you delete the file, but not before recreating
> itself. So it will stop, but you can start it running right away again
> because the file you deleted will have magically re-appeared (that's what I
> refer to as its "will to live").
>
>
> ------------------------------
> Not happy with your email address?
>  Get the one you really want <http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/ymail/new.html> -
> millions of new email addresses available now at Yahoo!<http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/ymail/new.html>
>
> _______________________________________________
> NetBehaviour mailing list
> NetBehaviour at netbehaviour.org
> http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
>



-- 
*****************************
Pall Thayer
artist
http://www.this.is/pallit
*****************************
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.netbehaviour.org/pipermail/netbehaviour/attachments/20080727/5f151dc1/attachment.htm>