The Wandering Earth. Short stories by Liu Cixin

Author:Liu Cixin [Cixin, Liu]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Relato, Ciencia ficción, Fantástico
Publisher: ePubLibre
Published: 2013-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Curse 5.0

The Curse 1.0 was born on 8 December 2009.

It was the second year of the global financial crisis and common wisdom on the street still held that things would soon turn around. It never occurred to most that the real crisis had only just begun. Everything seemed to be wrapped in an air of anxiety, and everywhere people were looking for any opportunity to let off steam. Perhaps it was these circumstances that gave birth to the Curse 1.0.

The Curse’s creator was a young woman, somewhere between eighteen and twenty-eight, and that was pretty much all IT-Archaeologists learned about her. The cursed was a young man, age twenty. Unlike the creator, there was little about him that remained undocumented. His name was Sa Bi, a name that could hardly avoid raising unfortunate associations with the word ‘idiot’ in Chinese, and when it happened, he was a senior at Taiyuan Polytechnic. What happened between the two was in no way remarkable, no different from what happened between boys and girls everywhere, every single day. There were thousands of versions of the supposed events, and perhaps the real one was in there among them, but no one except those two themselves knew exactly which particular version transpired between them. In any case, when the drama had run its course, the girl hated the boy with a burning passion, and so she coded the Curse 1.0.

The girl was an expert coder, although it isn’t known where and how she learned her craft. Despite the ever-growing abundance of IT specialists at the time, the number of programmers actually proficient in deep-level coding had not increased. There were just too many easy and convenient tools out there. With their help, there was no need to code close to the hardware. Laboriously writing line by meticulous line of code seemed superfluous when merely running the right tool could produce the desired results. This was even true for viruses like the one the girl was about to write. An endless variety of hacker tools allowed coders to produce viruses by quickly combining a few pre-coded modules or, even simpler still, by using a single module and only slightly modifying it. The last virus to become a pandemic in pre-Curse China, the so-called Panda Burning Incense – or Fujacks Virus – was created in just this way.

This girl, however, chose to start from square one, without the use of any tools whatsoever. She coded it line upon line, like a peasant weaving cloth from a hand loom. One could just imagine her, crouched in front of her monitor, hammering away at the keys, grinding her teeth. She must have been the spitting image of Heinrich Heine’s description of The Silesian Weavers: ‘Germany, your shroud’s on our loom; and in it we weave the threefold doom… We weave; we weave.’

No computer virus in history spread as quickly as the Curse 1.0. There were two reasons for its success: first, the Curse did not actually damage the infected system. In fact, most viruses had no intention of causing direct harm.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.