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Opinion
The Calm Before the Calm?
8/9/2007
Journalists have often referred to the "Dog Days of August," meaning a time of the year when the kind of political and national news that makes headlines is less available, and things can seem to be happening slowly. In higher education, August is for many a time to finally get out for a week or two of vacation. In my own office, we have our peak of activity (with SCUP's annual conference), followed by a wave of time off that stretches through the month.But in this period of slowdown for us, our students, returning and new, are out there interfacing with the virtual and physical worlds, getting ready to bring all sorts of things back to our campuses. Are we ready? Is this the calm before the storm or the calm before the calm?
Do you remember "Cloner," the first feral computer virus, created by Richard Skrenta in 1982? It didn't even need the Internet or a local area network.
That was an amazing 25 years ago. It was the first virus to get into the "wild," meaning outside the closed network or system within which it was created. Until I researched this story, I didn't know that in the early '70s, when I was working at the Defense Special Research & Planning Group (DSRPG), a division of ARPA, that there had been a "Creeper" virus within the ARPANET system, and then the "Reaper" virus that appeared to have been written to hunt down and destroy "Creeper" virus clones.
We've come a long way in 25 or so years, with the biggest shift happening at the beginning of this new millennium. The intent and the power of various viruses and worms, "malware," changed tremendously. Even as recently as 2002, the virus protection company McAfee was learning of something like 100 new viruses every week. Now they find more than 100 new ones every single day. And our students, those who are juniors this fall at least, have always lived with computers that are susceptible to viruses.
If you work in higher education IT, I know that you remember the beginning of the 2003 school year. That was the year of "Blaster," which came on the heels of major budget cuts and caused tremendous discomfort for IT staffers on nearly every campus. Remember that "Perfect Storm?" Maybe these story synopses will bring back some memories for you:
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