Luc Montagnier, Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and Harald zur Hausen take the Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discoveries of the AIDS virus and HPV, respectively. Take that Gallo.
posted on Oct 6, 2008 - View this thread

New Scientist reports today that inhabitants of the former Roman Empire have much lower levels of a gene variant that protects against the virus that causes AIDS - CCR5-Delta32 to be exact. Previously, this genetic mutation had been attributed to the spread of the Black Death.
posted on Sep 4, 2008 - View this thread

Darwin's Surprise. "There may be no biological process more complicated than the relationships that viruses have with their hosts. Could it be that their persistence made it possible for humans to thrive?" [Via Disinformation.]
posted on Nov 27, 2007 - View this thread

The Computer Virus Turns 25. "I guess if you had to pick between being known for this and not being known for anything, I'd rather be known for this. But it's an odd placeholder for (all that) I've done." In 1982, ninth-grade student Rich Skrenta decided to play a prank on his friends. He wrote the Elk Cloner virus that infected Apple II machines. It is thought to be the first computer virus to be unleashed "in the wild." Related: A History Of Viruses.
posted on Sep 1, 2007 - View this thread

Obesity has been called an epidemic in the United States. Looking at an interactive statistic [CNN, flash] of the state-by-state numbers is sobering ^mf. 64% of adults are overweight and approx 25% are obese [Wikipedia 1, 2]. The usual suspects have so far been a culture of low-exercise ^mf high-consumption (due to urban sprawl, driving, TV, ... ), microbes ^mf, genetic predisposition, and bad diet (the ubiquity of junk food with its high levels of fat, sugar and salt. Recently the high fructose levels in the common American diet has also been noted. Fructose comprises 50% of table sugar and up to 90% of high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), both ingredients found in copious amounts in most American 'convenience' foods. [Wikipedia: Fructose#References, Wikipedia:HFCS]).
Now it seems that a decisive assessory is a common virus, the Human Adenovirus-36, which may really make obesity an actual epidemic. [Int. Journal of Obesity, CNN]
posted on Aug 21, 2007 - View this thread

Defend your server from viruses with, for some reason, flamethrowers and machine guns. Happy Friday!
posted on Jul 6, 2007 - View this thread

I love my friends...My friends love me...We're just as friendly...As friends can be...And just because...We really care... Whatever we get, we share.
posted on Jun 29, 2007 - View this thread

Small Number of Video iPods Shipped With Windows Virus. As you might imagine, we are upset at Windows for not being more hardy against such viruses, and even more upset with ourselves for not catching it. Oops!
posted on Oct 17, 2006 - View this thread

The origins and evolution of human intelligence: parasitic insects? viruses? mushrooms? neural darwinism? foraging? machiavellian competition? emergence? or something else?
posted on Jul 24, 2006 - View this thread

Dr. Stephen Lanka claims that H5N1 doesn't exist. Or AIDS. Or disease-causing viruses in general. "In humans, in the blood or in other bodily fluids, in an animal or in a plant there never have been seen or demonstrated structures which you could characterize as bird flu viruses or flu viruses or any other supposedly disease-causing virus. The causes of those diseases which are being maintained to be caused by a virus, also those in animals, which can arise quickly and in individuals either one after the other or several at the same time, are known since a long time back. However much you stretch things in biology, there is simply no place for viruses as the causative agents of diseases. Only if I ignore the findings of Dr Hamer’s New Medicine, according to which shock events are the cause of many diseases, and the findings of chemistry on the effects of poisonings and deficiencies, and then if I ignore the findings of physics about the effects of radiation, then there is a place for imaginings such as disease-causing viruses."
posted on Jul 24, 2006 - View this thread

W32/Hoots-A : Where overworked internet fads leave the basement and become exposed to the harsh light of day. "Why the author should want to print out pictures of an owl is, of course, anybody's guess..."
posted on May 15, 2006 - View this thread

It is estimated that due to an infected polio vaccine, 10 million to 30 million people in the United States from 1955 through early 1963 were inadvertently exposed to live Simian Virus #40, a pathogen linked to various cancers. If it happened before, maybe it happened again. Perhaps AIDS was just another accidental contamination originating in an American lab - this time a hepatitis vaccine gone wrong. Why assume conspiracy Dr Cantwell?
posted on Apr 24, 2006 - View this thread

The Nata village blog - "A unique opportunity to witness the battle to control the spread of HIV/AIDS in an African village."
posted on Apr 17, 2006 - View this thread

Interesting (Norton?) Bug If you're using norton, you might just have fallen off the internet. Or something. Try this on your friends!
posted on Feb 22, 2006 - View this thread

A monstrous discovery suggests that viruses, long regarded as lowly evolutionary latecomers, may have been the precursors of all life on Earth. "We haven't even begun to scratch the surface. The numbers are mind-boggling. If you put every virus particle on Earth together in a row, they would form a line 10 million light-years long. People, even most biologists, don't have a clue. The general public thinks genetic diversity is us and birds and plants and animals and that viruses are just HIV and the flu. But most of the genetic material on this planet is viruses. No question about it. They and their ability to interact with organisms and move genetic material around are the major players in driving speciation, in determining how organisms even become what they are."
posted on Feb 17, 2006 - View this thread

Barbarians are at the gates, testing the locks again. Mac OS X users beware: A file supposedly containing pictures of Mac OS X 10.5, actually does other things. Lots of info and links at this first link. Here's the disassembly of the executable (it's just a plain text file) and some notes on the application which comes to this conclusion: "In the end, it doesn't appear to actually do anything other than try to propagate itself via iChat, and unintentionally prevent infected applications from running It seems that this is more of a "proof of concept" implementation that could be utilized to actually do something in the future, depending on how successful it is, or it was simply done to garner attention/press. Which I'm sure it'll get. " Might be a good idea to check out a Mac OS X security primer.
posted on Feb 16, 2006 - View this thread

On January 19, 1986, the first PC virus — Brain — was detected. It was virtually harmless, and the Pakistani creators claim that it was only intended to protect their copyrights. (They did, after all, include their own address and phone number in the machine code.) In the past 20 years, though, both creating viruses and destroying them have become billion-dollar industries.
posted on Jan 19, 2006 - View this thread

Is H5N1 flu transitioning to a human-to-human illness? Recent reports of familial clusters suggest that it may be, though there are certainly other possible explanations, such as families living in environments contaminated by virus-laden bird feces. On the other hand, it would seem that epidemiologists are growing increasingly interested in the possibility that these clusters are indicative of human-to-human transmissions. Further, the virus may be inching towards being asymptomatic, which isn't as good as it sounds: if people can carry the virus and transmit it to others without showing symptoms, it will be very difficult to impossible to tell who is a vector and highly difficult to control any emerging epidemic.
posted on Dec 2, 2005 - View this thread

for the bookmarks - free browser-embedded antivirus [IE only, I assume Windows only]
posted on Oct 4, 2005 - View this thread

W. M. D.'s? There's been a lot of talk going on about bacteria infections in Iraq. Is it just common bacteria, or is the ground spoiled?
posted on Aug 3, 2005 - View this thread

1.7 million deaths in the U.S. and 180-360 million dead globally. That's the estimate of the impact of the next influenza pandemic from Michael Osterholm, published in today's New England Journal of Medicine. He warns that almost every public health response to the inevitable emergence of pandemic influenza A strain is unplanned or inadequate: A vaccine would take minimum six months (and millions of fertilized chicken eggs); there are no plans to setup and staff the temporary isolation wards or replace dead health-care workers; nor are there detailed plans for handling the number of dead bodies. Given the deeply interconnected nature of the global economy a pandemic would be impossible to stop and wreak havoc in every nation. "Frankly the crisis could for all we know have started last night in some village in Southeast Asia," said Dr. Paul Gully, Canada's deputy chief public health officer. "We don't have any time to waste and even if we did have some time, the kinds of things we need to do will take years. Right now, the best we can do is try to survive it. We need a Manhattan Project yesterday."
posted on May 5, 2005 - View this thread

Putting his money where his mouth is regarding the recent Symantec (Norton Utilities, Anti-Virus etc.) Mac OS X virus claims...? Seems not to be, but the fellow who was sponsoring the $25,000 reward has a, shall we say, checkered past. Mac users are still waiting for the first real attack. I could live without it, but this particular religious war (however insane and inane it can get) does liven up our computing experience. If the pop-unders at MacDailyNews get around your browser's pop-up blocker, go here.
posted on Mar 26, 2005 - View this thread

Microsoft AntiSpyware Program Hit by Trojan. Microsoft's Antispyware isn't out of beta yet, and already the virus writers are on the attack. "The Bankash-A Trojan shuts down the AntiSpyware program and then logs keystrokes in hopes of stealing passwords from users. The Trojan is triggered when the user opens the malicious e-mail attachment."
posted on Feb 11, 2005 - View this thread

Free the Olympukes. Fontshop, the 500-lb gorilla of type foundries, has released Jonathan Barnbrook's Olympukes dingbat font - which does a good job of reconciling the love/hate relationship many of us have with this most constructed of all sports events - for free. Barnbrook is the politically savage designer behind the Virus typefoundry, and is probably most well-known for collaborations with Damien Hirst and the typefaces Exocet and Mason (which was originally called Manson – and "intended to speak of the uncomfortable associations between elegance and violence" – but was renamed Mason in a fit of pique marketing), which are sold through the fine folks at Emigre.
posted on Aug 13, 2004 - View this thread

When mobile phones attackget attacked. Articles posted on The Guardian and Reuters today are reporting that mobile phones running on the Symbian OS in Moscow are being targeted by a non-malicious virus/worm named Cabir.
Only 49 phones have been infected so far by the worm which propagates via Bluetooth. The creators are 29A labs, a "group of virus writers from the Czech Republic and Slovakia who pride themselves in creating "proof of concept malicious viruses,"
Countdown to impending doom in..5..4..3..
posted on Jul 15, 2004 - View this thread

Bloomsday Virus Inflicts James Joyce on Mobile Phone Users
The first ever computer virus that can infect mobile phones has been discovered, anti-virus software developers said today, rendering many phones virtually useless.

The virus was apparently released in time for the 100th anniversary of the eponymous literary holiday. It infects the Symbian operating system that is used in several makes of mobiles, notably the Nokia brand, and propagates through the new bluetooth wireless technology that is in several new mobile phones.
posted on Jun 16, 2004 - View this thread

Front lines in the Virus War. The virus wars are here and getting worse. Read the blog by the warriors on the front line.
posted on Feb 18, 2004 - View this thread

A MyDoom Worm Blog F-Secure, the firm that claims to have cracked the MyDoom virus in two hours, is blogging the MyDoom virus outbreak.
posted on Feb 3, 2004 - View this thread

Is SCO, the most hated company in tech attempting to improve it's image by offering a bounty for the creator of MyDoom virus? Now being considered the fastest growing virus ever. Can companies with a similarly low public perception *cough* win favor by similar good deeds?
posted on Jan 28, 2004 - View this thread

New Scientist reports that a virus has been built up from mail order components. Other reports on this are in USA Today and Nature. This isn't time life has been created in the lab, as previously linked.
What's interesting is that this study was funded by the Department of Energy to produce a completely man made lifeform that can create hydrogen or consume greenhouse gasses. The present virus is an artificially created copy of a naturally occurring virus.
posted on Nov 14, 2003 - View this thread

Virus replication is a feature! "If you are using a Macintosh e-mail program that is not from Microsoft, we recommend checking with that particular company. But most likely other e-mail programs like Eudora are not designed to enable virus replication." The original URL is 404. I wonder if Microsoft will be exerting their copyrights to force archive.org to remove this.
posted on Oct 7, 2003 - View this thread

The smoking gun has the arrest report for Jeffery Lee the kid just arrested for releasing a variant of the blaster virus. Without spoiling much it's safe to say the kids methods were idiotic , but it's a fascinating read on how the FBI caught this guy.
posted on Sep 2, 2003 - View this thread

So I Google search on the SoBig virus' affinity for UDP port 8998, and the possibility it may be downloading additional programs this afternoon(actually, right about now). Great, more filters on the routers. Hang on, what's this result on that first search? A link to PornResource? Why, it appears to be a news and technical site for porn site operators. News, guides, interviews, top designers, host reviews, even a message board. Of course, a site billed as "The Standard for Up-To-Date Adult Webmaster News" is NSFW. Unless you are BossHawg, of course.
posted on Aug 22, 2003 - View this thread

New Phase for Sobig.f Expected to Hit Friday. Any . . . minute . . . now. . .
posted on Aug 22, 2003 - View this thread

SARS much more deadly than first estimated. Analysis of the latest statistics on the global SARS epidemic reveals that at least 10 per cent of people who contract the new virus will die of the disease. The low death rates of about four per cent cited until now by the World Health Organizatio n and others are the result of a statistical difficulty, well known to epidemiologists, that hampers the early analysis of new disease outbreaks. [...] A better current estimate of the deadliness of SARS may be the number of deaths as a proportion of resolved cases. Those numbers for Hong Kong, Canada and Singapore are 15.8, 18.3 and 13.7 per cent.
posted on Apr 25, 2003 - View this thread

Ad Aware 6 released. The long awaited (at least for me) king of spyware detectors is now available for download.
posted on Feb 5, 2003 - View this thread

The latest fad. You know you're really famous when there is a virus named after you. Avril lavigne gets digital punk.
posted on Jan 9, 2003 - View this thread

But what about the kitties? Feline Immunodeficiency Virus. FIV has been recognized as a syndrome since 1986, and as with AIDS, has been found in stored blood samples dating back to the 60s. Unlike HIV, however, for FIV there's a vaccine. Not that everyone is excited about it.

Originally, this was to be a post intended to provide something lighter until this appeared:

In addition, over 25 large cat species including, cheetahs, lions, and panthers have their own strain of the virus. Despite similarity among these viruses, transmission among species has never been documented. Scientists think that FIV is an old virus and may be the grandfather of all immunodeficiency viruses. Comparison of its' genetic code point to a virus that is millions of years old.

Googling led to several topics.
posted on Dec 1, 2002 - View this thread

Photos of neked boys popping up during your powerpoint presentations at work? Could be a computer virus.
posted on Nov 23, 2002 - View this thread

A quick HIV test is about to hit the US market. An HIV test that is easy to administer and provides results in 20 minutes has just been approved by the FDA. This is a big deal partly because almost 250,000 Americans are infected and don't know it. The ease of this fast-response test will help identify some of them.
posted on Nov 8, 2002 - View this thread

Is this a Virus or just really sleazy advertising? www.friendgreetings.com is a free greeting card company. However, the e-card email that is received contains a link where you can view the e-card. Once you click that link, and accept the Security Warning and License Agreement, then the FriendGreetings application will be installed on your computer. Once it is installed, it will email all the addresses listed in your MS Outlook contact (or Exchange's GAL) list to invite them to download FriendGreetings products as mentioned in the License Agreement. Trend, McAfee, and others are treating this as a virus. Is it a virus or just another new and nasty way of advertising that preys on the fact that no one really reads EULAs anyway?
posted on Oct 25, 2002 - View this thread

The Demon in the Freezer An article by the author of The Hot Zone. " The water contained the whole molecules of life from variola, a parasite that had colonized us thousands of years ago. We had almost freed ourselves of it, but we found we had developed a strong affinity for smallpox. Some of us had made it into a weapon, and now we couldn't get rid of it. I wondered if we ever would, for the story of our entanglement with smallpox is not yet ended".
posted on Sep 30, 2002 - View this thread

The West Nile virus has leapfrogged into California. Don't you find it suspicious that there are no subversive theories of how this virus showed up at all in New York, and now in California?
posted on Sep 13, 2002 - View this thread

Help yourself to an exploit. No biting social commentary here, just spreading the word on an ooky Win XP exploit in the form of a malicious Help Center request. The patch has been silently rolled into SP1, and is otherwise unavailable. Of course, if you want to install SP1, you'll have to agree to that nasty Trojan EULA.
posted on Sep 11, 2002 - View this thread

a) A virus is a form of life.
b) Scientists 'assemble' a virus in vitro
c) Man has power to create life.

Discuss.
posted on Jul 11, 2002 - View this thread

First JPEG virus discovered... "The W32/Perrun virus, as it is now being called, extracts data from JPEG files and then injects picture files with infected digital images. A fair warning to those individuals who are fond of sending multimedia files to friends and families." Is everyone's porn stash threatened now?
posted on Jun 14, 2002 - View this thread

The Big Picture Book of Viruses is "intended to serve as both a catalog of virus pictures on the Internet and as an educational resource to those seeking more information about viruses. To this end, it is intimately linked to All the Virology on the WWW, and our collection of Virology Courses and Tutorials." Interesting electron micrographs include pictures of Marburg and Ebola viruses and T-4 like phages. Once a bio geek, always a bio geek. And for some other information about why viruses always matter see The 1918 Influenza Pandemic (sorry the page design sucks but it's a good read) and The American Experience: Influenza 1918. Are you sure that runny nose is just allergies?
posted on Apr 22, 2002 - View this thread

Flashers: the Garden of Eden is now closed. It's the first Flash virus. Luckily, it can only hurt you if you run it locally.
posted on Jan 8, 2002 - View this thread

File sharing apps may contain a trojan. It seems some versions of Grokster, Limewire and reportedly Kazaa contain a trojan called W32.DlDer Troja. Whilst I am aware that these apps often install scumware, this seems more serious.
posted on Jan 3, 2002 - View this thread

Microsoft's newest version of Windows.... billed as the most secure ever, contains several serious flaws that allow hackers to steal or destroy a victim's data files across the Internet or implant rogue computer software. The company released a free fix Thursday.

A Microsoft official acknowledged that the risk to consumers was unprecedented because the glitches allow hackers to seize control of all Windows XP operating system software without requiring a computer user to do anything except connect to the Internet.
posted on Dec 20, 2001 - View this thread