[news] First human 'infected with computer virus'

[BatchFile]

BBC News - First human 'infected with computer virus'

 

Slow news day?!

[featured_spectre]

perhaps someone can infect him with conficker and we can see what rubbish he tries to send to the creator?

[powdarrmonkey]

I'm-an-expert-Cellan-Jones. Surprise.

 

(Sshh, don't tell tech_guy.)

[sparkeh]

What an irritating story. Clearly there is an big difference between the headline "First human 'infected with computer virus'" and my preferred headline "Idiot shoves infected chip into his hand".

 

Its typical of the nonsense tech stories that are put out by the BBC website and especially Cellen-Jones, and while we are on the subject its irritating that his blog is entitled Dot.Rory ('dot dot Rory'..really?)

*hummph*

[danrhodes]

Biggest load of I've seen in a while, has the BBC not got anything else to do with our licensing fees? Sparkeh has it in one i think "Idiot shoves infected chip into his hand". Dear Dear me BBC!

 

D

[tech_guy]

Don't get me started.....Ok, I will:

 

[/rant]

 

Cellan-Jones is an idiot. Why do they insist on allowing this journo to write about a subject that he has very little knowledge of?! Along with Bill Thompson on the BBC site they both produce a stream of hackneyed rubbish.

 

As for the story - it's almost as irritating as anything that crops up from that other blatant self-publicist Kevin Warwick, Professor of Cybernetics at the University of Reading.

 

[/rant]

 

And breathe.......

[mavhc]

they use quotes, which translated into computer terms means "First human infected with computer virus. Obviously the real aim is to highlight the lack of security in such devices, see also the people altering software in your car to turn off the brakes and lock the door, it's designed to get press attention and wake up the people who are ignoring the problem.

 

Can't see anything wrong with the stories on BBC - dot.Rory or Bill Thompson's stuff, any specific complaints?

[tech_guy]

Other than they're both idiots?

[mavhc]

[citation needed]

[tech_guy]

Compare them and their wibblings to the informed, incisive, valid, pertinent output of a true IT journalist like the late Guy Kewney and you'll see what I mean.

[powdarrmonkey]

[citation needed]

 

You can't cite your own opinion...

[tech_guy]

How's this for a possible BBC news story then - "Man puts chip from Oyster Card in P***s & Waves it over the Ticket Terminals at London Tube Stations...."

 

That would be an inspired piece of IT "journalism". Especially if Cellen-Jones was the man in the story.......

Edited May 26, 2010 by tech_guy

[dhicks]

First human 'infected with computer virus'

 

As already pointed out, the headline doesn't quite match up with the story - this is actually about someone proving a point that there's a potential security problem with these embedded chips. It's probably best that someone investiagtes such issues before such things get used day-to-day. I seem to remember a story a while back about someone cracking Oyster without too much difficulty - it's annoying enough if you lose £20 in Oyster credit, but it could get really annoying to keep having people crack your in-body chips and sending signals to your spinal column.

 

This story also quite neatly illustrates the problems that university departments in general have in getting information across to the public. Kevin Warrick isn't a self publicist as such, he's trying to promote his department and the work it does so he can attract students, researchers and funding and get more work done. When I was there a decade or so ago the cybernetics department seemed (to me) somewhat embarrasingly under-funded. Kevin Warrick gave the Millenium Royal Institution Christmas Lectures and, on asking for examples of all the robots the department had created over the years, found that they'd been canibalising previous year's projects to get parts for each new project - in effect, the department only had one robot project going at a time. This was in comparison to the equipment and resources available to departments in North America at places like MIT - even the undergraduate robotics courses I did at UVic had better equipment than we did as postgrads in the UK.

 

From speaking to a couple of people who work for the BBC, they seem to have an institutional / cultural problem in understanding science. The programme research / production side of the BBC is, understandably, mostly populated by arts graduates - they understand music, theatre, film, etc, but seem to not quite know where to start when it comes to tackling hard science. This means they tend to grab someone as charismatic / entertaining as possible, or simply someone who is available to comment on as wide a range of topics as possible. This is why someone like Kevin Warick turns up on the BBC fairly often - he's a pretty good speaker (we managed to avoid falling asleep in his two-hour monday morning lectures, which has to be worth something) and he can comment on anything that sounds vaugly, to an arts graduate, to do with cybernetics / robotics / computers in general. Professer Warick's expertise, I seem to remember, lays more in the field of analysing and understanding the nature of Human intelligence than in the day-to-day nitty-gritty of how to stick motors and chips together to make actual, physical robots, but your average BBC programme researcher isn't going to know the difference. From Kevin Warricks point of view, publicity for his work / department / field of study is good, although I'm sure he must find it exasperating at times to have journalists not grasp the basics of what he's trying to explain to them.

 

As a side note, I've always thought Oyster missed a trick by making their card-readers horizontally mounted - with vertically-mounted readers at around waist height, as we had for door-access readers in UVic's engineering department, you can just place your access card in your back pocket and swivle your bum at the reader to use it...

 

--

David Hicks

Edited May 26, 2010 by dhicks

[Fuzzz]

He's got a Dalek in is office!! Where can I get one??

 

If someone comes in and asks a stupid question it can go "exterminate, EXTERMINATE, E X T E R M I N A T E !!" and chase them down the corridor...

[Gonk]

He's got a Dalek in is office!! Where can I get one??

 

If someone comes in and asks a stupid question it can go "exterminate, EXTERMINATE, E X T E R M I N A T E !!" and chase them down the corridor...

 

Hell I'd pay to have a Dalek for that

[korifugi]

... but it could get really annoying to keep having people crack your in-body chips and sending signals to your spinal column.

 

Okay - slightly off topic, but this made me think "Breakdance Protocol".

 

You could create whole new T-mobile adverts with a single press of a button, think of it... Hundreds of bemused people bustin' moves...

[dhicks]

He's got a Dalek in is office!!

 

Indeed, I have a picture of me with it somewhere - for my dissertation project I was supposed to be making a front-end Java application to control it, along with with the window and door openers. Never did get the interface part of things working - in the end I had to mock up the controls with images of the Dalek and window / door openers in various states and simply pretend it was actually controlling something as there was no-one to give me any help in figuring out how to get everything to work together. The Dalek was originally meant to be a fire-fighting robot - it was literally meant to rush around going "Exterminate! Exterminate!" and put fires out.

 

--

David Hicks

[Willott]

Indeed, I have a picture of me with it somewhere

 

Some of my colleagues took it out and about on open days and freaked people out with it... including making it queue up for something... took people a while to realise there was a Darlek in the queue.

 

Back on topic, there was stuff on this story in the Metro this morning, and some "computer scientist" made a comment that if he had a virus on a memory stick and put it in his mouth, he could make the claim of being virus infected... idiot. The whole point of the research is talking about chips and communication - looking at the real possibility of in the future medical equipment's communication potential (if you can create settings on a pacemaker wirelessly at the hospital [i think they already do this over a minute range], what else could someone do to a pacemaker outside of hospital). One thing that doesn't seem to have been mentioned is that Reading Uni, in particular the group in which Mark Gasson (and Kevin Warwick) work, are heavily involved in medical implant research, including computer-neural interfacing, assistive technologies and a number of other areas which pass my mind, so they're fairly placed to make an assessment of the risks involved with such technologies.

 

Yes, it's over sensationalised by saying it's a human computer virus infection, but what scientific "story" isn't.