| > I really do not understand viruses. You stand overlooking a giant office park with lots of stand-alone offices. A storm swirls trash among them, though trash doesn't last long in the wind and wet. Your goal is to create steady-state trash. So you design a packet. An envelope with tape (so it sticks when blown against glass front doors), and an address label (to get it carried inside, rather than being ignored as trash, or trashed as spam). And then you fold that envelope around hopefully-persuasive instructions for photocopying envelope and instructions, and assembling new packets. Then you make a lot of them. Few will reach doors, few will get inside, few will be executed. There are a bunch of design tradeoffs. The address can spam or spear-fish. A "<blur> Trucking" address works well with trucking companies, and poorly with others. A "<blur> Accounts Dept" works less well, but more broadly. You can include helpful envelope folding templates, but that means making fewer larger packets with more to go wrong when assembling them. You can go for stealth, only one person in the corner making packets and tossing them out the window, or even getting the instructions inserted into to the company process manual. Or you can go for fast private-equity zombie-apocalypse takeover, where the whole company dedicates itself to production until it explodes, scattering scads of packets to the wind. Zombies are the common case. Our human genome manual is littered with inserts. You might put an inter-departmental envelope within the envelope with a specific destination - trading lack of generality for performance. You might include a photocopier how to - buying "no worries, I've brought my own" generality at a cost of size and complexity. But the complexity budget is tight. Each extra badly-photocopied page ups the odds of a broken packet. Offices don't want to become zombies. So they keep their sprinklers running, to degrade packet trash. They toss out port-a-potties that feel like front doors to decoy packets. People run around the office with scissors, chopping up paper that looks spamish - you might want your instructions to fire them early on. Employees refuse instructions that don't look right. Out of common cause with sister offices, if someone notices the office going zombie, they may pull a fire alarm, burning down the office. It's a hard hard life being spam. And not easy being an office either. Looking out over a shallow coastal city... it's a burning trash-filled hellscape warzone. The half-life of functional packets is like an hour. The half-life of bacterial office buildings is only a couple of days. Asides: Some envelopes can punch a hole through the door to inject instructions. The time between insertion and resistance-is-only-a-delaying-action can be short - seconds to minutes. The zombie buildings explode within an hour or day. > how do these satellite viruses then survive off of other viruses? Small and simple, and easy to build, are nice design goals. As simple as possible but no simpler - taking over offices is hard after all. But what if the office is already being taken over, by someone else? The C-suite has been sent golfing, and the scissor snippers fired. Now in that altered environment, your even simpler or more general instructions might survive and grab a slice of production, or even takeover the takeover. Parasite parasites. Think of the ecological interactions of memes - "I might not have believed <improbable A> yesterday, but now, after encountering <conspiracy theory B> this morning...". And if two different packet designs are being photocopied at the same time, hey, mixups happen. Or consider a label of "Important Mandatory Instructions from the Fire Marshall - OPEN IMMEDIATELY" - highly persuasive... when someone else is causing nearby offices to burn down. The complex interactions of living in a warzone. |