curmudgeon

Canada, has been engaged in similar battles for several years. Aycock’s book, Computer Viruses and Malware (Advances in Information Security), was published by Springer-Verlag in 2006, so there’s no hiding of the basic techniques unless certain Hitlerian incineration methodologies are invoked. A search of the ACM Digital Library for “John Aycock Malware” yields 13 matches, to which one can add Ledin’s own paper, “Not teaching viruses and worms is harmful” (Communications of the ACM, January 2005). John Sullins, professor of philosophy at Sonoma State, has also been lending moral-ethical support to Ledin’s malware courses. “We must teach it because it allows us to deal with the [dangerous] reality that our students are going to face.” But Sullins also points out that malware might have some beneficial applications. It could be used to combat a tyrannical government. I see some NRA Second Amendment echoes here: the right to bear malware as self-defense. Q

 

REFERENCES

1. These deliberately slurred misspellings have been popularized by the British satirical magazine, Private Eye. Its editor is fond of asking, “Shurely shome mishtake?” Lexicographers are no doubt debating whether these forms deserve to be blessed with dictionary entries. There are precedents for mispronounced and misspelled words usurping the previous “standards” (e.g., according to some scholars, bird was originally brid.)

2. Another popular verbal tic is deliberately omitting

Coming Soon

English definite and indefinite articles to mirror the famous quirk in Russian language!

3. Min (Minna; Wilhelmina) Planck belongs to that growing bunch of neglected sisters, such as Fanny Homer, Nannerl Mozart, Siobhan Shakespeare, and Doreen Kelly-Bootle, who quietly produced their brothers’ works without fuss or fame. It’s quite clear that Max had nothing to do with those tiny natural units of mass, length, and time. It was Min, Min all the way.

4. See reference 2.

 

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STAN KELLY-BOOTLE ( http://www.feniks.com/skb/; http:// www.sarcheck.com), born in Liverpool, England, read pure mathematics at Cambridge in the 1950s before tackling the impurities of computer science on the pioneering EDSAC I. His many books include The Devil’s DP Dictionary ( McGraw-Hill, 1981), Understanding Unix (Sybex, 1994), and the recent e-book Computer Language—The Stan Kelly-Bootle Reader. Software Development Magazine has named him as the first recipient of the new annual Stan Kelly-Bootle Eclectech Award for his “lifetime achievements in technology and letters.” Neither Nobel nor Turing achieved such prized eponymous recognition. Under his nom-de-folk, Stan Kelly, he has enjoyed a parallel career as a singer and songwriter. He can be reached at [e-mail]. © 2008 ACM 1542-7730/08/0700 $5.00

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