ESR has recently written a piece of science-fiction called “The Final Virus“, in which he imagines a world where some virus writer finally decides that they are going to write one which does some real damage, and wipes out most of the world’s Windows machines.
I think that, sadly, there’s a strong chance of that happening eventually – but before that time, we’ll see the “Penultimate Virus” – one which attacks a specific section of the Internet community. (I’ve blogged about this before.)
The most effectively discerning attack would probably be one which checks the Windows UI language, and wipes the hard disk at a specified time if it finds a particular one. Virtual ethnic cleansing. Scary. Imagine the economic damage to a country if the virus is stealthy enough to not get detected before zero hour.
Purely by looking at the number of people who have a grievance against Israel, and the uniqueness of their language group, if I were a betting man, I’d bet on Hebrew being the target. Either that, or US English – which would probably catch a lot of UK computers as well.
Hebrew is not _at all_ unique in its language group. Arabic, Coptic, Berber and other nilo-saharian languages belong to the same group.
More information in http://www.ethnologue.org/show_family.asp?subid=2
btw, yes, that’s really me :-)
Did I not hear a while back that there wasn’t an Israeli (Hebrew) localisation for Windows.. which was leading to a lot of Linux usage in Israel?
If this is the case.. then would be hard for a virus to attack what doesn’t exist.
Don’t forget Canada. Most of the machines here also use American. :)
I would see them going after EN-us computers first… more people have “grievances” with the USA than they do with Israel…
Daniel: I didn’t make myself clear. When I said they were in their own language group, what I meant was that they weren’t like en-US, where loads of people use it not from the USA. I didn’t mean language group in an ethnological sense.
“Did I not hear a while back that there wasn’t an Israeli (Hebrew) localisation for Windows.. which was leading to a lot of Linux usage in Israel?”
I don’t know where you heard that, but it’s totally untrue.
IIRC, the issue was that MS was not providing a Hebrew localization of *Macintosh* Office whichever, not Windows.
Not to be pedantic, but penultimate means “next to last,” not “final.”
:)
Paul
Sorry. I see now that you realize that.