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xkcd continues to impress me with its immense cleverness. I saw Randall Monroe speak at CMU a couple weeks ago.

First, I was surprised that he was 23. I assumed he was older. I also assumed that the deep romanticism of some of xkcd's comics meant that he was in a serious relationship of some kind -- he isn't, and implied that he always has trouble with girls.

"I also assumed that the deep romanticism of some of xkcd's comics meant that he was in a serious relationship of some kind"

Funny, I assumed the opposite. A lot of his comics about relationships resonate with the self image I had before I married.

I'm really tempted to try creating this. It really would make a cool "aquarium" if you could figure out a way to visualize it.

Well, the buncha windows instances running under a RAMd-up VMWARE server is pretty easy to cover (if a bit costly).

You'd probably want to run a couple of different versions of virus and spyware checkers (for variety) on the various Windows machines (not being much a Windows guy, I couldn't make any great suggestions here, but Norton, McAfee, etc come to mind).

The next part would be some sort of client to report back to a monitoring server the infection status of each box. You'd have to come up with a scale to determine level of infection, and (ideally) how the infection got there. From that point, you display everything on an NMS system of sorts. His graphic reminded me a lot of the OpenView screens we used to watch back in the late 90's, mostly for the randomness of the machine layouts and the interconnected lines.

After that, it's just a matter of how/where you display the NMS screen.

Could this whole thing be hosted in something like the Amazon S3 environment, allowing for many people to view the screen remotely?

> After that, it's just a matter of how/where you display the NMS screen.

The most appropriate device would be Microsoft's Big Ass Table. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZrr7AZ9nCY)

ClamAV might be a good choice for virus detection. It's open source so you can probably configure it to not delete the viruses.

Most virus scan software could be configured to report back to a central location. All you need to do is set it up so the client VM only detect and report but do not remove/clean. Then write a software to scan the monitoring log of the main station every 5 minutes for entry. The software will then do a lookup on either McAfee or Norton's virus library on everything that was detected and depending on the item's "threat level" it'll be visually represented differently.

Maybe each VM could be a tree and each spam email will be a leaf... each virus will be a fruit... any exploit will be a bug and something that's bad enough to kill it will be a snake... :D

http://www.honeynet.org/ http://www.honeyd.org/

Yeah xkcd is just too funny. I love his physics jokes, cause it just so happens I'm learning physics atm and they make sense.

My favorite is his comic about naming his kid

Robert'); DROP TABLE STUDENTS; --

lmao. I'm so naming my kid

Timmy'); Drop Table *; --

I wish I can filter the xkcd. :(

Some researchers have implemented in software toy ecosystems which eventually developed viruses and parasites and prey-predator cycles and what not. The very first one, by the way, was implemented in Lisp (cited and commented upon in the book "Complexity" by Roger Lewin.)

Now doing it with Windows machines adds a sarcastic/sadistic tone to the whole thing.

Do you have any online references for this virus-ecosystem? A name, at least?

Not sure if it's the one albertcardona was referring to; but this sounds like Thomas Ray's Tierra simulator. Details at http://www.nis.atr.jp/~ray/pubs/tierra/tierrahtml.html

From his abstract: "Digital organisms have been synthesized based on a computer metaphor of organic life in which CPU time is the 'energy' resource and memory is the 'material' resource. Memory is organized into informational 'genetic' patterns that exploit CPU time for self-replication. Mutation generates new forms, and evolution proceeds by natural selection as different 'genotypes' compete for CPU time and memory space. In addition, new genotypes appear which exploit other 'creatures' for informational or energetic resources."

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