The inbox for my personal account is STILL flooded with something like 250 messages a day from the latest computer threat that's going around. The Novarg/MyDoom/MIMAIL worm is worse than the flu this winter! It's a pain, but thankfully my system is safeguarded with the latest antivirus software updates and it's relatively easy to delete the buggers when they come in. (It's the people who don't update their antivirus program that are perpetuating this plague...have you updated yours lately?).

The nuisance reminds me of an issue that came up in May last year about John Aycock's course at the University of Calgary in creating computer viruses and malware. The controversy surrounds the fact that the campus is giving college credit to would-be hackers who are not only trained in the classroom to create new computer viruses, but rewarded for their successes.

Intuition tells us that it's probably not in the interest of society to use one of its institutions to train tomorrow's computer terrorists. And yet, the course is designed to get "inside the mind" of the hacker so that students will be trained well for jobs in computer security when they graduate. This could improve society. The approach is just like some firms that actually hire hackers to outsmart other hackers from the outside who would attack their corporate systems. Yet even anti-virus experts themselves argued against the course's assumptions ("Should we teach kids how to break into cars if they're interested in becoming a policeman one day?"). There's some truth to about.com's claim, too, that there are already plenty of viruses available in the wild to deconstruct and analyze without producing new ones. Medical researchers don't invent deadly new diseases to study the nature of disease, after all.

Although my gut tells me that training students to harm is not the right thing to do, I'm not sure where I stand on this as a pedagogical issue. I think the whole notion that "it takes a thief to catch a thief" is true to some degree: when I was in the Army twenty years ago, I was trained in the basics of -- well, let's be blunt -- in how to kill, but that experience also taught me how to protect myself from those who would kill me, too.

But that's a loaded example.

Here's a metaphorical one, borrowed from Burroughs: Language is a virus.

In what I teach, English, there is a degree to which I empathize with Aycock's mission because just as he teaches computer programming AND its deconstruction through viruses, I teach both literature courses that reify texts AND creative writing and theory courses which to some degree undermine their cultural authority and power in the way that a hacker's code might undermine a popular operating system. Although Aycock teaches students to write "subversive" code, he's still teaching them creative writing to some degree... So in giving away the trade secrets and encouraging students to write against the grain and explore the ways that language can subvert norms and defamiliarize habitual ways of seeing the world, I too perform something of a subversive act.

But mine is an ethereal act, performed in the realm of ideas -- and my work is often more constructive. Virus creation is a material act, in the realm of actual machinery and systems -- and ultimately destructive. Perhaps that's the difference. People hurt when new viruses are unleashed; they may have to change their whole hard drive. In my field, I just try to change people's minds and if some old belief systems get thrown out, then good riddance.

Then again, it was that stupid computer worm that's flooding my inbox that launched this very train of thought that I'm typing right now.

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