Fwd: virus spreading

From: Wade T.Smith (wade_smith@harvard.edu)
Date: Tue Apr 10 2001 - 14:53:43 BST

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Subject: Fwd: virus spreading
Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 09:53:43 -0400
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From: "Wade T.Smith" <wade_smith@harvard.edu>
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    I think this might have some relevance-

    - Wade

    ***********

    http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/100/science/Science_Briefs+.shtml

    Computer plagues

    Computer viruses are more infectious than human ones. Romualdo
    Pastor-Satorras of the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya in Barcelona,
    and Alessandro Vespignani of The Abdus Salam International Centre for
    Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, studied how computer viruses
    spread and found a key difference between the two types of viruses and
    how they spread. Human viruses are generally passed from one person to
    one other person or very few people. Computer viruses, on the other hand,
    typically spread from one machine to very many others directly. A
    detailed model of the effects of this difference, together with the
    potentially long times that computer viruses can lie dormant, produces
    some disturbing predictions. Among them are that there is likely no safe
    minimum viral load needed to start an epidemic, and that old viruses can
    re-emerge after arbitrarily long periods of laying low.

    ref: Physical Review Letters, April 2.

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