One evening I was chatting on MSN with my fellow townsman Liu Hai. He had trained in computer science and was now a freelancer, earning quite well. Liu Hai told me that next month an especially powerful worm virus called “Pantao No. 5” would begin to spread, and advised me to upgrade my system early and patch it properly.
I asked how he could know about it in advance. He told me that sixty percent of the viruses circulating on the internet were developed either by him or by people like him. When a new strain of virus is successfully created, they either sell it to antivirus companies, which then add the virus information to their update packages, or sell it to specific clients, since special viruses have special uses. As for whether a virus is then actually released across the internet, that is another matter.
I asked how such new viruses were created. Liu Hai said that ordinary programmers, of course, know the system inside out and write code line by line according to its vulnerabilities. He, however, called himself a “gu breeder.” Just as the people of Yunnan and Guizhou once raised gu in ancient times, he regularly placed different viruses into a dedicated computer and let them attack one another. After a certain span of time, the one virus left standing would necessarily have absorbed the characteristics of all the others, overwritten the rival programs, and survived alone. Liu Hai called his own viruses “electric gu.”
Electric gu cannot be raised by just anyone. Without a specially modified Linux system and a high-speed hard drive, trying to cultivate electric gu will only result in one’s own machine being devoured and destroyed. It is said that there are now quite a few people like Liu Hai raising “electric gu.” In ancient times gu was among the darkest and most vicious of arts, and even the gu master would not employ it unless absolutely forced to. That there are now people using it for profit is something that truly makes one sigh in distress.
Postscript I: In Beijing, six foreign teachers were asked to take the 2005 English section of the national college entrance examination. The full score was 150, but the average score of the six teachers was only 71. After finishing, the teachers asked, “Is this really an English test?” (China Youth Daily, May 15.)