safe testing of infectious agents

[Henry Spencer]

In article <32440 at oliveb.olivetti.com> jerry at olivey.UUCP (Jerry Aguirre) writes:
>>>How does one debug a virus?
>>     On an isolated network of machines, obviously.  
>There are simpler ways than dedicating a group of systems and the
>network connecting them.  The most obvious is to criple the virus (or
>worm) so it can't live on normal systems...

Ah, but this brings us back to the Morris-Jr Fallacy:  "of course it won't
cause any real trouble, I wrote it not to".  Debugging on an isolated
network protects the rest of the world from your mistakes as well as your
deliberate experiments.
-- 
Sendmail is a bug,             |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
not a feature.                 | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry at zoo.toronto.edu