roommate's computer had the Internet connection, and a local network-a set of cables connecting their computers together- allowed Antonio to share the signal.
But what Antonio didn't realize, he says, was that his worm would regard his friend's computer as a foreign target. It spawned a copy of itself in his friend's machine. From there it leapfrogged onto the Internet-and out into the wild. His creation had come to life and, like Frankenstein's monster, decided upon a path of its own.
Clive Thompson lives in New York City. He is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine. He is also a columnist for the online magazine Slate, and writes regularly for Wired, Details, Discover, and New York magazine. In his spare time, he publishes
The thing that surprised me most about the 'virus scene' is how much it was like a scientific society: All these teenagers worldwide, staying up all night researching new programming techniques, then writing long reports they gave away for free, just to prove they could bust a hard problem. (One sixteen-year-old in Austria showed me a meticulous article he'd written on a programming technique-and it was five thousand words, ten times longer than any paper he's required to write for school.) This is partly why it'll likely be impossible for authorities to ever extinguish virus writing. That's not for a lack of trying; in fact, since I published the article, two authors of the most virulent worms of 2003 have been caught: Jeffrey Lee Parsons, an American eighteen-year-old who released a 'Blaster' worm, received one and a half years in jail, while a German of the same age. Sven Jaschan, was charged for releasing the infamous Sasser worm. New worms are still appearing every week-and now they're starting to invade mobile phones, the next great frontier of Internet-connected devices.
Jonathan Miles
Punch Drunk Love
from Men's Journal
The best bar fight I ever witnessed took place in a tiny shit-kicky bar in Wyoming, somewhere along the road between Sheridan and Gillette. Outside there was a faint skein of April snow on the ground. Inside it was Hawaiian night. The bar was festooned with tropical knickknackery and paper palm trees, grass skirts were free for the taking, and the owners-a salty-mouthed blonde and her mother-were forcing everyone to wear leis, including me. I was in the company of a Canadian poet and a Wyoming painter, fellow artists-in-residence at a foundation down the highway; we'd been snowbound for a few weeks, and, like loggers emerging from a long stint in a lumber camp, we were itchy for a bit of fun. Some hot whiskey, some social chainsmoking, a smile from a hard-faced girl, perhaps a clumsy two-step, and maybe-you never know-the spectacle of a good-natured late-night fistfight.
It was a perfect place for all that. A singer-guitarist with a drum machine mixed Merle Haggard and Joan Jett into his sets. An old Indian in new blue Wranglers and a belt buckle the size of a 45- rpm record tore up the dance floor with all seven of the women present, with the exception of the owner-mother, who chose to dance solo with an oversize chef's knife raised above her head, as if baiting criticism or suitors or both. Besides us, the only other nonlocals in the bar were three itinerant sheepshearers from New Zealand-two drunk louts and a girl.
I got the full story only later. Allegedly, one of the Kiwi sheepshearers-a short, stout, vinegary guy-took to throwing roasted peanuts at the head of a local boy, one peanut after the other. The local boy had some tragic name-I swear, everyone pronounced it 'Art Fart,' though it must surely have been Art Vart. In any case, skinny Art Fart-clad in a grass skirt with an impromptu bikini top made from coconut shells and twine over his shirt- finally tired of being pelted with bar peanuts, said words to that effect to the Kiwi sheepshearer (who was also, I should note, wearing a grass skirt), and, like that, the fight was on.
Smart money was on the Kiwi. He'd started it, had some solid farm muscle on him, appeared to have piss for brains, and, unlike Art Fart, wasn't sporting coconut titties. But chalk one up for the U.S. of A.: After the typical cuss-and-shove windup, Art Fart threw a lanky-armed punch that sent the Kiwi buckling to the floor, hula skirt and all. There may have been some subsequent tussling-a crowd swiftly circled them, blocking my view-but the decisive blow had been struck. The fight officially ended, as I recall, when the salty blonde charged from behind the bar with a pistol, though I wouldn't swear to that in a court of law; maybe she just threatened gunplay.
'We have to get out of here,' said my poet companion. With a smile I refused, and there in that bar, as the Kiwis hustled their frothy countryman outside and into the giant RV that was their home during sheepshearing season, and as Art Fart ordered a victory round, I tried to explain to him, knuckleheadedly, what I'm about to attempt to explain, just as knuckleheadedly, to you: The spectacle of a good bar fight, properly executed and healthily ended, is not merely annoying boorishness. The best of them-an admittedly minor slice-are shaded with the elements of high art. Think ballet, with its orchestrated stepwork, and opera, with its epic, heart-on-the-sleeve passions, or any kind of gladiatorial drama. Naturally, these overlofty comparisons apply to boxing matches and run-of-the-mill fistfights, too, but the bar fight has a sublimity all its own. Because it's fueled by alcohol, it's usually a rank amateur's game, with all the unpredictability this implies, and unlike boxing and most angry fistfights, it's sometimes lacquered with a gloss of comedy. Flying peanuts, grass skirts-that sort of thing. For millennia, saloons have served as comfortable petri dishes for sex and violence. I am either too honest or too unsophisticated to suggest that one can exist without the other. There is a mammalian side to all of us; on occasion it rears its head, snarls, makes a mess, acts the fool, howls at the moon, gives or gets a black eye.
Before we get rolling here, though, I feel it necessary to clarify my terms and to set a few ground rules. When I say bar fight, I mean this: one-on-one, hand-to-hand combat that occurs inside a saloon, or just outside its door. Except in those rare instances when a life is at stake, weapons have absolutely no place in a proper bar fight. In short: no knives, chairs, bottles, derringers, swords, or mounted billfish (a possible urban myth I once heard in Australia had a man attacking another with a marlin yanked off the wall), and absolutely no throwing opponents through plate-glass windows. (Let's call this last one the Charles Barkley rule, to dishonor Barkley's throwing of a man through the window of an Orlando bar in 1997 after the man had thrown a glass of ice at the NBA star. It's hard not to secretly admire Barkley, however, for his reply when asked if he had any regrets: 'I regret,' he said, 'that we weren't on a higher floor.')
A proper bar fight pits one man (or woman-but wow are those fights scary) against another, with the only outside involvement coming from pals or patrons attempting to stop the fight. Holding a guy down while your friend pummels him is evil bullshit; pum-meling a guy while your friend holds him down is evil bullshit squared. The proper bar fight ends quickly, though there are exceptions (like John Wayne's epic brawl in The Quiet Man,but then that's a movie), but when it's over it's over. Injuries-broken noses, fingers, hands, ribs, and jaws, along with assorted bruises and the famed cauliflower ear-are an obvious and common consequence, but their seriousness should never be dismissed. The rallying cry that a friend reported hearing a fighter bellow in a Tennessee roadhouse-'C'mon, I'll cripple ye!'-is okay to utter, but forbidden to enact. 'The casualties in barroom fights are staggering,' William Burroughs wrote in Naked Lunch, and it's true. Type 'bar fight' into Google and the results are sobering: 'Bar Fight Leaves 10 Dead in Guatemala,' 'Student Dies Trying to Stop Bar Fight,' 'Bar Fight Ends in Stabbing Outside Local Club,' 'Five Men Shot After Bar Fight in Michigan.' For the record, these grim variations and extensions fall far outside this essay's beery scope. However faint and friable it may be, I prefer to maintain a line in the sand between behavior that is merely bad and that which is sociopathic.
The history of bar fighting is, as far as I can discern, almost wholly undocumented, though a few historical tidbits can be found glittering amid the archival dust. The origins of the phrase 'the real McCoy,' for instance, are said, perhaps apocryphally, to be traceable to a turn-of-the-century saloon fight. As the story goes, an obnoxious drunk accused then-welterweight boxing champ Norman Selby, a.k.a. 'Kid McCoy,' of being a fraud. McCoy, inventor of the notorious 'corkscrew punch' that Muhammad Ali later claimed as his own, promptly and definitively beat the stuffing out of his accuser, who weakly admitted, as he clambered back upright, that he'd been laid out by 'the real McCoy.' Without bar fights, too, the history of the American west would be one very long episode of Little House on the Prairie. One of the enduring Western myths is that gunfights were staged, quite formally, as cowpoke variations on European duels. More often, if not always, they were standard- issue saloon brawls that spilled out onto the street and resulted in the snap-crackle-pop of gunfire. Beyond that, however, the history of bar fighting remains locked among the men, young and old, who trade their smoky stories in private, twisting the fights' origins and outcomes to suit their egos and/or bleary memories. ('The guys who get beat up always deny they started anything,' an ex- bouncer from Maine told me. 'And if they got beat up by two guys, it's ten in the retelling.')
Despite this hazy history, however, I think it's fair to make a few assumptions. The first is that the original bar fight surely happened within hours or days of the appearance of the first bar. (The scientific basis for this will be explored shortly.)
The second is that no culture in which alcohol is publicly served is immune to them. Even Tibetan Buddhists-widely, if perhaps inaccurately, considered to be more violence-averse than we hayseed Americans-have their share of bar brawls. In Tibet's Kham province, fights between Tibetan and Chinese drinkers are said to be commonplace; several years ago, in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa, a fingernail discovered in a dish in a Chinese restaurant sparked a giant brawl, during which wine bottles were hurled at policemen trying to restore order. Stray fingernails are not typically fuel for fights in the United States but then we do not suffer from the sorts of geopolitical tensions that would cause one to suspect a restaurant of serving human flesh. In a similar vein, we are also not prone to bar fights caused by soccer club rivalries, as in Europe, though college football rivalries seem to take up a little of that slack. Suffice it to say that bar fights are not a product of globalization. When it comes to late-night scraps, we are the world.
The third assumption is that the unwritten chronicle of bar fights features a cast of mostly men, though women of a certain flinty temperament are also prone to bar fighting. In my lifetime I've witnessed two girl-on-girl brawls and both scared the bejesus out of me. Girls are not indoctrinated, by pop culture or society, with the vague code of fighting that usually-and I stress the word usually-keeps boys from pulling hair or gouging eyes. The term catfight is popularly applied to these fights, and it's an apt analogy; as with battling cats, there is rarely anything you can do to stop these fights, and it's best, from my experience, to simply run for cover when one breaks out. This isn't to suggest that such fights aren't worth witnessing. If you're accustomed to ladies of a genteel sort, there's a world-upside-down element to them, and they can sometimes have the frightening appeal of Shark Week on the Discovery Channel. I'm told that many men take pleasure in the spectacle of females fighting. Though this fetish falls outside my sphere of kinks, some overly red-blooded men also get turned on by car wrecks or Christina Aguilera. Disaster, I guess, can have a certain pervy allure.
Young men are the predominant combatants in any saloon fight, since the tempers of older men take much longer to come to a boil. (Regarding alcohol and youth, Plato warned, 'It is wrong to add fire to fire.') Tim Sylvia, the former heavyweight champ of the Ultimate Fighting Championship league, told me that he used to pick fights in Maine bars when he was nineteen or twenty 'just to prove my masculinity.' Young men feel they have much to prove; older men, as a very general rule, tend to feel more comfortable in their skins.
This is not to suggest, however, that old men are immune to beer tempers. Many years ago, in a Deep South beer joint, a white-haired man of about seventy threatened to kick my ass because he suspected I was a 'beer spy.' The full story emerged after I'd denied the charge and was able to calm him down: He claimed he'd found a condom floating in a capped bottle of Budweiser. He'd notified Anheuser-Busch, he said, and they'd agreed to ship him a free case of Bud if he would just send them back the bottle in question. 'I told 'em that'd be fine so long as either Mr. Anheuser or Mr. Busch called me to apologize,' he said. 'And, lookit, I told 'em they'd have to call me at night because I ain't about to sit by the phone all damn day.' Because I'd been alone at the bar, scribbling away at some piece of writing or other, he'd assumed I was a spy dispatched by Anheuser-Busch to find and reclaim that dread bottle. I'm not sure what I would have done if the old man had actually attacked me-hard to envision a happy outcome there. In the end, though, he apologized and fetched me some homegrown beef-steak tomatoes from his truck, which, to this day, are the best tomatoes I've ever eaten.
