 Since high-speed worms are no longer simply a theoretical threat, worm defenses need to be automatic. There's no conceivable way for system administrators to respond to threats of this speed. Human-mediated filtering provides no benefit for actually limiting the number of infected machines. This is now saying that things have gotten so out of hand that we need to actually have the equivalent of Patriot missile batteries that are automatically firing at worms assuming that they're worms before a human has even had a chance to judge them. This is a form of trigger happiness that again may well be required but is starting to rub up against the idea of no questions asked, you hand me a packet, I pass the packet. I don't care if you're a Democrat or a Republican. I don't care if the packet is pro-Democrat or pro-Republican. I don't care if it's good, if it's bad, if it's music, if it's text, I just pass packets. That form of neutrality is ebbing away at the edges, first to prevent network abuse like viruses but second to prevent institutional abuse, abuse of record companies by looking for packets that aren't threats to the network but are uses of the network that threaten other people. These are the sorts of changes that are coming about what had previously been a free-for-all open network, kind of like the last day of Woodstock where it really just started to rain and everybody realized they were just on some guy's farm and it was time to get out. That's the sort of moment we may be at right now on the Internet where what had basically been a big party where nobody would lie about their identity has turned into this instrumentality of contraband, of abuse of network threat and coming up with strategies for dealing with it that don't end up tamping down on the innovative capacity is one of the biggest challenge facing the thoughtful Internet policy person today, including exactly where to try to insert control. Among the backbone providers among Internet service providers or one computer at a time. Most viruses and worms, their damage is that they spread. That's all they do. They arrive on your computer and promptly use your computer once you click on it or otherwise activate it to send themselves to other computers and the disruption to the network is just in all the emails that are generated as it's trying to spread or in the literal network traffic of the emails passing along. This is kind of weird, right? What if in addition to the worm going through your address book and busily looking for addresses to automatically send itself to it decided oh and by the way delete everything on the hard drive. That's four more keystrokes from the virus author but very rarely do we see worms and viruses that try to do such things. Viruses are incredibly sophisticated sometimes. They will go to great lengths to look for virus software on the machine and disable it. Really incredibly sophisticated stuff. Deleting the hard drive would just be like that and yet they don't. Now this might be because they're written by 12 year olds and 12 year olds don't delete hard drives. They just like to spread the thing. It might be because they're proof of concept. It's like the next one will erase your hard drive. We just wanted to see as a test whether the first one could propagate a lot but you can imagine the white knuckles of the people that write reports such as a strategy to secure cyberspace realizing it's just by the grace, the good graces of the virus authors that you don't have billions and billions of dollars worth of damage to these computers as they get erased or data gets altered randomly. Imagine a virus, not that this is a suggestion, going into spreadsheets and just changing numbers every so often and suddenly you couldn't rest assured that your spreadsheets hadn't been tampered with. It's a virus that would keep people up at night and it's just as easy to write as the ones we see today.