This new age of criminal viruses puts traditional malware authors in a politically precarious spot. Police forces are under more pressure than ever to take any worm seriously, regardless of the motivations of the author.

A young Spaniard named Antonio discovered that last fall. He is a quiet twenty-three-year-old computer professional who lives near Madrid. Last August, he read about the Blaster worm and how it exploited a Microsoft flaw. He became intrigued, and after poking around on a few virus sites, found some sample code that worked the same way. He downloaded it and began tinkering to see how it worked.

Then on November 14, as he left to go to work, Spanish police met him at his door. They told him the antivirus company Panda Software had discovered his worm had spread to 120,000 computers.

When Panda analyzed the worm code, it quickly discovered that the program pointed to a site Antonio had developed. Panda forwarded the information to the police, who hunted Antonio down via his Internet service provider. The police stripped his house of every computer-including his roommate's-and threw Antonio in jail. After two days, they let him out, upon which Antonio's employer immediately fired him. "I have very little money," he said when I met him in December. "If I don't have a job in a little time, in a few months I can't pay the rent. I will have to go to my parents."

The Spanish court is currently considering what charges to press. Antonio's lawyer, Javier Maestre, argued that the worm had no dangerous payload and did no damage to any of the computers it infected. He suspects Antonio is being targeted by the police, who want to pretend they've made an important cyberbust, and by an antivirus company seeking publicity.

Artificial life can spin out of control-and when it does, it can take real life with it. Antonio says he did not actually intend to release his worm at all. The worm spreads by scanning computers for the Blaster vulnerability, then sending a copy of itself to any open target. Antonio maintains he thought he was playing it safe, because his computer was not directly connected to the Internet. His 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 www.collisiondetection.net a blog about science and technology.

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.