My sister asked me recently to help her with a school paper on computer viruses.
It got me thinking about how computer virus programmers should be considered the new bogeymen for the environmental movement to focus on.
Here's some things to consider about computer viruses: they are ultimately a drain not only on computers, but the environment. They waste energy simply by existing.
Every computer out there should be running antivirus software. However, this software grows larger each week, as new viruses are created, and new patches come out to deal with the new viruses. The result is a snowball effect. This software is cumulative - taking up more hard drive space, even if it is miniscule amounts compared to the size of today's hard drives. More importantly, antivirus software takes up more computer processing power.
Depending on which antivirus package you use, it can be a tremendous drain on your system. I've seen Norton Antivirus in particular make what should be speedy systems drag like they had a boat anchor attached.
Sometimes you could end up in the unfortunate situation of having two antivirus packages installed. Double the protection, right? More like four boat anchors instead of two.
What it all boils down to is processing power. While computers roughly double in power every 18 months, according to Moore's Law, they still use a whack of processing cycles watching out for viruses that may or may not ever show up. Put another way, the amount of processing power used on my three-year-old dual-core processor laptop to combat viruses is likely more than processing power of my computer of 12 years ago - likely a significant amount more.
This processing power can be directly translated into energy. When I have two desktops and a laptop running in my small office, the resulting heat can be almost unbearable without an open window. Go ahead: before you recycle your old desktop computer, crack it open and put your finger on the processor while it's doing a virus scan and several other processes at the same time. I dare ya.
Electricity goes in, heat comes out.
Now let's go macro with this: multiply the electricity used, by millions of computers, all essentially wasting a portion of their processing time on antivirus programs.
That in turn drives the ever-increasing demand for electrical generation. Thousands of tonnes of coal around the world each day are burned to generate the power for millions of computers to churn through gazillions of ones and zeros looking for dastardly computer viruses.
Those tonnes of coal end up creating more and more greenhouse gases, the stuff everyone is worried about eventually cooking our planet. It's not just my office getting hot, now it's the whole world.
I think the environmentalists should start freaking out about this. Maybe they can find some computer hacker's house and chain themselves to the door for all the grief they've caused.
This is above and beyond the wasted time and resources when a virus does successfully circumvent the latest antivirus software and exploit some recently discovered weakness in Microsoft Windows, thereby deleting your hard drive and all the hundreds or thousands of hours of work you've put into the files stored on it. Plus there's the waste of computers, albeit very few, that end up essentially useless and thrown out after nasty viral infections. Again, more waste.
I think we better get David Suzuki on this pronto, before China builds another coal-fired power plant.
- Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at brian.zinchuk@sasktel.net.
