[spectre] Vampire Digital Art

[marc garrett]

Sorry for any cross posting...

Vampire Digital Art

New article on Furtherfield by Rob Myers.

Building on science fiction author Charles Stross's vision of a future 
of weaponized eBooks, Rob Myers considers how artists can use the 
strategies of malware to make art that really grabs the attention of the 
public and the market, and how much it will cost to make.

In "How Readers Will Discover Books In Future", science fiction author 
Charles Stross envisions a future in which weaponized eBooks demand your 
attention by copying themselves onto your mobile devices, wiping out the 
competition, and locking up the user interface until you've read them.

This is only just science fiction. Even the earliest viruses often 
displayed messages and malware that denies access to your data until you 
pay to decrypt it already exist. ePub ebooks can execute arbitrary 
JavaScript, and PDF documents can execute arbitrary shell scripts. 
Compromised PDFs have been found in the wild. Stross's weaponized ebooks 
are not more than one step ahead of this.

http://www.furtherfield.org/features/articles/vampire-digital-art