Dave Burke - Freelance .NET Developer specializing in Online Communities

A freelance .NET Developer

ST:TNG Season #2. Contagion taking viruses and blogging to the extreme

I happened to catch ST:TNG on Spike TV tonight, a season #2 episode titled Contagion where the Enterprise goes into the neutral zone to follow a sister ship which is experiencing system-wide failure and shortly explodes.  And of course, there's a Romulan vessel cloaked on its tail.  (I never knew why the Romulans thought they owned the Neutral Zone, I mean, its the neutral zone.)

It was a great example of how a virus infiltrated the Enterprise's computer system which they picked up when they transferred the logs from the doomed sister ship.  But what was really interesting to me was how Jean Luc scanned the ship's captain's logs for any references of two words (I forget which.  Probably someone on this list knows what they were. :-)  And the computer brought back snippets of video of the captain's video logs (I'll call them blogs) which chronicled the musings of the ship's captain providing Jean Luc great insight into what destroyed their ship.  The downside, of course, was that those blogs had a virus.  The fact that Captain Picard's door didn't open immediately when he stepped onto the bridge afterward was a dead giveaway.

Comments

Darrell said:

Maybe they didn't update their anti-virus software? I mean, I know they're waaaay out there in the neutral zone, but come on. The McAfee:The Next Generation software surely comes with an autoupdate feature from the nearest starbase, right?
# January 16, 2004 9:57 AM

Dave Burke said:

Thanks, Darrell. I hadn't thought it through. It's difficult however to accuse Geordi La Forge of not staying current with his anti-virus update procedures.
# January 16, 2004 10:10 AM
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