Boing Boing reader James says,
A scientist claims that aliens might be able to introduce a virus into Earth computers through the blocks of data distributed by SETI@home. The author of the claim works at the US Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, but then how much do particle physicists know about virus-writing?
Reader comment: Calvin Rodo of National Research Council Canada (which is, you know, part of the Gouvernement du Canada), says:
I program for a living, and I just have to say that I seriously can’t see aliens infecting our computers. It simply doesn’t seem feasible, first they would have to somehow figure out a way to get the Seti@home program to execute the code, so they’d have to find an exploit in it somehow. They would also need to know how to write computer code that would be compatible with the OS that is running the Seti@home program, so they would need to be familiar with either Linux, Windows, or Apple computers. So unless by some freak of nature they happened to develop systems that use the same computer commands as ours here on earth this isn’t going to happen.
Whew!