Mac Game/Trojan Wipes a File for Each Alien Killed
A new piece of software developed by Fine Arts student Zach Gage is making waves in the security community.
As part of his Master of Fine Arts thesis project, Zach Gage wrote a game for Macs that deletes files from your machine as you play. Dubbed Lose/Lose, the title sees the player take on the role of a space captain on a "seemingly endless quest to destroy attacking aliens." Each alien is represents a file on your computer. Killing the alien means destroying that file. You have one life and if an alien touches you, you explode and the application will delete itself.
Describing the program as "a videogame with real life consequences," Zach says he tried to explore what it means to kill in a videogame. On his website, the student says that while touching the aliens will lose you the game and killing them will get you points, the aliens don't actually fire at you. "This calls into question the player's mission, which is never explicitly stated, only hinted at through classic game mechanics," writes Gage. "Is the player supposed to be an aggressor? Or merely an observer, traversing through a dangerous land?"
However exploratory, experimental or just interesting it seems, users are warned several times before they download and before they play that Lose/Lose will result in the permanent deletion of files from your hard drive and CNet reports that Symantec, Sophos and Intego have flagged the application as malware, with each of them calling the "Trojan" OSX.Loosemaque, OSX/LoseGame-A and OSX/LoserGame, respectively.
What do you think, malware or just harmful game? Let us know in the comments below!
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Some people are foolish and will ignore the warnings, so really they are just protecting there users that aren't to bright from themselves.
finally...
)) Brilliant idea - I was actually waiting for this kind of stuff to be released... My opinion - brilliant retro game with a slight bug... Nothing to worry about 
"Master of Fine Arts" degree? Seriously? That's going to be as useful as the degree in East European Pornography I saw advertised by a Uni near me. Get a real degree!
I think it is brilliant and should be shipped with all new Apple Macs sold
This is essentially Darwinism at it's finest. Remove the genetically poor from the internet.
This is the sort of game I'd play before a format.
this is not a trojan. there is no disguise, no malicious behavior. it's an art piece designed to provoke thought and discussion. weather it's successful in creating the intended debate is questionable.
Whether it is Malware or not, it is not a Trojan! Really, given that you get warnings it's not that different from FDisk or similar.
Does it inform you what files were deleted after playing?
I think a funnier game would be one that's ACTUALLY a virus, and one that runs itself when you download it. Then you HAVE to win the game, and kill all the aliens - with every alien you let through deleting a file! And if you ctrl-alt-del, or try to close it/reboot, it erases everything! Haha!
this is brilliant.
its not suppesed to be a game people download and play. brilliant thinking, i love what the guy has done.
No doubt a totally harmless game. Who in their right mind would ever consider saving anything important on a mac anyway?
No doubt a totally harmless game. Who in their right mind would ever consider saving anything important on a mac anyway?
It does remind me of a port of Doom for *nix though, psDoom. Basically a Doom for SysAdms, where every process on your machine is represented by a monster in the game. You can shoot the process with different weapons in Doom, and there by issuing the 'kill' command to the process =)
http://psdoom.sourceforge.net/
http://psdoom.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html
Love the idea - very clever.
Dandalf - you are missing the point a bit.
There used to be an old demo game on the Amiga called Rox - you just had to dodge and shoot piles of rocks flying down the screen (think Asteroids). Your score was just how long you survived - no points for destroying anything, and no levels to pass.
We used to try and see how long we would survive without shooting.
tstebbons, wow now that is a special point of view you have there. Fine Arts is not a real degree huh, so what would you call English Lit or maybe History. Maybe they are Pseudo degrees, unlike a real one such as Computer Engineering. Amazingly enough no University I know of has classes dubbed English for Fine Arts, yet everyone I have ever been around has multiple English for Engineers courses that even a trained monkey could ace.
As for the program this student has written, I say well done and about time. It puts real world consequences to digital games, kudos!
My only complaint is that the game graphics aren't that good
Mac should have seen this coming.
It seems that they were quite confident that their OS won't end up like products from Microsoft. Although, MAC has less problems than MS considering security lately they started to develop problems. First, by the missing data from time to time ( fixed in the end) and now a game that deletes files while you play and win. The one who came up with such is a "GENIUS". If such and more start to happen than MAC users will have to use additional security software just like MS products. Something that might happen in the near future.
As about the game. It might be great to play but it ain't eye-catching that's for sure.