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Worm Disrupts Physics Simulations Undetected For A Decade
A computer worm sat undetected at VirusTotal for nearly a decade, producing slightly wrong answers.
Sounds like a version of Philip K. Dick's 'civic notification distorter' from "The Zap Gun" (1965):
— Bill Christensen (@Technovelgy) May 3, 2026
""The Civic Notification Distorter," Febbs said, "bases its operation on the requirement that in present-day society every filled-out official form has to be recorded, microwise,…
A 2005 state-designed worm designed to corrupt physics simulations sat undetected on VirusTotal for nearly a decade. Fast16, intercepted executable files at the kernel level and silently rewrote floating-point calculations to make them produce slightly wrong answers. Targets: high-precision engineering suites used for structural analysis, crash simulations, and physical process modeling, including LS-DYNA, a tool cited in reports on Iran's nuclear weapons research. The sabotage vector relied on deployment of the driver across a network via worm, corrupting calculations on every machine, and eliminating the possibility of cross-checking results against a clean system. Stuxnet got the documentary. Fast16 got twenty years of nothing.
I refer to the civic notification distorter from The Zap Gun (Project Plowshare), by science fiction author Philip K. Dick.
"And the distorter," said Febbs, "Operates from that instant on in a way for which the word 'inspired' is not excessive. It diverts integers of the data, the fundamental message-units, so that they no longer agree. In other words, copy two of the original document no longer can be superimposed on copy one. Copy three disagrees with copy two at one higher order of distortion...
Update 24-May-2026: It occurs to me that The 3-Body Problem also provides an example of some sort of deliberate technology interfering with accurate science. The aliens use their sophons to disrupt the human study of matter:
“To effectively contain a civilization’s development and disarm it across such a long span of time, there is only one way: kill its science.”
End update.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 5/1/2026)
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