The Sober Worm is discovered and virtual property prices start to rise. All on today’s On This Day from TEST Huddle.
2003 – Sober Computer Worm
The Sober computer worm was first discovered. Written entirely in Visual Basic, Sober distributes copies of itself as an e-mail attachment using its own SMTP engine. When a Windows user opens the attachment, which includes a .bat, .com, .exe, .pif, or .scr file extension, the worm alters the Windows registry, deactivates any other Sober variants already present on the system, and disables popular antivirus applications.
2005 – A Virtual Property Bubble
A player of online multiplayer game Project Entropia, Jon “NEVERDIE” Jacobs purchases a virtual “Asteroid Space Resort” for one million Project Entropia Dollars (PED), which is the equivalent of US$100,000 in real-world currency. At the time, it had been the single largest real-world purchase of a virtual item in history. Jacobs renames the resort “Club NEVERDIE” after the nickname of his own in-game Avatar and announces plans to turn the resort into a venue for “Live Entertainment in Virtual Reality.” When the re-design is finished, the club boasts numerous profitable assets, including a thousand-unit apartment complex, twenty hunting biodomes, a commercial space ship dock, a shopping mall, and a stadium for championship sporting events. Before this purchase, the most expensive piece of virtual property was a virtual island dubbed “Treasure Island”, which user Zachurm “Deathifier” Emegen paid 265,000 PED (US$26,500) for in December 2004.
Images: Wikipedia
