
                     ---| SOK -3 Rant's N Rave's |---

  Once again the Source of Kaos has risen from the grave to put forth another
issue.  We seem to have exceeded the virus and size limits by quite a bit this
time.  This is in part due to the inclusion of the BONUS.ZIP file which has a
mixed bag of fruits and nuts in it.  There has been quit a bit going on the
world since the 2nd issue, some good but more bad.  Activity in the community
appears to have been rather slow, but that may have been a calm before the
storm.  While it appears the the VX community has slowed, the AV community also
appears to have slowed as well.
  If you want to complain that the zine is a mess compared to the first two
issues don't bother.  I wasn't expecting to end up with this much material, but
it happened and there wasn't any real choice.
  What the hell is a zine based on small asm programs doing getting so big?  Is
it suffering from bloat?   Well folks, the zine peeked at over 900k and was
trimmed down to 650k with a few small articles left to go in.  This size is
solely due to being thorough.  Several of the viruses where updated and I decided
to keep the outdated material (which was moved to the bonus section).  The bonus
section has been expanded this time to include executable code and earlier
versions of viruses included in the main portion of the zine.  So as to make the
bonus section more rewarding, it has been encrypted with a password.  The
password is only 4 characters and is easy enough to figure out.
  There has been an apparent slow down in the production of viruses since the
beginning of the year.  This trend is slightly misleading since there have
been several Zines released with 3 being released this month.  Our friends in
Russia have had several releases, SLAM has released #2 with June having the
possibility of 3 releases.  LT#2, SOK#3, RSA#1 are all due to be released in
the month of June, LT#2 being out already :)
  The lack of non-zine  viruses seems to have lulled the AV community to sleep,
since they have fewer releases than the VX community.  TBAV finally got release
8.0 out and it is still full of all the old pitfalls.  F-Prot seems to be
working on release 3.0 of their software, leaving months between updates.  AVP
is still beta testing 3.0 of their software and has quit supporting 2.2 .  The
good Dr. Solomon appears to have been the only AV'er working on keeping his
product current.  With only 1 product to really worry about this makes our life
a bit easier since you don't have to keep coming up with ways to beat multiple
AV products.
  The good being that many of the old faces that where once thought extinct
have re-surfaced.  Also on the good side is the break through into the East
as shown by the number of Russian based viruses in this issue.  We have also
seen a few new faces in the crowd who show some promise of continuing the work.
Work is in progress to bring more Far East work (Taiwan, Korea etc..) into
english based publication.
  The flip side of the coin is grim, grim indeed since it goes all the way from
death by censorship to death by drug overdose.  The Italian based group iKx lost
it's site because of Swedish law.  It is also disturbing that the lone bastion
of free thinking ILF.NET has closed his doors.  It appears that inside and
outside hacking have caused Chaos@ilf.net to start closing off the system to
insure that it stays up.  Most disturbing was the loss of TerminatorZ who
passed from our presence with a drug overdose.


If you want to get in touch with me for either getting something into the next
release of this zine or you have general comments .. sok@int21h.org ..

Just don't send big files there since they wont make it, but it will take source
code and files of about 50k - 100k in size.
