Babushkin's Antivirus
A young third-year student from AltGTU created a computer antivirus called 'Immunity' — and claims to be working on an algorithm to compress a 2GB movie down to 2-3 kilobytes.
A young third-year student from Altai State Technical University has developed a computer antivirus program called "Immunity." According to sources, this program is now being installed in some schools in Barnaul. As of now, more than a thousand copies of this antivirus have already been sold! It's mostly being installed on personal computers, but several schools and companies in the regional capital have also purchased it.
Interview with the Genius
According to him, he was debugging and writing code for Windows 8, and is currently working on an algorithm that will compress a 2GB movie down to just 2-3 KB! Well then, let's wish this young talent the best of luck in his endeavors.
You can check out the current discussions here and here.
P.S. If you happen to be interested in this individual and want to recruit him, here are the contact details: VKontakte
And, I almost forgot, another one of his inventions:
UPDATE: Juicy details
Here is a quote from a forum discussion where one user did some digging:
I checked the antivirus. It's written in Delphi. Basically, when you click "Full scan" it scans all files on drives, calculates their CRC32 checksum, and compares them against a database of known checksums (which is just a text file). If the checksum matches, it declares a virus found. The "database" contains about 30 entries. That's the entire "antivirus." No heuristics, no real-time protection, no behavioral analysis — just a CRC32 lookup table with 30 values.
As for the compression algorithm that would shrink 2GB to 2-3KB — experienced programmers on the forums quickly pointed out that this violates information theory (specifically Shannon's source coding theorem) and is mathematically impossible. The student was apparently confusing some form of deduplication or referencing with actual compression.
The whole story became a legendary Habr meme about the gap between youthful ambition and technical reality, and about local media's tendency to amplify unverified technical claims without consulting actual experts.
