technically there is a link near the bottom of the page concerning those alternative methods… it points here (http://www.avien.org/learningav.htm)… it’s not that great a resource and it’s certainly not complete, but they are offering some alternatives..

also, the document is a petition, a statement of principle, not an open letter as you called it… the open letter that spawned that petition was penned by frisk and can be found here (http://www.f-prot.com/news/gen_news/030603_open_letter_univ_calgary.html)…

“So, while some might object to these events as being unscientific, the message that they are trying to send (that in todays world you can’t have a one-click security solution by buying AV software and you must put at least some effort into trying to learn what to do and what not to do to avoid malware) is very timely and very true.”

unfortunately, the message i get from them is that av is dead, it doesn’t work, it doesn’t protect people so they should stop paying for it and stop using it…

“I really don’t think that contestants will be given self-propagating samples.”

i really hope you’re right, but they explicitly say viruses and malcode… we can hope they didn’t mean virus when they said virus, but on the off chance they weren’t misusing the term then there’s a problem…

“The other reason I don’t think that they will use viruses in this contest is because file-infecting code is very fragile”

not all viruses are file infectors, and not all file infection techniques are fragile… they’d certainly have the work cut out for them if they had to maintain prepending, appending, or cavity infection capability but a companion infector or a worm would probably not be as much of a challenge…