Before cancer kills, it cheats

Doubtful. You can to computing with DNA http://dna.caltech.edu but it is still debated if the actual role of DNA is being a code (some recently weasel out form that stance by saying it's an “app”, like there's a difference, machine code being a code). Coding theory applied to DNA yields inconclusive results. Galois theory usually has power over any kind of information encoding, cryptographic, computable or not. One constructed one for DNA convinced mathematicians it's not the way to go at all. If it's computation it's nothing like what we mean by any model computation, you may as well say it's magic instead of making stretched analogies.

About OpenBSD and evolution, that's so fetch... these folk invented the attack in the first place, not evolved a response to some market force in the early oughties. Broadly I don't think designed systems are in business of evolving, otherwise living organisms could perhaps evolved electro-hydrostatic instead of hydraulic power system with a pump being a single point of failure.

Malicious hackers are on the one side very smart (the cancer genesis process is not smart at all), but on the other side they make poor use of evolutionary strategies, mainly because human hackers can't easily spawn "an army of clones of their mind" (cancer otoh is all about evolutionary strategy).

Since the information about "what mutating a codon in a gene does" is not really available to "the attacker", it's as if the whole "address space" is already randomized by default...

The "cancer problems" sound like it's more like being attacked by a really really really dumb hacker, who has access to an utterly insane amount (relatively speaking) of computing power!

(...kind of hard to defend against such an attacker unless you invent modern crypto stuff like hash-signatures, blockchains etc. And our "DNA computer" is not at all designed for these types of math, recoding it to do this would probably be harder than developing mind upload capabilities or superhuman-AI :P Hence not likely to happen.)

This is an odd comment: This realisation is quite literally at the core of cancer research, and every researcher in the field recognises this. Heck, it’s implied if not mentioned outright in the seminal Hallmarks of Cancer paper [1] that every cancer researcher (and probably generally most human biologist) has read.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s a well-written article explaining the biology to a lay audience. But it doesn’t hold any striking new insights. All of this is not merely known but in fact fundamental knowledge.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hallmarks_of_Cancer

I used to work at a lab as an undergrad that worked on extremely similar topics, though the cancer link was more implied: http://research.fhcrc.org/shou/en.html

We had four yeast systems: Two cooperative yeast systems (exchanged metabolites the other needed to survive), and two cheater systems (needed those same metabolites to survive, but just took from the system and never gave back).

One experiment I assisted with was basically putting them all together at differing ratios and seeing what happened over time - the different systems released different fluorescent proteins, so we could measure their relative populations.

Common sense might dictate that the cheaters would rapidly outgrow the cooperators and eventually crash the whole system, but that actually didn't happen until very high ratios of cheaters.

The cooperative yeast systems somehow managed to extinguish the cheaters pretty consistently (all the experiments were repeated and done in triplicate). This happened even at fairly absurd ratios like 3:1 cheaters:cooperators. Unfortunately, I left before any of the follow-up work to determine why that was happening.

All that to say, it's fascinating how much cooperative systems really are favored in nature. Glad to see someone explicitly applying this idea to cancer.

A lot of "fundamental knowledge" in medicine is wrong. The genetic theory of cancer has always been a dead-end, because it reverses cause and effect. The cancer industry has encouraged "kill all the cancer cells" treatments because it's convenient for their business model. The cancer treatment situation is similar to how the use of bloodletting persisted for hundreds of years [0], in spite of the low rates of success.

[0] http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/theodoric-of-yo...

There's no need for new insights, the old insight needs to be fully developed. Your link has a subsection:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hallmarks_of_Cancer#Deregu...

Warburg's nobel prize was in 1931; we're finally realizing he was probably right all along.

(minor edit)