In the 1995 science-fiction box-office bonanza "Independence Day," our hero manages to thwart a space-going alien race's attempt to conquer the Earth by infecting its space armada's onboard control networks with a computer virus. What does this suggest about the relative compatibility of the alien's design philosophy, when it comes to networks? Are they using TCP/IP or ISO OSI - like protocol stacks? If they were not, how could such a malware counter-attack ever succeed? And what might this, in general, suggest about our abilities to communicate with any truly alien systems?