As you may be aware, one of the most common viruses on the internet is the hoax announcement of viruses on the internet. They usually take the form of "Microsoft and McAfee have just announced on their websites that the most virulent virus to date has appeared on the internet. If you receive an e-mail entitled 'Good Times', DO NOT OPEN IT!!!!" Etc., etc.

The message will go on to tell you that it was pulled directly from the Microsoft press release (MS never issues press releases with exclamation points, by the way), that it affects everyone in your address book, and then tells you to forward the warning on to everyone in your address book.

As viruses (viri?) go, this strain is very common but not very dangerous. It spreads itself with the cooperation of the host, it takes up some bandwidth and hard disk space, but it doesn't take up enough space or bandwidth so as to be terribly damaging at any particular point in time. Sure, at any given moment there's thousands of useless messages like this clogging the Internet's arteries, but never enough to bring it down. These viri mutate as well, insofar as they are modified from time to time by the people who pass them along. ("Embellished" is the more appropriate word.) In other words, it's just like any other virus.

There are some destructive versions of this strain, though. Recently, I received one such message that urged me to delete a certain .dll file from my Windows directory. Of course, since I use a Macintosh, this kind of warning is pointless to me, anyway. But, the .dll file the message urged me to erase is actually a valid and necessary file for Windows to work... well, insofar as Windows works at all. The point is, it *looked* real enough, and a lot of people followed the instructions and deleted the .dll file and then forwarded the message to everyone they knew.

Tsk, tsk, tsk.

Well, recently someone did this one up a little better. You can read about it here and here. This fellow sent out a joke version of this kind of message, wherein he told the reader that there was a malignant file that was taking up 30M of hard disk space, and that the reader should look for and delete a file called 'aol.exe'.

The author of the joke then included a number of references that should have tipped off the reader. For example, the message said that failure to delete the file would result in the reader being charged a monthly fee. Hilarious.

Allegedly, some people didn't realize it was a joke and forwarded it along... and then deleted their aol.exe files.

My friends, there is a message in all of this: don't believe everything you read. Unless you read it here.

:-)

--Allan

PS: three working days left until Clarion West begins. Woo-hoo!