At 08:33 AM 3/15/96 -0500, you wrote:

I just heard from a friend today that there is a VERY nasty virus that has
been unleashed and it shows up in the form of an email entitled "GOOD TIMES"
or something to that effect. If you see this post show up in your In Box,
delete it IMMEDIATELY! Do not read it! My friend told me that it will create
some kind of endless loop in your hard drive and wipe EVERYTHING out! If
your hard drive starts acting up, I was told that you should Reset the
computer pronto. That's the scoop. Keep yer eyes open!

    NO, NO, NO! There is *ABSOLUTELY NO POSSIBLE WAY* for a text file to be
a virus unless it is something like an encoded virus. However, even if that
is so, it *MUST* be executed to take effect.
    The "Good Times virus" has been around for many years. In fact, the
original version of the "Good Times virus" deleted E-Mail. Fancy that people
who believed in it deleted all the mail which had the words "Good Times" in
the subject.
    I repeat, there is *NO* "GOOD TIMES VIRUS!!!"

On a slightly different subject, it IS possible to encode ANSI codes in text
files, and if the person has ANSI.SYS in their config.sys file, can remap
the keyboard if the person displays the e-mail in DOS mode.  Some idiots
used to put text files at the beginning of ZIP files that PKUNZIP would
automatically display when the file was unzipped.  It would do silly things
like change the 'f' key to 'format c: /q[enter]' and then whatever character
came after that to 'y'.  Crude, but effective.  So while not possible for
a virus to spread normally outside of an executable program, it's still
possible to hose someone's computer from remote.

(remembering the Data General mainframe at my old college, you could send
a message to another person's account, and screw them up big time by using
the right codes...  Since messages were displayed on the terminal the
person was using and then returned by the terminal to the central system
as keys the person wrote...  Now THERE was an unsecure system.)

Fnord.
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* Founder of the Church of the One Righteous Spatula!                       *
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* inThane@oz.net - inThane O'Neill Walkup, Spearman                         *
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