Re: Virus warning! Fact or fancy? Dunno.

[Andrew Duane USG/PE <duane@zk3.dec.com>]

Sure sounds like fancy to me. First of all, the FCC knows almost
nothing about computers, or how the Internet works, or how the
mail exchange programs on it work.

But mostly, the entire article is filled with PC jargon about
"hard drives", "downloading", etc. That implies that this so-called
"virus" is an executable, which can't be exchanged by RFC822
mailers. Unless it is encoded, and all mailers don't auto-decode
or even use the same coding. 

Of course, I don't use a PC; neither does half the Internet.
I use an Alpha Server running OSF/1. Where are it's hard drives?
I don't know how the program is gonna find out, or get access
to them. Except weekends I read my mail on a MIPS-3000 Ultrix
box. Hmmm, even harder.

My point is that these "warning" are mostly attempts to spread
panic among naive people. I suspect that the warning message
itself is the "virus", and is designed to annoy people into
needlessly dumping mail.

Sorry, but I see dozens of these a year....

-- 

Andrew L. Duane (JOT-7)			duane@zk3.dec.com
Digital Equipment Corporation		(603)-881-1294
110 Spit Brook Road			http://www.zk3.dec.com/~duane
M/S ZKO3-3/U14
Nashua, NH    03062-2698

Only my cat shares my opinions, and she has a head cold (that's a virus).