Not to belabor this virus hoax thing (which is to say, I don't
care if I'm belaboring this virus hoax thing, listen to me, dammit!), but
it seems you two are missing the point, at least in terms of this
particular warning.
It says absolutely nothing about binary attachments; it claims
that one can get do damage to a computer simply by viewing an ASCII text
file! This is clearly absurd. It's like saying you're in danger of
having your eye poked out if you look at a photograph of a cue stick.
Our friend the "VIRUS WARNING" could be called a virus itself, but
even it is only capable of causing minor irritation and congestion in
one's emailbox.
jason
P.S. - Actually I can think of a time that it *was* possible to do damage
to data just by displaying a text file. This was back in the dark days
of DOS 3.3 (or so): if you had "ansi.sys" loaded, you could become a
victim of a maliciously coded ansi file that would remap your keyboard to
send a data-deleting command to the DOS prompt, while changing your screen
colors to something like white on white to obscure what it was doing...
while all the while you thought you were going to see a pretty Atari
2600-stye picture. But, of course, I was somewhat of a neophyte back
then, so perhaps that too was just a hoax, a BBS legend, as it were. ;)
On Thu, 4 Mar 1999, Paul W. Abrahams wrote:
>
> Michael Perry wrote:
>
> > On 4 Mar, Paul W. Abrahams wrote:
> > >
> > > There are two giveaways in this virus warning that it isn't genuine:
<huge and extremely prejudiced snip>
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