

| Subject: | Virus Warnings are Themselves Viral.... |
| Date: | Sat, 8 Jun 1996 16:16:49 -0500 (CDT) |
Please stop posting virus warnings to the list. Just stop. Even if they weren't all bogus, they still wouldn't belong here. Hints: --The gubmint does not monitor the Internet for viruses. Any warning that purports to have come from some government agency is almost certainly a hoax (cf goodtimes, JAVA). --If you get scared, go to the home page of whomever stands to be burned by the virus financially if it really exists (Netscape, Microsoft, PKZIP). They'll know about any virus *long* before you will. Don't slather this nonsense all over the net until you've made some effort to determine whether it's bullshit. --By nature and design, Java cannot write to your machine's memory and it cannot access your hard disk. The facility for this is intentionally missing from the language. Any claim that Java can "upload sensitive material" to some mysterious cabal is extremely dubious. I know this message is a bandwidth sow in and of itself but this sort of dreck just keeps coming. Newbies, listen to me: 999 times out of a thousand, virus warnings are the geek's version of a snipe hunt. If you get one, just sit on your hands and let the rest of us get our sensitive data uploaded. It'll serve us right. OK? --Ken
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