Date:         Sat, 8 Jun 1996 16:16:49 -0500 (CDT)
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@vanagon.com>
From:         khooper@wsp1.wspice.com (Ken Hooper)
Subject:      Virus Warnings are Themselves Viral....

 
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