Virus seduces grandmother

Virus folklore has never had it this good either. Most hoaxes ride on chain mail, which has been around as long as the Internet — as long as snail mail, actually. The originator sends out a message to several people asking them to pass it on to more people. The commonest is a proposal for illegal pyramid schemes. It opens with an epiphany about the experiences that the sender has had — how he’s wiped out his debts, arranged for his wife’s cancer treatment and taken the kids to Italy for their first real vacation.

It then goes on to list five names, including the sender’s. You are to send them $1 each, with a copy of the mail. Then you lop off the first name, add yours at the bottom of the list, and mail again. Then move your name up, mail again. As the list spreads exponentially, you will apparently find zillions of people sending you $1 each, because your name is on their lists. Of course, this is illegal, but it’s been spreading fast. One of the originators, in fact, lives in Nizamuddin East, in Delhi.

Now associate this phenomenon with fraud virus alerts — which you will naturally forward in the public interest — and you have a recipe for disaster. The oldest fraud concerns the Good Times virus, which apparently travels in an email with the subject `Good Times’. If you read it, it will wipe your hard drive clean and send your microprocessor into an n-th complexity infinite loop, burning out the circuits. The day someone manages to write a virus which can do all that, Microsoft will kidnap him, forcibly clone him in a secret facility in Cupertino and patent his cell line for eternity.

The Penpals Greeting hoax was perpetrated to stop a chain letter that had `Penpal Greetings!’ for subject. It said the greetings contained a self-starting trojan which would wipe out the recipient’s boot sector, replicate and mail itself to every person in his addressbook. There is, of course, no such thing as a self-starting program and the hoax became as much of a nuisance as the chain mail it was intended to stop.

So great is the nuisance, in fact, that one disgruntled netizen has posted a brilliant parody on Good Times. He claims that besides trashing your computer, Good Times will change your refrigerator settings, demagnetise your credit cards, drink all your beer, leave its dirty socks out on the coffee table and shave off both your eyebrows while dating your girlfriend behind your back and billing everything to your Discover card. It will seduce your grandmother. Such is its power, it reaches out beyond the grave to sully everything you hold most dear. `Listen to me,’ it continues. `Good Times does not exist. It cannot do anything to you. But I can. I am sending this message to everyone in the world. If anyone sends me another email about this fake virus, I will turn hating them into a religion. I will do things to them that will make a horsehead in your bed look like Easter Sunday brunch.’

But sadly, such is the power of Good Times, not even open threats can stop it.