August 29, 1996
Dear Everyone:
Our “Livermore”
Web Site is up and
running to generally good reviews from the manager and several
supervisors who announce in the first breath that it looks
great!!! and, in the
second breath, feel compelled to start suggesting “improvements”.
I’ll leave the improvements to “Wilbur”, who absolutely loves to
tinker with this whole thing.
He still goes out onto the
Internet looking for
little graphics like a tiny revolving football with the word “New!”
drawn on it. Where do you
suppose he found that one?
However, in the
realm of Web Pages, tinkering is considered good.
A Web Site should always be changing so people don’t get bored
with it and stop coming by for a look.
Remember: A stale Web
Site is an ignored Web Site.
(Words to live by.)
In other news...
Viruses, pesky
little beggars. I don’t mean
the kind that make your nose run, I mean the kind that burrow into your
PC. The original (computer)
viruses were called “viruses” because of the way they operated.
Hidden inside a program, when activated, the virus was simply a
file containing the instructions to make a copy of itself, which is what
real viruses do. The virus
would make a copy of itself.
Then the two viruses would make copies.
Then the four viruses would make copies and you can see where
this is going unless you had that
new math that was
all the rage in the mid-1960’s.
Ultimately, the virus would fill up the computer’s memory until
it couldn’t function anymore.
Then you had to clean the virus out and straighten out your hard
drive.
Inevitably, people
who knew computer code and had too much time on their hands started
designing viruses that did more than just copy themselves.
They created viruses that could actually kill your computer.
Viruses began to get names like the
Trojan
Horse, the
Michelangelo Virus (so-called because it was set to activate on his
birthday) and, of course, the April Fools Virus.
As a
result of all these shenanigans, whole companies sprang up to
combat the viruses.
Pharmaceuticals for PC’s, so to speak.
Their people design programs to identify and eliminate or, at
least, disinfect the viruses.
And they make pretty good money at it.
When you discover that you have a virus that the exterminator
program doesn’t recognize yet, you contact the pharmaceutical company
and, with any luck, they already have a cure for you.
Or they will in a few days.
These exterminator programs get upgraded almost weekly with new
fixes.
The latest wave of
viruses are called “macro
viruses” because they are written in the macro language that
programs like Word
and Excel
use. These are really just
mini-programs that record keystrokes and similar instructions.
The beauty of it is, you don’t have to be a computer programmer
to create a macro virus because you don’t need to understand the
underlying code. So what we
have now are whole flocks of “neo-nerds”
churning out macro viruses just for the fun of it.
Generally, they can’t do any real harm.
They’re only good for the nuisance value.
And they spread very
easily. Up until now,
viruses had to be hidden in program files in order to be activated.
And people don’t usually download, or install, programs all that
often. But macro viruses can
be imbedded in documents.
And people open documents all the time.
Example:
Our manager is very fond of a software called
Lotus Notes.
It’s like an electronic bulletin board.
She copies an infected document onto the bulletin board.
I open the document to read it and now my PC is infected.
Next, I create a document (infected, naturally) and send it via
E-mail to my boss. When he
opens the document, his PC becomes infected.
He opens another document and sends it to another supervisor
which infects that PC. Are
we having fun yet? Think of
it as an electronic version of the
Bubonic Plague.
The good news is, by
the time I realized we were infested, I already had two E-mail Notes
with instructions for downloading the cure.
And promptly discovered that one of my Servers had nearly 20
infected documents. I’ve
already disinfected “Murray’s” PC twice this week.
But the really good
news is, my home PC, Oberon, is unscathed.
I did have an infected document that I’d planned to work on at
home but, as luck would have it, I just didn’t have the time.
Sometimes catching up on differed viewing is God’s way of
protecting you from too much technology.
Love, as always,
Pete
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