On Thu, 14 Mar 1996, Andy Skuse wrote:

I just heard from a friend today that there is a VERY nasty virus that has
been unleashed and it shows up in the form of an email entitled "GOOD TIMES"
or something to that effect. If you see this post show up in your In Box,
delete it IMMEDIATELY! Do not read it! My friend told me that it will create
some kind of endless loop in your hard drive and wipe EVERYTHING out! If
your hard drive starts acting up, I was told that you should Reset the
computer pronto. That's the scoop. Keep yer eyes open!

AAAGH!

This rumor has been going around in one form or another for over a year 
now.  It is categorically false.  Not only is there no such virus, there 
is no possible way to *make* such a virus.  Your computer just displays 
the contents of your email - it doesn't run them in any way that would 
allow you to get a virus.  To send a virus over email, someone would have 
to uuencode the virus or the program containing it, and then send it to 
you - and then you could only contract the virus if you saved the 
message, uudecoded it, and ran the program.  Furthermore, there's a huge 
variety of computers out there, and viruses are by necessity system 
specific.  A virus written for MS-DOS computers, for instance, won't be 
able to run on a Mac, or a Unix system, or a VAX, or an Amiga, or any 
other type of system out there.  Given the wide variety of computers 
people are using to read mail, no virus could affect more than a small 
portion of them.  Furthermore, if you're dialing into a service provider 
and reading your mail from there, rather than actually downloading the 
messages onto your computer with a program like Eudora or the like, 
there's no way the virus could actually get to your home computer even if 
it actually existed - you'd have to specifically download a file with the 
virus in it.
     Basically, ignore this rumor.  The only harmful thing propagating 
itself by email based on this 'GOOD TIMES' virus is the warning itself - 
there is not now, nor has there ever been, a GOOD TIMES virus.

--
Scott Johnson |
zagyg@io.com  |            This space intentionally left blank.