OT - watch out!

Great info.

I hope what I am about to say doesn't make people stone me, but:

I wrote a virus for my 1st year college project and I was happy, and KNEW I was the smartest person in my school. ;-)

Then I got a virus and I was so upset, I actually cried.

I couldn't believe I was so stupid and got caught on my own machine ;-(

From that moment on, I stopped my fascination with computer viruses.
Thank god I never sent them out, I just wanted the satisfaction of knowing I could write them.

I now tell everyone to make sure they are up to date on all their virus-scan software.

I now think people that write viruses are dumb!!!!


Great link......... ;-)

 

Someone on the creditnet once recommended McAfee VirusScan Professional 6.0 and I loaded it on my computer (windows 98 system), and it was a mess getting programs to run normally after that. Should I re-load it and try again?

 

Manequinne, I have a similar story!

In 1994 I wrote a little trojan in HyperCard which, for those of you who never had a Macintosh back in the good old days, was sort of like a Visual Basic for the early Macs -- it had a point-and-click interface and used a "card" metaphor. Anyway, I wrote something I called the "Rush Limbaugh is a Penis Virus" whose purpose was to unexpectedly flash the phrase "Rush Limbaugh is a Penis" across your screen. I programmed it so that it would only execute the first "Rush..." shocker screen after HyperCard had been booted 20 times AFTER the virus was caught. So, I thought, it would be days or weeks or even months after the trojan was "caught" that the hapless victim would be victimized. Moreover, every subsequent launch of HyperCard would cause the "Rush..." shocker screen to appear one additional time; so, for example, on the 20th execution the screen would appear once, but on the 30th execution the user would be interrupted with this obnoxious screen 10 times, and so on until HyperCard would become gradually unusable over time. I "hid" the trojan into a cute little apparently-innocuous HyperCard program (or "stack" as we called them then) called "Beavis & Butthead Sing." Basically I did this just because I wanted to see if I could do it. (This was technically a trojan horse, rather than a virus, because you caught it once from a stealth piece of freeware, whereas a virus replicates and goes from computer to computer.) As soon as I finished, I realized that this was not what I really wanted to do in real life, so I zipped it up for posterity and threw away all active copies and never distributed it.

Or so I thought... A couple of months after I last played with my dangerous invention, I was standing up before the faculty at the University of Tennessee Knoxville while in the doctoral program in clinical psychology there. I was giving a presentation that was HyperCard-based (think of it as an early form of a PowerPoint presentation with certain qualities of an interactive web page). Suddenly in the middle of my presentation, up flashed the "Rush Limbaugh is a Penis" screen. A couple of chuckles ensued. Others weren't amused. I wondered what was going on. I glanced up at the screen. Horror is the only word that adequately describes my emotional state in that moment. "Yikes," I said, "clearly I've caught some sort of weird computer virus!" to which one of the professors answered, "Well, I like that particular virus just fine. Please continue." I then finished out the presentation, did fine, went home, and completely wiped the little 40 megabyte hard drive (adequate in those days) clean.

This is a true story. I'm the only person (I'm almost certain) who ever caught that trojan. Manequinne, I had almost forgotten about my "Rush Limbaugh is a Penis Virus" until you mentioned your own episode, lol.

Ok, so this is off-topic. I'll correct that: Give me CREDIT for youthful creativity.

Doc

 

LMAO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! That is HYSTERICAL Doc!!! Thanks for the humor today....I sure needed that!



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