[3428] in Humor
HUMOR: Foot-and-Mouth
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Charles E Leiserson Jr)
Tue Mar 27 13:59:53 2001
Message-Id: <200103271859.NAA31257@third-west.mit.edu>
To: humor@MIT.EDU
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Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2001 13:59:32 -0500
From: Charles E Leiserson Jr <locutus@MIT.EDU>
FOOT-AND-MOUTH BELIEVED TO BE FIRST VIRUS UNABLE TO SPREAD THROUGH
MICROSOFT OUTLOOK
Researchers Shocked to Finally Find Virus That Email App Doesn't Like
Atlanta, Ga. (SatireWire.com) - Scientists at the Centers for Disease
Control and Symantec's AntiVirus Research Center today confirmed that
foot-and-mouth disease cannot be spread by Microsoft's Outlook email
application, believed to be the first time the program has ever failed
to propagate a major virus.
"Frankly, we've never heard of a virus that couldn't spread through
Microsoft Outlook, so our findings were, to say the least,
unexpected," said Clive Sarnow, director of the CDC's infectious
disease unit.
The study was immediately hailed by British officials, who said it
will save millions of pounds and thousands of man hours. "Up until now
we have, quite naturally, assumed that both foot-and-mouth and mad cow
were spread by Microsoft Outlook," said Nick Brown, Britain's
Agriculture Minister. " By eliminating it, we can focus our resources
elsewhere."
However, researchers in the Netherlands, where foot-and-mouth has
recently appeared, said they are not yet prepared to disqualify
Outlook, which has been the progenitor of viruses such as "I Love
You," "Bubbleboy," "Anna Kournikova," and "Naked Wife," to name but a
few. Said Nils Overmars, director of the Molecular Virology Lab at
Leiden University: "It's not that we don't trust the research, it's
just that as scientists, we are trained to be skeptical of any finding
that flies in the face of established truth. And this one flies in the
face like a blind drunk sparrow."
Executives at Microsoft, meanwhile, were equally skeptical, insisting
that Outlook's patented Virus Transfer Protocol (VTP) has proven
virtually pervious to any virus. The company, however, will issue a
free VTP patch if it turns out the application is not vulnerable to
foot-and-mouth.
Such an admission would be embarrassing for the software giant, but
Symantec virologist Ariel Kologne insisted that no one is more
humiliated by the study than she is. "Only last week, I had a reporter
ask if the foot-and-mouth virus spreads through Microsoft Outlook, and
I told him, 'Doesn't everything?'"
Be seeing you,
- Ricky
