Just to put my two cents in, this seemed relevant to the ABRF discussions as of
late:
By Bob Hirschfeld
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, May 2, 1999; Page B1
A new computer virus is spreading throughout the Internet,
and it is far
more insidious than last week's Chernobyl menace. Named
Strunkenwhite
after the authors of a classic guide to good writing, it
returns e-mail
messages that have grammatical or spelling errors. It is
deadly accurate
in its detection abilities, unlike the dubious spell
checkers that come
with word processing programs.
The virus is causing something akin to panic throughout
corporate
America, which has become used to the typos, misspellings,
missing words
and mangled syntax so acceptable in cyberspace. The CEO of
LoseItAll.com,
an Internet startup, said the virus has rendered him
helpless. "Each time
I tried to send one particular e-mail this morning, I got
back this error
message: 'Your dependent clause preceding your independent
clause must be
set off by commas, but one must not precede the
conjunction.' I threw my
laptop across the room."
A top executive at a telecommunications and long-distance
company,
10-10-10-10-10-10-123, said: "This morning, the same damned
e-mail kept
coming back to me with a pesky notation claiming I needed to
use a
pronoun's possessive case before a gerund. With the number
of e-mails I
crank out each day, who has time for proper grammar? Whoever
created this
virus should have their programming fingers broken."
A broker at Begg, Barow and Steel said he couldn't return to
the "bad,
old" days when he had to send paper memos in proper English.
He
speculated that the hacker who created Strunkenwhite was a
"disgruntled
English major who couldn't make it on a trading floor. When
you're buying
and selling on margin, I don't think it's anybody's business
if I write
that 'i meetinged through the morning, then cinched the deal
on the cel
phone while bareling down the xway.' "
If Strunkenwhite makes e-mailing impossible, it could mean
the end to a
communication revolution once hailed as a significant
timesaver. A study
of 1,254 office workers in Leonia, N.J., found that e-mail
increased
employees' productivity by 1.8 hours a day because they took
less time to
formulate their thoughts. (The same study also found that
they lost 2.2
hours of productivity because they were e-mailing so many
jokes to their
spouses, parents and stockbrokers.)
Strunkenwhite is particularly difficult to detect because it
doesn't come
as an e-mail attachment (which requires the recipient to
open it before
it becomes active). Instead, it is disguised within the text
of an e-mail
entitled "Congratulations on your pay raise." The message
asks the
recipient to "click here to find out about how your raise
effects your
pension." The use of "effects" rather than the grammatically
correct
"affects" appears to be an inside joke from Strunkenwhite's
mischievous
creator.
The virus also has left government e-mail systems in
disarray. Officials
at the Office of Management and Budget can no longer
transmit electronic
versions of federal regulations because their highly
technical language
seems to run afoul of Strunkenwhite's dictum that "vigorous
writing is
concise." The White House speechwriting office reported that
it had
received the same message, along with a caution to avoid
phrases such
as "the truth is... " and "in fact...."
Home computer users also are reporting snafus, although an
e-mailer who
used the word "snafu" said she had come to regret it.
The virus can have an even more devastating impact if it
infects an
entire network. A cable news operation was forced to shut
down its
computer system for several hours when it discovered that
Strunkenwhite
had somehow infiltrated its TelePrompTer software, delaying
newscasts and
leaving news anchors nearly tongue-tied as they wrestled
with proper
sentence structure.
There is concern among law enforcement officials that
Strunkenwhite is a
harbinger of the increasingly sophisticated methods hackers
are using to
exploit the vulnerability of business's reliance on
computers. "This is
one of the most complex and invasive examples of computer
code we have
ever encountered. We just can't imagine what kind of devious
mind would
want to tamper with e-mails to create this burden on
communications,"
said an FBI agent who insisted on speaking via the telephone
out of
concern that trying to e-mail his comments could leave him
tied up for
hours.
Meanwhile, bookstores and online booksellers reported a
surge in orders
for Strunk & White's "The Elements of Style."
---------------------------------------------------------
Bob Hirschfeld, who enjoys receiving e-mails in plain
English, lampoons
the news at his Web site, bobsfridge.com.
--
Sheryl Christofferson wrote:
> How on earth can it destroy your mouse ane keyboard?!!!! Hoax!! > > Sheryl Christofferson > OMRF DNA Sequencing Facility > Oklahoma City, OK > sherylc@omrf.ouhsc.edu > > Ron Kasher wrote: > > > ---------- Forwarded message ---------- > > Date: Sun, 23 May 1999 10:35:05 +0300 > > From: Michal <michal@ard.huji.ac.il> > > To: yair@ard.huji.ac.il > > Subject: [Fwd: [Fwd: VIRUS WARNING]] > > > > Good morning, > > > > Please take care of it immediately! > > > > Have a good day, > > > > Michal > > > > -- > > Michal Bardarian > > Authority for Research & Development > > Tel. 6586629, Fax: 5664740 > > E-mail: michal@ard.huji.ac.il > > -------------------------------------------------- > > > > Subject: VIRUS WARNING > > Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1999 07:45:54 -0700 > > From: Shaul Hurwitz <shaulh@vms.huji.ac.il> > > Organization: Hebrew University > > To: arielh@galon.org.il, ydft_eng@netvision.net.il, aelron@netvision.net.il, > > KESCHET@gilat.com, matmon@techunix.technion.ac.il, > > mshadasb@mscc.huji.ac.il, dx@mail.netvision.net.il, > > cioffer@weizmann.weizmann.ac.il, ronit@gps.caltech.edu, > > Tamar_Shiner@ccm.intel.com, katzir@ccr.jussieu.fr, yweinstein@ucsd.edu > > > > VIRUS WARNING > > This is VERY, VERY SERIOUS!! Please forward it to everyone you > > know..they will be grateful > > > > There is a virus out now being sent to people via email...it is called > > 'the A.I.D.S. VIRUS'. It will destroy your memory, sound card and > > speakers, drive and it will infect your mouse or pointing device..as > > well as your keyboards (possibly mother boards) making what you type not > > able to register on the screen. It self terminates only after it eats > > 5MB of hard drive space & will delete all programs. > > > > It will come via E-mail called "OPEN: VERY COOL! :) ". > > DELETE IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! immediately!! It will basically render your > > computer useless. Please pass this on to everyone you know! > > > > PASS IT ON QUICKLY & TO AS MANY PEOPLE AS POSSIBLE > > > > -- > > ******************************** > > Shaul Hurwitz > > Institute of Earth Sciences > > The Hebrew University > > Jerusalem 91904 > > Israel > > Tel: 972-2-6586856 (w) > > Tel: 972-2-6439565 (h) > > e-mail: shaulh@vms.huji.ac.il > > ******************************
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