Re: new virus warning

[Lee Hickling xywrite@xxxxxxxx]

Someone, it doesn't matter who, said

>My reaction when I first got word of this virus
>a week or two ago was identical to Lee's,
>(snip) The name's different, but ...

No, no, no.That misunderstands my reaction. I tried to make it clear that
the names are not "different, but." They are totally different. My reaction
was NOT that AOL4FREE.COM is a hoax. It is a crude but dangerous trojan,
which carries as its payload a virus that is reported to be capably of
trashing everything on a hard disk. AOL4FREE (no extension) is the e-mail
hoax. The extension dot-COM makes all the difference, a point I clearly made
in my first post on the subject a week ago and again this morning.

Let me say it again.
Viruses are transmitted by executable files.
An e-mail message is not an executable file.

The extension .COM, like .EXE, .DLL, .BAT and a few others less common,
signals an executable file. It tells DOS "This is a program. Run it."

That was the crucial point I've tried to make, for the third time now,
because it is so important. All I can figure is that people who have never
run DOS programs, who only point and click on icons, are completely clueless
about filenames and extensions. They really need to learn at least this
much, for their own safety.

And I'm still astonished to encounter that confusion on the XyWrite list,
where most of the subscribers appear to be veteran computer users and many
of them are experienced programmers.
Lee Hickling