Thoughts on "Melissa" (Warning: explicit MS-Word bashing content)

["Irv Thomae" irv.thomae@xxxxxxxx]

 News reports on the "Melissa" virus have given me another reason to feel
smug about being a XyPurist - (as if I needed more  .) Evidently the
virus is carried not in the very brief ASCII part of the message, but in
its attached ".doc" file. Infection occurs when the user opens up that
...doc attachment (in MS-Word, of course.)
 Presumably, then, Melissa is an exceptionally clever Word-macro. If I
don't use Word to open that .doc file, I don't see any way for my system
to get infected, right?

 This triggers these thoughts -
 (1) I never cease to marvel at the stupidity of using a 20-30K ".doc"
file to carry a message whose text amounts to a few hundred characters.
It's probably unfair to blame many of the computer users who do this,
since they truly don't know any better (or, that there _is_ "better").
But the fact that WIndows, et al, defaults to doing it that way is
inexcusable. _Why_ on earth should every E-mail message be bulked up with
descriptions of the fonts I was using when I wrote it, when the odds are
that every recipient _also_ has those fonts?

 (2) Isn't it interesting how a metaphor borrowed from the natural world
("virus") continues to be subject to laws of nature?  Ecologists warn us
that when a population loses biodiversity, it becomes more vulnerable to
infections. "Melissa" wouldn't be causing so much trouble, (indeed,
perhaps its author might not even have been tempted to write it), if
MS-Word weren't so conveniently available to such a huge number of E-mail
users...

 Hmmm - I wonder if whoever perpetrated this had the Microsoft antitrust
suit in mind? It sure does cast a sickly light on Gates's claim that
'consumers benefit by having Internet applications tightly linked into
their WIndows desktop', doesn't it?

 Irv