Fwd: Foot and Mouth (fwd)

[WooF owlswick@xxxxxxxx]

O XyWrite List:

  Thought you might enjoy this.

George Scithers of owlswick@xxxxxxxx

-------------Forwarded Message----------
Date: Mon, 09 Apr 2001 20:45:54 -0700
From: Dian Crayne 

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?'" she
recalled. "Who would've thought?"

-- Dian Crayne
Willits, California
*****************************************