THE SPECIMEN

Received from Aunt Ruth, subject line all capitals, forwarded (by my count) through eleven people before her. I won't reprint it, because the last thing it needs is another copy. Here's the gist:

HISTORY

Good Times first went around at the end of 1994, on AOL and on Internet mailing lists. I first got it in 1995, my senior year of college, from my roommate's girlfriend. Here in 1999 it's still going, usually with the dates cut off so nobody can tell it's five years old. It's been going around longer than I've been in grad school, and that's saying something.

It also has children. Over the years the same warning has come back under new subject lines, like "Penpal Greetings" and "Join the Crew." Same story, new label, same result: nothing, except a lot of worried e-mail.

ANALYSIS

1. Reading a plain e-mail message can't run a program. The text of an e-mail is just letters. When you open it, your mail program shows you the letters. It doesn't run them, any more than reading a recipe bakes a cake.

2. The FCC doesn't do this. The Federal Communications Commission regulates things like radio, television and phone service. It doesn't put out computer virus bulletins. Credit a warning to an official-sounding agency and people stop asking questions. That's the trick.

3. The processor part is science-flavored nonsense. It's full of words like "infinite" and "binary" so it sounds technical. A loop is just a program going in circles. It can freeze your machine until you restart it, but it can't cook the chip.

4. Nobody has ever produced one. In five years, not one person has turned in an actual copy of a Good Times virus. CIAC and the antivirus companies have been calling it a hoax pretty much from the start.

"BUT NEIL, WHAT ABOUT MELISSA?"

That's a fair question, and Aunt Ruth asked it. In March of this year the Melissa virus really did spread by e-mail. Here's the difference, and it's the most important thing on this page:

Melissa came as an attachment. It was a Word document attached to the message. If you opened that document in Word, a macro inside it ran, and it used Microsoft Outlook to mail itself to the first 50 people in your address book. Reading the message's text did nothing. Opening the attachment did.

Same for the others this year. Happy99 was a little program attached to e-mail that showed you fireworks while it quietly set itself up to mail copies of itself. ExploreZip, in June, came as an attachment called zipped_files.exe, and when you ran it, it went after your documents. Every one of the real ones needed you to open or run something.

SAFE HANDLING PROCEDURE

1. Reading e-mail is fine. Read away.
2. Don't open an attachment you weren't expecting, even if it's from someone you know. Melissa came from people's friends. Write back and ask first.
3. Keep your virus scanner's definitions up to date. Norton and McAfee both let you download new ones. Once a month at least.
4. In Word 97, make sure macro virus protection is turned on so Word warns you before running a macro.
5. When a warning shows up in your inbox, check it before you forward it. Most of the time the only thing spreading is the warning.

CONCLUSION

Good Times does not exist and never did. The warning is the only thing that's ever been passed around. Verdict: HOAX. Confidence: as close to 100 percent as I ever get about anything.

Next: Case 002, The $250 Cookie >>