Build Date: Fri Jul 11 10:40:28 2025 UTC
I like throwing stones in glass houses.
-- Johnnie Royale
Gnutella "Worm" written in... VBScript?
2000-06-05 11:04:51
Oooh.... so there's a scary Gnutella worm out there giving nasty warning messages to Gnutella users. Eeeek! Scary virus like software makes me afraid to turn on my computer!
Give it a rest. OK, I can see how frightening a thing like this is on the surface, but what's going on here? Someone has made a bullshit straw dog for the media to ignorantly sink their teeth into. The breathless scare-hype is out that if you use that scary bad pirating-condusive software you could have horrible things happen to you.
First of all, you can't have them happen to you without double-clicking on the damn icon to run the script. This ain't no Outlook Express "run it before you know it's been downloaded" deal. It takes actual participation. And this begs the question: Who in their right mind is out there downloading files CLEARLY MARKED as VBScript from a totally unknown source and then running them? You've got to really really want the monster in your living room to do that, or else be too stupid to get the correlation between moving the mouse and seeing the little arrow move on the screeen, in which case Gnuella may not be the choice for you anyhow.
Once again, we watch a media feeding frenzy designed to scare us using no hard facts, and lots of smoke and mirrors. Maybe those people at ZDNet should stop smoking whatever it is they smoke over there and snorting stuff off of those mirrors. Then they might go to the library and look up the words "responsible" and "journalism". Then come back here and bring us a 12-page essay on how those words might be used in combination with one another.
Eroding the users' trust in Gnutella? More like eroding the readers' trust in Journalism.
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