Sep 21, 1998

Are you jamming the Net with your ignorance?

Arun Katiyar

Cyberchatter ("the joys of e-mail") created a record last fortnight, triggering a virtual MailSlide. Many wrote in, expressing their joys and frustrations with e-mail, others sent jokes about e-mail, many more of my friends from the past got in touch and at least one person, Rohit Baccher, sent in a very funny pictorial attachment to do with Via-Agra: Come via Agra and see man's biggest erection for a woman. Many of the jokes were simply forwarded, without comment, explanation or reason. Imagine what would happen if I had to forward just one of them to a mere 10 people, who in turn sent it to another 10 each, creating chain mail. By the ninth time it was being forwarded, there would be a billion copies of it in cyberspace, creating jams on the Net and God alone knows what else.

Add to this the time consumed to download the message, read it, then delete each of the billion messages and we can safely assume that more than two billion precious manminutes would have been wasted. In some ways, chain mail behaves exactly like a computer virus: a perfectly innocent line of code replicates itself (in our case, the text of the e-mail), causes the host computer to behave in a way it normally wouldn't (in our case, making you forward a perfectly silly message for absolutely no valid reason) and causes loss or damage of some kind (in our case, loss of time). On the Net, an increasing number of people call this a thought-virus. It spreads like wildfire and you've perhaps been at the end of it or even perpetrated it.

Recently, my mail box opened to reveal a really funny one: it was a variation of what is now popularly known as the Good Times virus. The sender wanted me to forward the mail to as many friends as possible and since it was a spoof, I was, for a moment, even tempted to hit the "forward" button. The message said that if I opened mail which had the Good Times virus, it would rewrite my hard disk, "Not only that, it will scramble any disks that are even close to your computer. It will recalibrate your refrigerator's coolness setting so your ice cream goes melty. It will use subspace harmonics to scratch any CDs you try to play. It will mix Kool-aid to your fish tank. It will give your ex-girlfriend your new phone number. It will drink all your beer and leave its socks on the coffee table where there's company coming over " The Good Times virus and several others, which aren't exactly viruses in the technical sense but nevertheless cause havoc, are part of what is called an Urban Legend. To know more about them, check out kumite.com/myths and follow the links -- my suspicion is that you'll use e-mail with great caution.

Arun Katiyar is executive editor of India Today Group Online. His e-mail address is katiyar@india-today.com

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