Good Times

Over the past few weeks, cyberspace has been humming with rumors about a virus called "Good Times."

This alleged virus has turned out to be one of the grandest on-line hoaxes of the past year.

First, some background. The rumor has several variations, but the most common elements of the story are that the virus has "unparalleled destructive capability" and that it was created by a user on America Online.

Most of the "chain letters" announcing this virus warn that if you happen to come across an incoming e-mail called "Good Times," you have encountered the virus. (To date, no instances of infection have been documented.)

The catch about "Good Times" is that the e-mail is supposed to infect your system immediately upon being read. Some versions of the rumor claim that once infected, your computer's hard drive will be corrupted.

Other versions of the rumor are more outlandish, claiming that an infected machine will be sent into an "nth-complexity infinite binary loop" which is supposed to be so complex that the computer's central processing unit (CPU) will be "severely damaged."

First of all, the only things getting "severely damaged" by computational complexity are students in Computer Science 121. The last machine I know of that could possibly be physically damaged as a result of user input was an old version of the Commodore PET, a late-1970s relic.

Second of all, it is impossible for a user's machine to become infected by a virus simply because the user is reading e-mail. The text contents of e-mail are exactly that--text--and as such are simply dumped to the screen for the user to read. No hard drive is going to get erased because the user read the text of an e-mail message.

That is not to say that it is impossible for a virus to be transmitted via e-mail. In fact, it is quite easy for a virus to be attached to an e mail as a separate file.

Most Harvard students use the e-mail program PINE ("Program for Internet News and E-mail"), developed at the University of Washington. This program supports Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME), a specification for including non-textual information in e-mail.

The term "non-textual" should sound some alarms when it comes to virus protection, as viruses typically come in the form of non-textual information like system file additions.

In fact, it is possible for a user's machine to become infected by a virus through MIME attachments. If you were to use the "view attachments" command in PINE and download to your computer a file attached to art e-mail, that file could conceivably cause damage to your stored files.

A simple explanation of why this could possibly happen is that any program can be made to execute automatically once it is on your hard drive (both Macintosh and PC compatible machines have the capability of running programs automatically upon bootup, for instance). Such a program might contain commands to do nasty things (like erase the hard drive's contents).

But think about that. The only way for a user to obtain a virus through e-mail is by intentionally downloading an attached file. The solution! Don't download attached files sent by people you don't know!

Of course, e-mail is not the only way a virus can be transmitted, and indeed, it is quite a rare means of transmission since it is pretty klunky (most computer programmers, especially the unhappy souls who spawn viruses, prefer to be "slick" in their work).

So enjoy the holiday season with the comfort of knowing that "Good Times" won't strike you. See you next semested

Eugene Koh '96-'97 is Remote Staff Manager, Media Services, at America Online, Inc. "On Technology" will next appear on the first Tuesday of the spring semester.