> The Pluperfect Virus
> By Bob Hirschfeld
> Special to The Washington Post
> Sunday, May 2, 1999; Page B1
>
>A new computer virus is spreading throughout the Internet, and it is far
>more insidious than the recent Chernobyl menace. Named Strunkenwhite
>after
>the authors of a classic guide to good writing, it returns e-mail
>messages
>that have grammatical or spelling errors.
>
>It is deadly accurate in its detection abilities, unlike the dubious
>spell
>checkers that come with word processing programs.
>
>The virus is causing something akin to panic throughout corporate
>America,
>which has become used to the typos, misspellings, missing words and
>mangled
>syntax so acceptable in cyberspace.
>
>The CEO of LoseItAll.com, an Internet startup, said the virus has
>rendered
>him helpless. "Each time I tried to send one particular e-mail this
>morning,
>I got back this error message: 'Your dependent clause preceding your
>independent clause must be set off by commas, but one must not
>precede the conjunction.' I threw my laptop across the room."
>A top executive at a telecommunications and long-distance company,
>10-10-10-10-10-10-123, said: "This morning, the same damned e-mail
>kept coming back to me with a pesky notation claiming I needed to use
>a pronoun's
>possessive case before a gerund. With the number of e-mails I crank out
>each
>day, who has time for proper grammar? Whoever created this virus should
>have
>their programming fingers broken."
>
>A broker at Begg, Barow and Steele said he couldn't return to the "bad,
>old"
>days when he had to send paper memos in proper English. He speculated
>that the hacker who created Strunkenwhite was a "disgruntled English
>major who couldn't make it on a trading floor. When you're buying and
>selling on margin, I don't think it's anybody's business if I write
>that 'i meetinged through the morning, then cinched the deal on the
>cel phone while bareling down the xway.' "
>
>If Strunkenwhite makes e-mailing impossible, it could mean the end to
>a communication revolution once hailed as a significant timesaver. A
>study of
>1,254 office workers in Leonia, N.J., found that e-mail increased
>employees' productivity by 1.8 hours a day because they took less
>time to formulate their thoughts. (The same study also found that
>they lost 2.2 hours of productivity because they were e-mailing so
>many jokes to their spouses, parents and stockbrokers.)
>
>Strunkenwhite is particularly difficult to detect because it doesn't come
>as
>an e-mail attachment (which requires the recipient to open it before
>it becomes active). Instead, it is disguised within the text of an
>e-mail entitled "Congratulations on your pay raise." The message asks
>the recipient to "click here to find out about how your raise effects
>your pension." The use of "effects" rather than the grammatically
>correct "affects" appears to be an inside joke from Strunkenwhite's
>mischievous creator.
>
>The virus also has left government e-mail systems in disarray. Officials
>at
>the Office of Management and Budget can no longer transmit electronic
>versions of federal regulations because their highly technical
>language seems to run afoul of Strunkenwhite's dictum that "vigorous
>writing is concise." The White House speechwriting office reported
>that it had received the same message, along with a caution to avoid
>phrases such as "the truth is ... " and "in fact ...."
>
>Home computer users also are reporting snafus, although an e-mailer who
>used
>the word "snafu" said she had come to regret it.
>
>The virus can have an even more devastating impact if it infects an
>entire
>network. A cable news operation was forced to shut down its computer
>system
>for several hours when it discovered that Strunkenwhite had somehow
>infiltrated its TelePrompTer software, delaying newscasts and leaving
>news anchors nearly tongue-tied as they wrestled with proper sentence
>structure.
>
>There is concern among law enforcement officials that Strunkenwhite is a
>harbinger of the increasingly sophisticated methods hackers are using
>to exploit the vulnerability of business's reliance on computers.
>"This is one of the most complex and invasive examples of computer
>code we have ever encountered. We just can't imagine what kind of
>devious mind would want to tamper with e-mails to create this burden
>on communications," said an FBI agent who insisted on speaking via
>the telephone out of concern that trying to e-mail his comments could
>leave him tied up for hours.
>
>Meanwhile, bookstores and online booksellers reported a surge in orders
>for
>Strunk & White's "The Elements of Style." |
