At 04:40 AM 11/27/98 -0600, Brown, R Ken wrote:

We're still getting clueless people forwarding us email virus hoaxes. Pen-Pal, Buddy Frogs, Good Times, whatever.

And I just realised who has to be responsible! Who has a motive for this "crime"? These things do no-one any real harm, they just take up bandwidth. Networks get saturated and maybe we have to buy more kit. It must be the router manufacturers. Maybe there is a secret team at Cisco or IBM generating new hoaxes to keep the email market growing.

A long time ago, in a network far far away, when there were wolves in Wales and Netnews still mostly ran over UUCP instead of that newfangled Arpanet, and the Center of the Earth was either allegra or ihnp4, there were some people who accused Bell Labs and probably in particular Mark Horton of spreading Netnews as part of a plot by The Phone Company to increase telephone usage, since more netnews volume meant more long-distance minutes. (Everybody tried to avoid knowing what the phone bills for allegra and ihnp4 _were_, because even internal funny-money creates some responsibility if you know you're spending more than $1M/year of it :-) Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639