>>>>> "Jonathan" == Jonathan Stott <jstott@poly.phys.cwru.edu> writes: Jonathan> It's more or less a hoax. ... It's not so much a hoax as a misunderstanding. Many people seem to think that any code that does something unexpected or malicious, that you don't want it to do, without getting your permission or telling you, is a virus. Apparently the program does send your directory structure to Microsoft. They seem to have carefully avoided denying that, if their statement was reported accurately on bugtraq. Here is something interesting from RISKS. > Another [...] risk, is people outside the US posting crypto code to > USENET, for instance my sig file below implements RSA encryption in > 3 lines of perl. If you are not familiar with encryption schemes, > RSA is one of the most secure public key encryption schemes, and is > the one used in PGP. It is also very firmly on the ITAR export > control list. > > Information on the sig is at: > > http://dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/ > > Some US folks are printing a T-shirt with this code on it, in honour > of ITAR, to produce an export controlled "munitions" T-shirt.