🚀 go-pugleaf

>Tina, Lynne and Info-CHILDES,
>  I agree that it is useful to understand "why a virus can or cannot be
>downloaded from the Internet."  In fact, the matter is fairly
>straightforward and not too mysterious.  Just to verify my own
>understandings of this, I called up a couple of our computer people and it
>was clear that we all agreed 100% on the issue.  
>1.  You cannot get a virus simply through reading email.  The virus has to
>be in an attachment which you extract.
>2.  Even if you (perhaps somewhat foolishly) decide to extract the
>attachment, you still will not "get the virus" until you (even more
>foolishly) decide to run the program.
>3.  One partial exception to #2, is that you can "get the virus" contained
>in things like the Word Template virus or the Hypercard Merry Christmas
>virus by merely "opening" a file in Word or Hypercard.  At that point, what
>happens is that the virus messes up Word or Hypercard, but doesn't really
>run off on a mission to destroy your hard drive or operating system.
>
>So, to get a really serious and dangerous virus from the Internet, you would
>have to either extract an attachment from email or else download a program
>and run it.  For example, if our CLAN program had a virus in it and you
>downloaded it to your machine over the Internet, you could potentially
>destroy something in your system.  This means that it is our responsibility
>in Pittsburgh to continually check for viruses on our machines to make sure
>that we are not inadvertently packaging something into CLAN that would
>destroy the world.  On our machines we run the Symantec Antivirus utilities
>that continually check for viruses.  We have never yet distributed a virus,
>although there was a virus in a data file back in about 1992 that we caught
>pretty quickly.
>
>I have received viruses in software from very reputable sources.  One was in
>a commercial database program and one was in a neuroanatomical database.  I
>will not mention the companies by name.
>
>I hope these comments help a bit.  
>
>If you have any further comments on this virus issue, please send your
>comments to me and I will collect them for later reposting.  Many thanks.
>
>--Brian MacWhinney (macw@cmu.edu)
>
>
>
Lise Menn
Professor and Chair
Linguistics Department - Box 295
University of Colorado
Boulder CO 80309-0295
303-492-1609; fax 303-492-4416

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