[NTLUG:Discuss] Fw: Microsoft/Foot & Mouth Disease

[Charles Jacobus]

Atlanta, Ga. (SatireWire.com) - Scientists at the Centers for Disease

Control and Symantec's AntiVirus Research Center today confirmed that

foot-and-mouth disease cannot be spread by Microsoft's Outlook email

application, believed to be the first time the program has ever

failed to propagate a major virus.


"Frankly, we've never heard of a virus that couldn't spread through

Microsoft Outlook, so our findings were, to say the least,

unexpected," said Clive Sarnow, director of the CDC's infectious

disease unit.


The study was immediately hailed by British officials, who said it

will save millions of pounds and thousands of man hours. "Up until

now we have, quite naturally, assumed that both foot-and-mouth and

mad cow were spread by Microsoft Outlook," said Nick Brown, Britain's

Agriculture Minister. "By eliminating it, we can focus our resources

elsewhere."


However, researchers in the Netherlands, where foot-and-mouth has

recently appeared, said

they are not yet prepared to disqualify Outlook, which has been the

progenitor of viruses such as "I Love You," "Bubbleboy," "Anna

Kournikova," and "Naked Wife," to name but a few.


Said Nils Overmars, director of the Molecular Virology Lab at Leiden

University: "It's not that we don't trust the research, it's just

that as scientists, we are trained to be skeptical of any finding

that flies in the face of established truth. And this one flies in

the face like a blind drunk sparrow."


Executives at Microsoft, meanwhile, were equally skeptical, insisting

that Outlook's patented Virus Transfer Protocol (VTP) has proven

virtually pervious to any virus. The company, however, will issue a

free VTP patch if it turns out the application is not vulnerable to

foot-and-mouth.


Such an admission would be embarrassing for the software giant, but

Symantec virologist Ariel Kologne insisted that no one is more

humiliated by the study than she is. "Only last week, I had a

reporter ask if the foot-and-mouth virus spreads through Microsoft

Outlook, and I told him,'Doesn't everything?'" she recalled. "Who

would've thought?"