VIRUS ALERT Please Read

..

BTW, files in your Temporary Internet Files directory are still in a "safe zone", and are not executable. So there is no reason to start panicing or proclaim the sky is falling.

It was probably wise to advise everyone of your findings, but please be a little more understanding in your response, especially when there was technically no cause for alarm. Your aggressive repsonse in the presence of technical ignorance demonstrates a need for you to experience further maturing yourself.

Oh, and upon closer examination of the files in question, it should be noted that there is no virus code contained within them. Your virus checker is being paranoid (by specifically declaring this website's content as a "virus", although all it does is popup windows, which was the original point to the "trick" anyway), or you have a virus elswhere in your system that's infected these.

[Edit: removed inflammatory statement. I apologize.]

Well, that's the trick then isn't it?

Don't click the link.

You clicked it.

Then you whine about all the popups it makes, and try to make it sound like a much more serious issue by labeling it as a "virus".

[Edit: removed inflammatory statements. I apologize.]

[Edit: removed inflammatory statement. I apologize.]

Because the program is being over-sensitive, and the authors of the virus program probably included the pages in this website (which has been around for months) as files to "watch for" because it does aggressive things.

The content of this web site is in absolutely no way deserving of a title as alarmist as "VIRUS". All it is, is a stupid popup trick that can easily be stopped immediately by anyone with the equivalent of 5 years of computer experience, let alone 25 years.

This is like me setting up a huge sign on the highway and saying "ROAD HAZARD, WARNING DANGEROUS ROAD DEBRIS AHEAD!" because a truck lost a nail on the road.

Kex,

Come on why are you being so harsh? He posted that a link was reported to contain a virus to warn other people. Even if it turned out to be a false positive, does he really deserve being berated as being stupid and immature because he did not go into the guts of the page and determine that it was harmless. We count on antivirus programs to warn us of potentially harmful content, and trust in that. Every time my anti-virus program warns me that an email contained a virus, I don't pop into the email and check the document to make sure that it wasn't a false positive. Why are you so hostile with him?

Cristiano

I'm being harsh because look at how harsh he was to the person who posted the link. He wants the person suspended from SL for posting a link she/he assumed was a harmless joke?

Here's the quote:

Like I said earlier, I don't respond well to people who are complete jerks talking about something they are only knowledgeable enough about to be more trouble than good.

I will give my full apology to Regnar when he apologizes for saying this.

Alright, I will agree with you there - it all goes down to the intent of the original poster, which neither of you actually know. I imagine it was harmless. Regnar should have been more careful in what he said there.

I still don't see however how that correlates to him being stupid and immature for not knowing the full technical details, after a virus warning did in fact appear. Had I gotten a virus warning, I would have posted the same thing he did, minus the attack on the original poster. Does that make me stupid and immature? I have 20+ years of computer experience myself.

Cristiano

The ignorance label comes from his aggressive response more than the content of his alert.

If he had simply stated "Hey, my virus checker caught these files and thinks they are a Trojan Horse. Everyone might want to be careful what links you post here." then I would have commended him for his post. That is stating objective fact and giving fair warning to everyone.

But instead, what he did was take what his virus checker reported as a "Trojan Horse" and turned it into "VIRUS ALERT" to make his post more sensational and also technically inaccurate (trojan horses are not viruses), and condemning someone in the process so far as to recommend suspension for a fairly innocent act.

Like I said before, I would have skipped over this thread entirely if he hadn't blown it out of proportion and condemned someone completely undeserving.

Yes, but only after clicking "Yes" to "Running a system command on this item might be unsafe. Do you wish to continue?"

I happen to agree with him, because it wasn't a harmless joke. First of all, it's usually human curiosity to click a link that one is told not to. I saw the post before it was deleted, and it was easily apparent the poster was expecting (and hoping) people would give in to curiosity and click the link. If they really didn't want people to click the link, they wouldn't have posted it in the first place. Or at the very least worded their post in a more descriptive/helpful fashion.

Second of all, the site that was linked was not harmless. It spawned an infinite loop of popup windows at a rapid pace. For a person who could not (or didn't know how to) stop the progress of the loop, it would have continued until the machine was forced into a reboot or crashed when it ran out of resources. If the person was working on something important at that time, they likely would have lost their work. That's not a harmless effect, by any measure.

The poster of the link may have found it funny, but it was done in a malicious fashion. They even had the nerve to call one person an idiot because they clicked the link. The original poster knew people would click the link, and then got nasty with those who got burned by it.

That's just plain malicious. As far as I'm concerned, they wholly deserve a suspension/ban.


- Newfie Pendragon

Trojan horses, backdoors, keyloggers, dialers, worms, viruses all fall under the term virus in general usage. While technically they are different, they all cause undesired and unauthorized effects on a system. I don't think reporting it as Virus Alert sensationalized it, since it was found by a virus scanning program and said program identified it as Trojan Horse virus.

Also, as Newfie posted, the results were not harmless to the user. How are you so certain that Holy Grace's intent was innocent?

Cristiano

You know what. I'm not going to drag this out.

Regnar, I apologize for the name calling. That was out of line for me to do. I suppose I should get a cup of coffee before posting in the morning.

However, I maintain my stance on the rest of what I said. Warning was called for to alert people not to click the link, but it is not a virus, and a penalty of suspension is too harsh.


Just as these are all known in general as "viruses", people also informally associate "a virus" with "a thing that will delete my files and probably cause me to have to re-install windows" or "thing that will cause me to unintentionally spam all my friends email addresses with viruses".

Both assumptions are wrong. Informal discussion of a technical nature which uses convenience to incorporate assumption A, where assumption A normally leads to the much more serious assumption B, is somewhat wreckless.

It would have been better to objectively report the findings instead of speculating on them in such a way as to make the findings seem a lot more dangerous than they were.

Dude, calm down. It was a joke. I clicked it, too. And I laughed my farking ass off. It was funny, get over it.

As a note, your capitalization of every word and your putting spaces before every piece of punctuation DOES NOT help your "maturity" case. I happen to know that English is your first language... so how did you make it through elementry school?

AND WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS THREAD DOING IN THIS FORUM?

The worst kind of virus is a warning of one.

(i.e. The emailed warnings of a virus can spread farther and wider than any virus ever could.)

Harmless joke? Harmless my ass! If I had clicked a link like that and ended up losing some important work I had been doing in the mean time, I'd be pretty damn pissed off.

Why the victim, who was trying to warn others of this, has been attacked here.....I don't know.

True Garoad.. scratch that first question. Two remaining.

Your capitalization of every word and your putting spaces before every piece of punctuation DOES NOT help your "maturity" case. I happen to know that English is your first language... so how did you make it through elementry school?

AND WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS THREAD DOING IN THIS FORUM?

Well that one can't be explained.. eheh...

Listen:

These personal attacks reduce the quality of the community and experience for everyone. When you make such an attack, please consider very carefully what you want to achieve. I cannot see a positive benefit to SL coming out of this thread. I cannot see how there is education going on here.

We cannot explicitly police the spirit of these threads without reducing everyone's collective freedom beyond the limits we are willing to sustain. We believe in tolerance and liberty as fundamental values for SL. What this means to each of you is that you must (if we are to survive) behave altruistically. You must sometimes censor your own words, if they do more harm to the community than they might in the short term give you pleasure.

Well gee, Philip...you're no fun.

dev, i think the phrase is actually "well gee philip maybe you will post this in the second life world forum where it matters."

You should be so lucky.

I have to agree with Reg on this.

I hate to say it (since you're the SL god and all) and I mean no offense, but when you changed the forums, added both a rants and a 'mature' forum, you did make a choice to build a house not out of sticks or stones, but of dynamite. You're surprised that it blew up??

I think you'll be doubly surprised when you guys finally (and in no way do I want this) get around to allowing kids in.

My guess is that they just assumed that most of the people here were mature adults, but some of us are questioning that assumption!

In hindsight it's easy to say the change caused alot of uh...you know. But LL can't read the future...