[techtalk] Almost arrested for using telnet

[Rick Scott]

On Wed, Apr 11, 2001 at 07:05:09PM +0100, Telsa Gwynne wrote:
> Watching someone in a terminal room. Stuck in floppy. Started machine.
> It went through virus-check. "Beep! This has a virus!" "Oh no!" cried
> the student. "A virus on the computer!" He whipped his floppy out...
> 
> ...and stuck it in the next PC along the line. 


<atsr flavour="gripe">
This used to drive me fscking crazy when I worked at my old
University.  The business people were really MS-Centric, and the
biz building had the only NT lab.  The place was just rampant
with MSWord Macro viruses along with (less commonly) a horde
of other goodies.  People would stick one of their (unlabelled) 
floppes in the drive, and the antivirus software would go 
"w00t!, this floppy is infected with the FooBarfluous virus.  
Would you like to..." at which point they would tear the floppy 
out of the drive and leave it in the lab.  

They did this, of course, so that some kind-hearted individual 
could go into the lab, find the (unlabelled) floppy beside the 
computer, and think `Hm, looks like someone forgot this 
unlabelled floppy here.  Well, since it's got no name or e-mail
address on it, I'll stick it into [this computer|my laptop|
my home computer] so I can see if it has any files on it that
would identify the owner and get their floppy back to them.'

And yes, in case you're wondering, more than once our helpdesk 
got a frantic call for help from someone who had the only copy of
their thesis on a [lost|damaged|corrupted] floppy disk.
</astr>


Rick
-- 
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Yield to temptation; it may not pass your way again. 
     :Robert Heinlein