On Wild Wild West, LL, showing the concern for fellow human beings that is her trademark, revealed that she may have given some of us a virus. In the thread "Where have all the groupers gone?" she tells Hawk that her previous thread "For Hawk only" contained a little present for him (and of course for any other person curious enough to look at the thread). Someone else posted the information that apparently the thread gave a boot sector virus to quite a few people.

I couldn't remember whether I'd looked at that thread or not, so I ran Norton Anti-Virus, which didn't find anything. (That's a long-running SOB, about 25 minutes for me.)

-- Peter Errington (petere7@starpower.net), October 28, 2001

Answers

I don't think I could restrain myself from checking IP's to determine if this or that poster was LL or not, or "Hawk" or not. I don't know if Unk has restrained from so doing either. I suspect that LL has more folks that hate her on www than she'd ever dreamed would be true. I ALSO suspect that much of the mischief is being done by those who hate her, rather than her. I didn't remember whether I'd looked at the "Hawk Only" thread. I've noticed no problems, so have no reason to believe the rants of an anonymous poster.

-- Anita (Anita_S3@hotmail.com), October 28, 2001.

Anita:

LL has her trolls, God knows, but none of them that I have figured for being her trolls has been particularly clever and subtle. There is a whole lot of really bad stuff which I have blamed on LL. If in fact there is a very clever subtle troll at work, I can't see it being Hawk.

-- Peter Errington (petere7@starpower.net), October 28, 2001.

I rarely check IPs.

-- Uncle Deedah (unkeeD@yahoo.com), October 28, 2001.

Anita--

How does one check IPs?

-- (lars@indy.net), October 29, 2001.

I did look at that thread and the casual post about the boot sector virus worried me quite a bit. Especially since I had no idea what a boot sector virus was. I asssume that Norton's will detect it but as a further check you can run a simple diagnostic in MS DOS. I found the information for this at the following address:

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q82/9/23.ASP

You might want to try the test just for additional peace of mind, though it would appear that the post was a bogus attempt to scare people. It worked on me!

-- Jack Booted Thug (governmentconspiracy@NWO.com), October 29, 2001.