Fw: humor: strunkenwhite virus (snafu)

[Otto Sell]

----- Original Message -----
From: Mattis Fishman <mattis at argoscomp.com>
To: <bananafish at roughdraft.org>
Sent: Wednesday, January 31, 2001 3:36 PM
Subject: humor: strunkenwhite virus


> Hello Friends,
>
> I came across this a while ago on another mailing list, and found it
> while cleaning up my home directory. I am sorry I have no record of the
author.
> I hope it brings some of you a few smiles.
>
> all the best,
> Mattis
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> A new computer virus is spreading throughout the Internet, and it is
> far more insidious than the recent Chernobyl menace. Named Strunkenwhite
> after the authors of a classic guide to good writing, it returns e-mail
> messages that have grammatical or spelling errors. It is deadly accurate
> in its detection abilities, unlike the dubious spell checkers that come
> with word processing programs.
>
> The virus is causing something akin to panic throughout corporate
> America, which has become used to the typos, misspellings, missing words
> and mangled syntax so acceptable in cyberspace. The CEO of
> LoseItAll.com, an Internet startup, said the virus has rendered him
> helpless. "Each time I tried to send one particular e-mail this morning,
> I got back this error message: 'Your dependent clause preceding your
> independent clause must be set off by commas, but one must not precede
> the conjunction.' I threw my laptop across the room."
>
> A top executive at a telecommunications and long-distance company
> said: "This morning, the same damned e-mail kept
> coming back to me with a pesky notation claiming I needed to use a
> pronoun's possessive case before a gerund. With the number of e-mails I
> crank out each day, who has time for proper grammar? Whoever created
> this virus should have their programming fingers broken."
>
> A broker at Begg, Barow and Steel said he couldn't return to the "bad,
> old" days when he had to send paper memos in proper English. He
> speculated that the hacker who created Strunkenwhite was a "disgruntled
> English major who couldn't make it on a trading floor. When you're
> buying and selling on margin, I don't think it's anybody's business if I
> write that 'i meetinged through the morning, then cinched the deal on
> the cel phone while bareling down the xway.' "
>
> If Strunkenwhite makes e-mailing impossible, it could mean the end to a
> communication revolution once hailed as a significant timesaver. A study
> of 1,254 office workers in Leonia, N.J., found that e-mail increased
> employees' productivity by 1.8 hours a day because they took less time
> to formulate their thoughts. (The same study also found that they lost
> 2.2 hours of productivity because they were e-mailing so many jokes to
> their spouses, parents and stockbrokers.)
>
> Strunkenwhite is particularly difficult to detect because it doesn't
> come as an e-mail attachment (which requires the recipient to open it
> before it becomes active). Instead, it is disguised within the text of
> an e-mail entitled "Congratulations on your pay raise." The message asks
> the recipient to "click here to find out about how your raise effects
> your pension." The use of "effects" rather than the grammatically
> correct "affects" appears to be an inside joke from Strunkenwhite's
> mischievous creator.
>
> The virus also has left government e-mail systems in disarray.
> Officials at the Office of Management and Budget can no longer transmit
> electronic versions of federal regulations because their highly
> technical language seems to run afoul of Strunkenwhite's dictum that
> "vigorous writing is concise." The White House speechwriting office
> reported that it had received the same message, along with a caution to
> avoid phrases such as "the truth is. . ." and "in fact. . . ."
>
> Home computer users also are reporting snafus, although an e-mailer who
> used the word "snafu" said she had come to regret it.
>
> The virus can have an even more devastating impact if it infects an
> entire network. A cable news operation was forced to shut down its
> computer system for several hours when it discovered that Strunkenwhite
> had somehow infiltrated its TelePrompTer software, delaying newscasts
> and leaving news anchors nearly tongue-tied as they wrestled with proper
> sentence structure.
>
> There is concern among law enforcement officials that Strunkenwhite is
> a harbinger of the increasingly sophisticated methods hackers are using
> to exploit the vulnerability of business's reliance on computers. "This
> is one of the most complex and invasive examples of computer code we
> have ever encountered. We just can't imagine what kind of devious mind
> would want to tamper with e-mails to create this burden on
> communications," said  an FBI agent who insisted on speaking via the
> telephone out of concern  that trying to e-mail his comments could leave
> him tied up for hours.
>
> Meanwhile, bookstores and online booksellers reported a surge in
> orders  for Strunk & White's "The Elements of Style."
>
>
>
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