-=> Mocking Wayne Chirnside to Bill Drake <=-
   
 BD>As far as the Virus issue is concerned, the ANTICMOS A Virus is
 BD>a Boot-Sector Virus.  This kind of virus does not propagate by
 BD>downloads -- it requires an infected boot disk.
 WC> I'd just like to say that I haven't swapped diskettes in years
 WC> and have scanned all with the latest virus scanner's yet I
 WC> aquired anticmos a: on a i-net download. I know this doesn't
 WC> seem reasonable but as I recall it was a zipped .avi file that
 WC> showed crc errors on unzipping, shortly thereafter I ran a virus
 WC> check and found anticmos a:.
it's a false alarm...
a) BD is correct in saying that anticmos is a bootsector infector, there
is no way it could get into a file by itself...
b) *.avi files are not programs, and they contain no executable code...
viruses are programs and require executable code as a host for the
infection...
as if the crc errors weren't enough to make one suspect the file was
worthless...
 WC> Now I continue to use a small number
 WC> of diskettes for recovery and diagnostic purposes and didn't bother
 WC> to scan them as they were previously found to be clean, the very
 WC> nature of these disks is that I boot to them on a regular basis
 WC> yet anticmos has not recurred.
so long as those disks are write protected you shouldn't have a problem
with most machines (but be warned, some floppy drives are faulty and
allow writes to a write protected disk)...
 WC> Do you think it's possible some
 WC> wierd varient exists.
no, i think it was a false alarm...
... i miss the blinking leds on my external modem...
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