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Foot-And-Mouth Believed To Be First Virus Unable To Spread Through
Microsoft Outlook
Atlanta, Ga. (SatireWire.com) Scientists at the Centers for Disease
Control and Symantec's AntiVirus Research Center today confirmed
that "foot-and-mouth" disease cannot be spread by Microsoft's
Outlook email application, believed to be the first time the program
has ever failed to propagate a major virus.
"Frankly, we've never heard of a virus that couldn't spread through
Microsoft Outlook, so our findings were, to say the least,
unexpected," said Clive Sarnow, director of the CDC's infectious
disease unit.
The study was immediately hailed by British officials, who said it
will save millions of pounds and thousands of man hours. "Up until
now we have, quite naturally, assumed that both foot-and-mouth and
mad cow were spread by Microsoft Outlook," said Nick Brown,
Britain's Agriculture Minister. "By eliminating it, we can focus our
resources elsewhere."
However, researchers in the Netherlands, where foot-and-mouth has
recently appeared, said they are not yet prepared to disqualify
Outlook, which has been the progenitor of viruses such as "I Love
You," "Bubbleboy," "Anna Kournikova," and "Naked Wife," to name but
a few.
Said Nils Overmars, director of the Molecular Virology Lab at Leiden
University: "It's not that we don't trust the research, it's just
that as scientists, we are trained to be skeptical of any finding
that flies in the face of established truth. And this one flies in
the face like a blind drunk sparrow."
Executives at Microsoft, meanwhile, were equally skeptical,
insisting that Outlook's patented Virus Transfer Protocol (VTP) has
proven virtually pervious to any virus. The company, however, will
issue a free VTP patch if it turns out the application is not
vulnerable to foot-and-mouth.
Such an admission would be embarrassing for the software giant, but
Symantec virologist Ariel Kologne insisted that no one is more
humiliated by the study than she is. "Only last week, I had a
reporter ask if the foot-and-mouth virus spreads through Microsoft
Outlook, and I told him, 'Doesn't everything?'" she recalled. "Who
would've thought?"
Copyright 2001, SatireWire
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