Virus Problems on the 'Net Are SoBig By Farai Chideya, AlterNet August 28, 2003

"Hey - is there a new virus out there?" Last week I sent that email to the
webmaster of TheBeehive.org, the site where I work. I pointed out the
signs. I'd been getting lots of spam-type email (no surprise) with
suspicious attachments (particularly the .pif extension).

By the afternoon, we knew there was a virus, or, more precisely, a worm. A
worm culls all of the emails from the computer it's accessed (when you open
the extension), and then uses them as both the To: and From: addresses for
its attack. By now, hundreds of millions of emails generated by the latest
worm, SoBig, have circulated the 'Net. I guesstimate that I've gotten 50 or
so a day for the past five days. My worm alter-ego has also sent them out,
judging by the bounced messages I got from computers that rejected emails
using my address.

Avoiding viruses and worms has become a necessary survival tactic for the
58 percent of Americans who use the Internet. I altered my POP email
download program to recognize certain phrases that the worm uses as a
subject line. Please don't send me anything personal with "Your
Application," "Thank You," or "Wicked Screensaver" as a header, 'cause that
stuff's going straight in the trash.

Which brings me to the downside of all this mishegoss: it's turning the Web
into the equivalent of a booby-trapped jungle, which people only enter if
they're totally strapped and ready. Nobody who got an account to do online
banking or get pictures of their grandchildren bargained that the 'Net
would be such a swamp. My grandmother, God rest her soul, went online at
the age of 82. Shortly thereafter she was solicited to buy Viagra and see
nude Russian girls lick their daddies. But porn solicitations, at least for
the moment, do not crash your hard drive. Under the assault of SoBig, sites
from the BBC to small mom and pop shops were inaccessible. Other current
viruses will flat out smash your hard drive, specifically if it's using
Microsoft software.

This year, the number of people in the U.S. who stopped using the internet
matched the number of people who started using it. Some lost access to a
computer. Many more didn't like it or had technical problems.

Theoretically, it's just fine not to be online. But living digitally is
becoming more like credit cards. I remember the day that, outraged, one of
my professors found he could not rent a car without a credit card. The same
thing is happening with online transactions, but it's much sneakier.

Companies wear down consumers with 15-minute telephone wait periods before
you reach a customer service representative. Sometimes it's the equivalent
of a regressive tax, where people who can't book online or get e-tickets
incur extra fees (as with airlines). One of the most ridiculous ploys came
from United Airlines, which directed phone callers who could not get
through to an actual human being, to a website offering a 5 percent
discount on bookings. When not a single person is left in United's office
to field complaints, the mission will be complete.

Part of my job at TheBeehive.org is creating content for low-income
families. On the one hand, I want to tell them that life online is
everything it has been promised - a portal to more choice, more freedom,
more self-expression. And the other part of me wants to send them a free
bumpersticker: My Problems with the 'Net are SoBig!


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