Alex,

I'm glad to hear this though I must confess to being overcome by another worry.

My wife and I went out for dinner Monday evening and I wrote 'Outlook' on the chack rather than 'Outback'. I think I've become MSFT-ied... <g>




>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.