Slashdot Mirror
Blackworm Dud Highlights Virus Naming Mess
An anonymous reader writes "Washingtonpost.com is running a story that looks at the total mess that the anti-virus companies made in naming the latest overhyped virus threat. According to the article, 'Blackworm' or the 'Kama Sutra worm' was the first major test of a new U.S.-government funded initiative to introduce some sanity into the virus-naming business. From the article: 'For most of [the antivirus vendors], this is like Esperanto: You can speak it if you want to, but everyone else is going to carry on babbling in their own native tongue, so it doesn't really matter.'"
They should have just had everyone call it the Sex for Gymnasts virus.
Grammar Lesson: you're is a contraction of "you are"; your means you possess something; yore means days gone by.
Hej! Mi povas paroli esperanto, you insensitive clod!
I am unamerican, and proud of it!
Assigning viruses numbers is an interesting idea, making tracking viruses easier in some ways, but much harder in others. For example, one couldn't say on the Nightly News: "Virus #34932423 has recently stricken the Internet, destroying the International Llama Foundation's forums and redirecting all Google search results to the federal government. Watch out, folks, #34932423 is a real nasty!" If the authorities do not name viruses, they will be given names by the common people to make communication easier. Much better to have an organization give each virus a name that has some chance of making sense, rather than having the masses choose a name that may or may make any sense, i.e. "the blue screen of death virus has hit again!"
games journalism blog
Better version:
So this guy takes his girlfriend to an engineers' comedy club, but when the act starts, she's confused because the guy on stage is just shouting out numbers and getting laughs from the crowd each time. She asks what's so funny, and her boyfriend explains that they have indexed every joke in the world and assigned each one an ID number, so when he says a number he's telling that joke. This goes on for a while until the end, when the comedian shouts a certain number that really brings the house down, roaring, cheering, standing ovation, the works. The girl asks what was so funny about it. The boyfriend replies, "We've never heard that one before."