Get your virus facts from Weekly World News

Rob Rosenberger, Vmyths co-founder
Friday, 7 April 2000 THE REGISTER FELL for a Weekly World News story. You may know the latter as a supermarket tabloid which covers alien sightings, Elvis sightings, JFK (Sr., not Jr.) sightings, Lee Harvey Oswald sightings, and so on. My favorite issue showed a photo of Rush Limbaugh talking with aliens who urged him to run for the U.S. presidency. Needless to say, Weekly World News started covering the computer virus scene a couple of years ago. They've written wild stories about:

a computer virus capable of infecting human beings;
a computer virus which flings glass shards into the eyes of little children; and
a demonic being which can possess your computer's hard disk.

A British computer tabloid fell for a virus story published in a U.S. supermarket tabloid. Why does this not surprise me?

Weekly World News now claims you can blow a house to smithereens via email. They concocted an expert who said "when the receiver downloads the attachment, the electrical current and molecular structure of the central processing unit is altered, causing it to blast apart like a large hand grenade." It sounds almost like a derivative of the Good Times virus alert hoax if you ask me. (Remember how it could "severely damage the processor"?) Yet Register reporter Thomas C. Green^[2] fell for it in a story dated 5 April. He even tried to locate the "expert"! Green almost seems to recognize the truth by the end of his story — yet he still wrote it. And his editor published it. Now you know why I call The Register "a computer tabloid."^[1] Hmmm. The Associated Press once warned of an exploding monitor virus eight days after an April Fool's Day. A decade later, The egister warned of an exploding computer email four days after an April Fool's Day. Coincidence? You be the judge.