In computer news this week:

Computer viruses - dealing with the causes - not the effects.

This week of Valentine's day brought a flurry of anticipated lovebug viruses in millions of people's emails, and it also brought the Anna Kournikova virus, both of which caused massive internet slowdowns and infected thousands of computers. Both these viruses were generic visual basic script viruses, which you can protect yourself against permanently by disabling this security hole in windows, which the virus writers found years ago and continue to exploit.

Once you disable this feature, which is explained in last week's Raw Bytes transcript, you will not be vulnerable to this type of virus. Unfortunately there are lots of other different types of viruses that you will still be vulnerable to, and you still need to protect yourself.

Computer users are getting really tired of all these viruses and virus software that never seems to catch up with the virus writers. The major complaint is that you constantly have to keep updating them, and they're getting more expensive. I know that in several of the major anti-virus programs, you would have to go through several updates for each of the new visual basic script viruses which have appeared over the past year. This is dealing with the effects of this security hole. But when you disable this feature yourself, you are dealing with the cause of the problem.

Last week I download several of the major antivirus programs from the internet, installed and ran each one as trial software, and I don't like any of them. I particularly don't like the way they just take over your entire computer, like the Norton/symantec program and the one from sophos.

You can disable them for a work session, but then they take over your computer again when you reboot. Another very annoying feature is their constant nagging you to buy and register their program, and until you do so you will be haunted by popup reminder screens and slowed performance, as they deliberately virus check every file you open. Then if you deinstall them, they sometimes leave a mess on your computer and take up disk space; usually informing you that some files were not deleted and you need to manually clean up things. I am still testing antivirus programs and will review some soon.

Pc world computer viruses started in the mid 1980's, and the anti virus software was free at that time. Computer viruses now number in the thousands, virus software is expensive, and fixing a computer hit by a virus is very expensive.

One of the biggest problems in fighting viruses is that many countries don't have laws in place to prosecute this crime. This was the case of the original lovebug virus writer in the Phillipines, and with this Argentinian hacker who keeps providing virus code for little hacker wannabes to download and use. The Dutch hacker who is now in custody over the Kournikova virus could face 4 years in jail, and he has admitted that he didn't really write it. He actually just downloaded some virus code written by the Argentinian hacker and modified and released it on the world. Most of the internet hacker sites have full source code of all the viruses, literally inviting anyone to download and release their own viruses upon the world.

The rethorical question is - who pays for the massive internet slowdowns and the cost of thousands of users having to disinfect their computers ? We all do, unfortunately, and we need new laws and prosecution.

For Raw Bytes, this is Frank Delaney

POB 222 Spangle, Wa 99031 (509)245-3736 Email: fdspokane@mtamicro.com