
.ili.   Devil Shat Two   .ili. 
------------------------------

This is Devil Shat Two released on 05/02/97. Devil Shat is published by disobey and is protected under all copyright laws. All of the issues are archived at the Disobey website: http://www.disobey.com

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.ili. Contents .ili. 
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Ahk! What are Friends? (by Morbus)
A Point for Stupidity (by Morbus)

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.ili. Ahk! What are Friends? .ili.
------------------------------------- by Morbus

Ahk... Friendship? What do we call friendship? How do we define friendship? Just how far into the boundaries of liking and telling people how we really feel will we go? How much can we trust them? 

Most of us have friends, and the goths and the haters among you will say that you have acquaintances. So be it. In either instance, there are some people whom you just plain hang around with a lot. You enjoy (or for the goths/haters: tolerate) their company and you generally get along. But can you tell them that you slept with their sister last night? Can you tell a fellow guy that you are having girl problems (for women, I have heard it is as easy as pie to talk about guys). Wouldn't that break your macho physique? Or is that what I'm getting at? 

Is a friend someone whom you don't have to put on your image for? Someone whom you can let see the real you, and not the one you put on at work, or the one you wear to church or around family? Do you have to play the image game with friends? Or are you so afraid of coming out of your shell that your friends will be surprised as you gun them down from the top of the water tower? 

I leave you with thoughts to ponder... have you ever played a mind game on your friend? Or drove someone crazy by making them paranoid that they have done something wrong? Or does it matter? Do you really, truly care about your friend? 

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.ili. A Point for Stupidity .ili.
---------------------------------- by Morbus 

I often wonder how paranoid our lovely society has become. After sending out the first issue, I was barraged by IMs and emails about people asking me what the attached file was, so afraid of this hype of the "penpals" virus. So what follows is a guide to virii and the hype they bring, and how stupidity and ignorance are becoming too paramount. 

VIRII CAN NOT INFECT YOUR HARD DRIVE BY SIMPLY OPENING YOUR EMAIL.

As much as everyone says they can, they can't. By opening an email, you are not transmitting any dangerous data. The only way you can get something from email is if you download something attached to the email. In which case, the downloaded file is the carrier of the virus (see below for exceptions), NOT the email. The "penpals" virus is merely a ripoff of the "Good Times" virus which began in 1984. It is a hoax... an urban legend. The story is that if you open your email with the subject of "Good Times" or "PenPals" then you'll get a virus. This is impossible, unless YOU DOWNLOAD A FILE. 

EVERY FILE YOU DOWNLOAD IS NOT A CARRIER OF A VIRUS

Another misconception of virii: "they are everywhere". Well, this takes an examining of a virus itself. I like to refer to it through the parent and child metaphor. But more on that later. 

First of all, a virus needs to be RUN. So, the virus MUST be a standalone application. Stand alone applications are anything with .EXE, .COM, or .BAT at the end of their file names. However, there are some files that don't have these ending. As a simple rule, ANY FILE that needs NOTHING ELSE to run, but merely involves you double clicking it, or activating it, can be a carrier of a virus. 

Now, picture files, text files, and sound files (which are the most often traded files on AOL) are not carriers of virii. How? They are not standalone applications (since they most likely end in .jpg, gif, .txt, or .wav). They need to be "seen" by a parent application. You need a text reader to READ a text file, or a sound program to READ your sound file so you can hear it. And that's where the difference lies. Virii must be RUN... but if a parent (an .EXE, .COM. or .BAT file) READS a child file (.TXT, .GIF/.JPG or .WAV) then the virus is never RUN. So therefore it can never infect your hard drive. 

So, quite easily, a picture could hold code for a virus, but that virus will lay dormant within that file forever, simple because there is no way that file will ever be RUN, it will only be read. We hope this clears up any misconceptions. Hopefully we won't need to explain it again. 

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