Feb 17

Take Advantage of NetFile
Sun Review February 17, 2001

There's a new virus on the block and her name is Anna. Also known as VBS/SST or OnTheFly, Anna is a worm similar to the ILOVEYOU virus and is spread via an e-mail attachment called "AnnaKournikova.jpg.vbs". Clicking on the attachment activates the worm. Once activated, Anna uses your Microsoft Outlook address book to mass e-mail itself to all your contacts.

The self-proclaimed creator of Anna turned himself in to Dutch police earlier this week. In a letter he claimed inspiration from devotion to the 19-year-old tennis star and evidence that Internet users were not taking measures to protect themselves from viruses.

So what can you do to protect yourself from Anna? As I've mentioned before, opening attachments is always a risky business. Use regularly updated anti-virus software to scan your attachments before opening anything, even if it appears to be sent by a trusted friend or colleague.

Most anti-virus software can automatically scan your attachments as your e-mail is received. Anti-virus products from respected manufacturers as Norton (www.norton.com) and McAfee (www.mcafee.com) are well worth the price. You can also download Microsoft's Outlook Security Patch, or upgrade to a more recent version of Outlook which includes added security measures.

Napster
In Napster news, a federal appeals court handed down a decision on the online music-swapping service that will eventually lead to a completely revamped Napster, or at worst, the termination of the popular service along with severe copyright violation penalties. Fearing an imminent shutdown, Napster users went on a downloading spree last weekend, copying more than 250 million songs to their hard drives.

The future of Napster may be determined more by what is possible to police, and what is not. Napster's central servers, which allow the swapping of copyrighted digital material through so-called peer-to-peer networks, can be monitored to some degree.

However, other services such as Gnutella (gnutella.wego.com) do not make use of central servers and simply allow users to connect to each others' hard drives to swap music and other files. The Napster transformation won't happen overnight, so you can probably still do some downloading, for now.

Microsoft vs DOJ II
Microsoft is in under the antitrust microscope again this week as the U.S. Justice Department has begun investigating the software giant's alliance with Corel Corporation. Corel's WordPerfect Office software is important for competitive reasons because it is also available for Linux, a computer operating system that competes with Microsoft's Windows.

The Justice Department is looking into whether Microsoft's stake in Corel could reduce competition in the market for office software packages that include word processing, spreadsheets and graphics, where Microsoft Office dominates with a market share of more than 90 percent.