*** BEWARE OF CYRUS VYRUS ***

[BruceZ]

This isn't actually a virus at all, but it has some of the same intentions and effects for some users, so I'll call it a "vyrus", in honor of its creator Cyrus. This user has provided a link to his "homepage", where he demonstrates to us his extreme cleverness, as he is wont to do, by provding a popup which opens an explorer window with no borders. When run, all windows vanish, and the screen goes blank except for a message saying "you have successfully shut down the internet" in a way which appears that windows may have shut down. This may present a catastrophic problem for some users who may not be aware of what is going on, and not know how to handle it. It is not necessary to reboot your machine and lose data when this happens. In windows XP for example, pressing the ctl-alt-del keys at the same time will bring up a list of tasks. There will be an internet explorer task called "shutting down the internet". That is just the one that the popup is run from. There is another internet explorer task without a name, and that is the one you want to terminate. Once this is terminated, everything will be back to normal. Of course, the best policy is to never run popups if you do not know what they do, but there may be a tendency to trust regular users of this forum. Unfortunately, it has become necessary to treat any links this user provides with caution.

[Cyrus]

BruceZ is seeing things. There is no virus, of course, nor any other damaging program or link that I have ever provided to anyone. The simple truth is that I included on my Profile page a (lame) joke of a website which does the things Bruce described -- only without any horrible consequences! You can turn off that page quite easily with the old way of hitting simultaneously Ctrl + Alt + Del for a second, which pops up the usual Close Window command. From there you can close down the page.

I'm sorry that old Bruce has gotten so upset by our little repartee on this page that he felt he should make me out as some web hacker, but, if this attitude helps his blood pressure, so be it.

I'm withdrawing the link from my Profile, just to put this to rest. Don't call Homeland Security on me yet, Bruce, old boy.

<ul type="square"> BruceZ wrote:
"This isn't actually a virus at all, but it has some of the same intentions and effects for some users, so I'll call it a "vyrus", in honor of its creator Cyrus. This user has provided a link to his "homepage", where he demonstrates to us his extreme cleverness, as he is wont to do, by provding a popup which opens an explorer window with no borders. When run, all windows vanish, and the screen goes blank except for a message saying "you have successfully shut down the internet" in a way which appears that windows may have shut down. This may present a catastrophic problem for some users who may not be aware of what is going on, and not know how to handle it. It is not necessary to reboot your machine and lose data when this happens. In windows XP for example, pressing the ctl-alt-del keys at the same time will bring up a list of tasks. There will be an internet explorer task called "shutting down the internet". That is just the one that the popup is run from. There is another internet explorer task without a name, and that is the one you want to terminate. Once this is terminated, everything will be back to normal. Of course, the best policy is to never run popups if you do not know what they do, but there may be a tendency to trust regular users of this forum. Unfortunately, it has become necessary to treat any links this user provides with caution."[/list]

[BruceZ]

I'm glad the user has removed this potentially harmful link from his profile, and now is utilizing that space for the more appropriate purpose of launching a personal attack on me. That is fine, but DO NOT post popups on this site which perform unknown functions, or which may not be easily terminated by everyone.

To clarify, ctl-alt-del is what you need to terminate such programs in windows. This is not a "Close Window" command per se in modern windows operating systems like 98 or XP. What it does is open the windows task manager, from which you must find and choose the appropriate running task to terminate by clicking on its name, and then click "end task". In this case, the task which needed to be chosen and closed was unnamed and not obvious.

To reiterate, such programs are potentially damaging to the many users who do not know how to terminate such windows, and to the many additional users who would not recognize that such programs are in fact windows to be terminated. The only solution apparent to these users might be to reboot their machines, which is always potentially destructive. If the user knows how to perform a soft reboot, the only risk is loss of data in running programs. Rebooting by turning off power to the PC is very bad, as it can and does frequently cause permanent loss of data, permanent corruption of windows files, and even corruption of the hard drive formatting. Even as a windows programmer familiar with the inner workings of windows, my initial reaction to this program was that I had launched a destructive applet which would cause me to have to reboot. A moment’s thought made me realize that I may in fact be looking at a window, but only because I remembered the esoteric fact that windows may be constructed without any of the normal attributes.

Users who have been here awhile recognize that I will always point out potentially damaging links regardless of who posts them, just as I try to offer software related advice when it is appropriate. I do "see" things now and again, but only things that are actually there, and then I report them accurately as I have done here.

This action by me is not related to any other threads on this board as the user has insinuated; though his attempt to manufacture such a false relationship is one of the characteristic tactics used in most of his other posts. His other tactics, incidentally, are to change, subtlety or blatantly, the wording, meaning, or subject matter of the post to which he is responding, and then argue in such a way that prompts further posts, which are then subjected to this same tactic, and so on, and so on, interminably. Such tactics were the primary cause of the recent thread which has monopolized space on this board. I apologize to the forum for my contribution to that waste of space. I have a policy of always offering a rebuttal in response to attacks, until the posts reach a sufficient stage of lunacy where they no longer require a rebuttal. My error was not identifying that this stage had occurred much earlier. The suggestion that I could become somehow enraged by that silly speed-chess like debate is ludicrous. The poster seems to have confused retorts with rage. When I'm enraged, which has never occurred on this forum, I start using a lot of capital letters.

I suppose my first clue that arguments with this user are non-terminating should have been the earlier thread in which he claimed that a certain word didn't exist, I showed that it did, and then instead of the thread ending normally, it dragged on for many more posts, many more threads, and many more days. This poster simply cannot and will not admit when he is defeated, not even when he makes a clearly false statement and gets called on it. Even on the probability forum, he responds to closed issues by arguing points which were never stated nor contended. I know this user from when I was a frequent poster on bj21.com, though he does not know who I am. He will most likely respond in a similar way to this post. Watch and see. He won't be able to help himself.

As for the claim that I am making him out as some web hacker, well, LOL. I think he doth protest too much.