This message was sent to me by a friend of mine. I have seen this before and sent it on before. Can't be too cautious.
QuoteHUGE VIRUS COMING!!! PLEASE READ & FORWARD
I checked with Norton Anti-Virus, and they are gearing up for this virus!
Get this E-mail message sent around to your contacts ASAP.
PLEASE FORWARD THIS WARNING AMONG FRIENDS, FAMILY AND CONTACTS!
You should be alert during the next few days. Do not open any message with an attachment entitled 'POSTCARD FROM HALLMARK,' regardless of who sent it to you. It is a virus which opens A POSTCARD IMAGE, which 'burns' the whole hard disc C of your computer.
This virus will be received from someone who has your e-mail address in his/her contact list. This is the reason why you need to send this e-mail to all your contacts. It is better to receive this message 25 times than to unwittingly receive the virus and open it.
---> If you receive a mail called "POSTCARD," even though sent to you by a friend, do not open it! Shut down your computer immediately.
This is the worst virus announced by CNN. It has been classified by Microsoft as the most destructive virus ever. This virus was discovered by McAfee on March 16th 2009, and there is no repair yet for this kind of virus.
This virus apparently destroys the Zero Sector of the Hard Disc, where the vital information is kept.
COPY THIS E-MAIL, AND SEND IT TO YOUR FRIENDS. REMEMBER: IF YOU SEND IT TO THEM, YOU WILL BENEFIT ALL OF US!
When they say "turn off your computer", I think they mean if you use Outlook or any other email program that downloads emails to your hard drive. You SHOULD be okay with conventional web-based email, just don't download the attatchment!
Wat?
I say BS.
Hey, I'm just passing it on. Don't shoot the messenger.
I mean, did you make a search about that source of the news?
99% of the results say its a hoax.
No, someone just emailed it to me. I thought it better to post it up just in case.
Better safe than sorry...
Btw my sis got an email not too long ago from hallmark with an attachment, hotmail gave a virus warning and refused to download it...
Yes. Even some viruses DO get around NX (bit disable) architecture found on many 64-bit x86 and some PowerPC. I wouldn't take a risk, since such viruses, EVEN 128 bytes in size, are capable of frying your computer crispy. Hoax? 1% BS. YES, it's real. Why Hallmark? It's to confuse the victim and I'm not a baka, I know their dirty works. (why? I used to be a hacker - and not gonna be one again, only to merrily smash the bugs in my own OS.)
Well, there are good H4X0RZ too, the ones that get employed by corporations to test and maintain the safety systems...
Even as a non-expert, I can tell this is 100% BS, and this is coming from someone is completely paranoid about computer safety. This is a hoax meant to instill a sense of panic and so some unoriginal (because this gag has been around forever) prankster can get some kicks-and-giggles. What got me was the warning to "shut down your computer immediately" if you receive such a message - what the hell would that do? How about running a diagnostic first, or better yet, how is a virus going to run if you don't open it? Just to verify, I checked it out on snopes (http://snopes.com/computer/virus/postcard.asp). This is just a message that preys on the ignorance of the general populace regarding computer virii. Yes, there is indeed a postcard virus, but it can't "fry" your hard drive and it's not a "HUGE VIRUS COMING" - it's old news. I'm not saying all this just to be rude - I do appreciate what it seems Red is trying to do here, but at the same time I think it's important to keep a healthy dose of skepticism handy when dealing with these kinds of things.
EDIT: Oh and please enjoy! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmK1agiw1wE)
Why lol. Results for this one:
"This video is not available in your country" (clean)
"We're sorry, this video is no longer available" (US proxy)
"ã"ã®å‹•ç"»ã¯ãŠä½ã¾ã,,ã®åœ°åŸŸã§ã¯ã"利ç"¨ã,,ãŸã ã'ã¾ã›ã,"ã€, " (Jap proxy)
Dunno why I tried the jap proxy, but meh, oh well.
And these are just run-of-the-mill shitmails anyway. "HUGE VIRUSES COMING" aren't announced by some random guy who just HAPPENS to know your email - it's announced on slashdot, then blogs, then newspages, and then in the old world media.
Emails don't spread news, unless it's about a nerdy subject you've signed up for to know aboot. That's how I roll.
Added after 45 seconds:
Try this one out for size, btw.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMAkCK4ZYN8
lol, good old Wierd Al.
I'm sorry but when I read "VIRUS ALERT!" that was the very first thing that popped into my head XD. I had hoped the video was on youtube and as luck would have it, Weird Al has his own youtube channel - snooch to the nooch! It also gave me an opportunity to view this classic (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEB0Xe2e76I).
QuoteAnd these are just run-of-the-mill shitmails anyway. "HUGE VIRUSES COMING" aren't announced by some random guy who just HAPPENS to know your email - it's announced on slashdot, then blogs, then newspages, and then in the old world media.
That was pretty much the idea I was going for, and if you actually happen to know any IT guys personally, chances are they wouldn't announce such a thing in an e-mail like that - unless it's April 1st, of course.
As my sad luck, it seems it's not open to anything outside of his own landyards...oh, gee. I've got my private hotline to EVERYTHING. Baka me! ^_^ ; *V* >w<
Ok, I should stop now before I make myself puke from sheer disgust over my own behavior. Lawl.
Wha? That's weird, there's not really much I can do on my end other than suggest editing your user string along with using a proxy. I don't know if I should continue derailing this with trial & error on YouTube ^^; .
Maybe it's a virus preventing you from opening that on uTube...^_^
Also i receive my warnings in mail first from Sophos Virus Alert...
Here's a snippet from the 16 march mail...
Sophos enews: the newswire which brings you up-to-the-minute reports on virus, spyware and spam issues, new Sophos products and enhancements.
Malware fall-out after dirty bomb news report in *your* city
----
Hackers have launched an attack against Windows users, posing as a breaking news story about a fatal explosion that has taken place in their neighborhood. Cunningly, the criminals are using Geo-IP technology to make the warnings more convincing, by including the name of the recipient's nearest city! Discover more in these blog articles.
http://www.sophos.com/blogs/gc/g/2009/03/16/dirty-bomb-news-report
http://www.sophos.com/security/blog/2009/03/3541.html
Oh well. Even the up-to-date antivirus is just enough to save your ass, leaving e-mails alone being dug up by AV, so there's no reason to worry. (I'm using Kaspersky AV on Windows XP x64 and a custom AI-based AV on my GO64 OS.)
As an experienced hacker, I recommend that you update your AV daily.
Auto-update and auto-fullscan... Lovely things... ^_^
It helps. Also, for much faster "search and destroy" operation, use a larger RAM, because AV will be likely to have a larger encrypted "to-do" lists, mostly to relax the CPU of task-intense loads. Minimum of 512MB RAM will do fine.
Oh, i only have 4GB... ^_^
I just upgraded the ME machine to 512, runs a lot smoother now.
Should be good enough.
Yep, even XP will run fairly smoothly on 512MiB, although she could also do with 1GiB....
But we were talking ME, and she'd run great on 512MiB...
Yeah. Well, if ME is to be on 4GB or larger banks without crashing, overhauls in EMM386 and HIMEM will be required.
Yep, but that's with all 32-bit OSes... Or in case of a well written one it'll just ignore the RAM it can't adress...
Sometimes, ME will simply convulse by the unaddressable RAM. It's a well-known unstable OS, though.
I've had no problems. Tho it can only identify 511MB of the ram I put in it.
Strangely DXDiag reports 510MB...
Exactly. 512MB is all you need without her baring the teeth.
And you ususally lose 1 or 2 MB due to... heck i don't know but it usually is like that...
To the UMB area of ME's MS-DOS kernel, of course, on the RAM memory. UMB is the area that Emuii-san (ME-chan) can't touch without crashing.
Oh, right... completely forgot about that... Old windows works as a glorified DOS-shell...
Exactly. All of those begun as Windows 1.01, ended with ME.
(Sure, I got to use the very first Windows, but it kept crashing on a Windows DOS disk, and in DOSbox, until I tried my GO64 AIOS firmware's command prompt, it worked - much to surprise, it's all over in 4-bit color, much uglier than Windows 2.0 I also tried.)
Those two never caught on, because they were, well, rubbish... there was better stuff out there...
Yeah. I don't take any pre-95 Windows OS seriously.
Still cool to actually marvel at those ancient software that I laid my hands on, though. Anyways, those are piece of history that we will never ever see again, ever. (unless written on holographic glass cube by laser-etching)
Oh, i actually have more respect for windows 3.11 than for win95, win98/SE or winME... But that may have something to do with the way computers worked back then...reliable... ^_^
Surprise! I ran Windows 3.1 on Athlon 64 Venice 2.2 GHz CPU, even though it thought it's 486 (due to it not reading CPUID, it simply pronounce the CPU's a 486, by the CPUID's presence, even this one's FOUR generation ahead of 3.1's heyday, that is, 886.) wonderfully - I eventually did it in multicore operation, with different x86 RISC CPU, this time, of 986 generation, it ran fine, except it loaded in a mind-blowing clip rate, pretty fast!
Yeah, that's one of the fun things in those old programs... they didn't know what CPU-throttle was, so they will go full whack on any CPU... ^_^
Can agree on this one. Too bad I can't use USB keyboard in Windows 3.1 and I knew that it's crazy hard to make a OHCI driver, let alone loaded by a firmware.
Well in theory it should be possible to have win3.11 support the same things (hardware/network/64-bit) as Vista, although it would then be the question of how "win-3.11" would it still be?
Well, "Windows 3.11 64-bit Edition" sound good?
;001 Been there, done it. I had to use different OS kernel (GO64 OS worked fine) and build some weird kind of WOW64 plugins, and build some driver, like video card, and PCI-express, and southbridge. And, oh yeah, JVM too!