By Ron Coates, 11 June 2001 13:09
NEWS Hundreds of web users have fallen victim to an anti-AOL joke which appeared on a comedy website. Webmaster Ray Ownes published a farce advisory on his Joke-A-Day site, warning people to delete the 'insidious aol.exe virus' - actually the executable which boots up the AOL application. The joke, largely aimed at people who dislike AOL, read: "It has been brought to my attention that there's an insidious new computer virus which has already affected close to 30 million computers. Even though I'm running the latest McAfee and Norton virus scans, neither have picked up this virus, as it's a mutating virus that isn't set to go off until Friday, June 8, 2001." Owen subsequently received more than 700 emails - some congratulating him on the joke, some asking him how serious the virus is, and others admitting that they had deleted the file and passed the warning to friends.
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