Hump Day Grab Bag

Thinking of You
Or: A Virus Warning

There’s a new worm, Goner, that’s been making the rounds. If you get e-mail that looks like this:

When I saw this screen saver, I immediately thought about you. I am in a harry, I promise you will love it!

…don’t run the enclosed program. Delete the message immiediately. It’s not a screen saver, but a program (written in Visual Basic, no less) that uses Outlook, ICQ and mIRC to propagate itself. You’d think that people would have learned after the Love, Anna Kournikova, SirCam and “To have your advice” attacks, but noooooo…

KPMG! KPMG! KPMG! KPMG!

KPMG seem to be under the opinion that people need their permission to link to them. For the record: Wrong!

For the background story, check out Chris Raettig’s weblog. Raettig has a website featuring corporate anthems — yup, just like national anthems, except for corporations. Perhaps KPMG is a little miffed that he not only made an MP3 recording of their anthem but also gave it a less-than-stellar review:

— it’s that team of power and energy at kpmg with their spectacular straight-to-the-top now finally slightly back down aspirational anthem our vision of global strategy. i sense a conspiracy; have you ever seen peat marwick and geoffrey, the giraffe from toys’r’us in the same room together? either way this is destined to become a modern classic. an audiable warning of what companies can do when they take themselves too seriously.

this from a kpmg insider… “In summary: it is awful, awful, awful and we are very (very) embarassed to be associated with it. keep up the good work.”

I encourage everyone to link to KPMG. It’s not really sticking it to The Man, but it’s still fun!

Recommended Reading

Oops…I Did It Again. A good article about social engineering and its relationship to malicious programs propagated by e-mail by those security-minded people at SANS.

Some of the culprits responsible for this meance to society we call linking: Vannevar Bush, Douglas Englebart, Ted Nelson, Tim Berners-Lee, Marc Andreesen. Also to blame are those evil people behind the Choose Your Own Adventure series of books.

Proof the hyperlinking is evil and should be outlawed and made punishable by death: Brad, The Game. A choose-your-own-adventure Web game where all the characters will end up on the Maury Povich Show someday. In one ending, I scored 69 times in an elevator with a woman who tunred out to be a man. Evil!

The fine print for the KPMG site. We really should’ve listened to Shakespeare when he advised us to kill all the lawyers. We ought to take a few suits down while we’re at it.

In case you were curious, here are guidelines for links for a couple of other companies: 3Com and Gateway.

Opinions about the legal issues of linking.

A Nice Beat, But Can You Dance to It? A Fast Company story on corporate anthems.