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From: RADAI1@HBUNOS.BITNET (Y. Radai)
Newsgroups: comp.virus
Subject: Re: naming confusion
Message-ID: <0003.8906072021.AA00932@ubu.CC.Lehigh.EDU>
Date: 7 Jun 89 16:30:14 GMT
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  In #128 Ken writes:
>One of the most frustrating things that I've run into is that viruses
>get called different things by different people.  Just look at a
>couple of the more common ones - Israeli <=> PLO <=> Russian <=> Black
>Hole <=> Little Black Box, Brain <=> Pakistani ... (the list goes on).

>I'm not proposing any solutions here because, quite frankly, I'm not
>aware of any real good solutions.  Anyone have any suggestions?  My
>point is merely to point out the cause for confusion and hopefully
>generate some discussion on it.

  I don't think we can prevent multiplicity of names, but some names
are more reasonable than others.  For example, if a user sees a region
of his screen scroll up and leave a black rectangle, it's understand-
able that he should call it the "Little Black Box" if he's never heard
of the Israeli virus before.
  On the other hand, the term "PLO" as a name for the Israeli virus is
entirely inappropriate since it suggests a political motive for the
virus, a hypothesis which, to the best of my knowledge, has never been
supported by *any evidence whatsoever*.  The first person to suggest
this motive seems to have been Vin McLellan, who wrote in a New York
Times article of Jan 31, 1988 that the virus "was apparently intended
as a weapon of political protest".  But his sole "evidence" was the
coincidence of dates which he discovered between the first day on
which the virus would cause damage (it does this only on Friday-the-
13ths) and the 40th anniversary of the last day Palestine was under
the British mandate (May 13, 1988)!  I wrote to him, pointing out how
flimsy his evidence was.  I also pointed out that whatever psychologi-
cal drive motivates most creators of viruses and Trojan Horses else-
where in the world, and whatever motivated the author of the April-
Fools-Day viruses (which were discovered in Israel about the same
time, yet no one claims that *they* were politically motivated), is
quite sufficient to motivate creation of our Friday-the-13th virus
also.  Now I have no doubt that McLellan's intentions were good.  But
as he eventually admitted to me, he "was too quick to assume too much
about this virus, its author, and its intent."  Unfortunately, his
explanation was already accepted by many people, even to the point of
dubbing this virus the "PLO" virus.
  The name "PLO" is therefore entirely inappropriate and I would like
to request readers of this list to refrain from using this name.

  As for the other synonyms for the Israeli virus (btw, I can add 7
more to those mentioned by Ken), I can understand the reason for all
of them except "Russian".  Does anyone have any idea what motivated
*that* name??

                                          Y. Radai
                                          Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem