[MacPerl] Ut desint vires,tamen est laudanda voluntas (MacPerl5 virus rumor)

[Matthias Ulrich Neeracher <neeri@iis.ee.ethz.ch>]

Bill Middleton alerted me to a Usenet posting that a few hours later indeed
arrived at my site. This posting alleges that MacPerl5, or at least the copy on
mors.gsfc.nasa.gov, contains a virus.

Disinfectant 3.6 disagrees. To the best of my knowledge, there is NO virus.
I've received reports in the past the Gatekeeper is unhappy with the fact that
I store XCMDs in MacPerl library files, but that is definitely Gatekeeper's
problem (While I can wholehartedly recommend Disinfectant and the Disinfectant
INIT, both Gatekeeper and SAM have caused more trouble for me than ANY Mac
virus ever did).

To prevent an outburst of Virus scare on the mailing list, I'm appending the
relevant parts of my news reply below:

Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl.misc
Subject: Re: Mac to Unix? ( also nVIRb on MacPerl5 mirror site... NOT!!!)
References: <yaron-0803960053560001@yaron.dialup.access.net>

In article <yaron-0803960053560001@yaron.dialup.access.net>, yaron@panix.com (Yaron Ben Horin) writes:
> (And by the way - MacPerl 5 has brought some nasty viruses to my computer.
> Beware of this mirror site:   mors.gsfc.nasa.gov /pub/MacPerl/Applications).

A comprehensive scan of the Perl5 distribution from that site with Disinfectant
did *not* turn up any virus, in particular no nVIRb.

Mr. Ben Horin, I expect that you:

 - Either substantiate your serious allegations or retract them.
 - In the latter case, also apologize to Paul Schinder
   <schinder@pjstoaster.pg.md.us> (the keeper of the mors ftp site) and me
   for your irresponsible rumor mongering.
 - Regardless of whether ultimately a virus is found or not, in future cases
   *first* make an attempt to contact the ftp site administrator and/or author
   of a program before speculating about it in public.

Thank you
Matthias

-----
Matthias Neeracher <neeri@iis.ee.ethz.ch> http://err.ethz.ch/members/neeri.html
  "What sort of idiot believes a USENET posting proves anything?  Paid your
   modem tax lately?" -- Fritz Anderson