Hi, folks,
Thought you might enjoy this . . .
Marcy
---------- Forwarded Message ----------
Date: Wednesday, June 16, 2004 3:42 PM -0400
From: "Kelly, Robert" <[log in to unmask]>
To: "Bauman, Marcy" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: RE: and in honor of Bloomsday...Bloomsday Virus infects cell
phones...Bob Kelly
Bloomsday Virus Inflicts James Joyce on Mobile Phone Users
The first ever computer virus that can infect mobile phones has been
discovered, anti-virus software developers said today, adding that it
has the potential to render many phones virtually useless.
The French unit of the Russian security software developer Kaspersky
Labs said that that virus - called Bloomsday - appears to have been
developed by an international group specialising in creating literary
viruses that try to "show illiterate technophiles the power of the
written word."
Bloomsday takes its name from the James Joyce novel Ulysses. June 16,
1904 is the day Joyce's protagonist Leopold Bloom famously made his
travels through Dublin, and is celebrated annually by bibliophiles
worldwide. Ulysses parallels a story about a day in the life of an
ordinary Dubliner with Homer's Odyssey.
The virus was apparently released in time for the 100th anniversary of
the eponymous literary holiday. It infects the Symbian operating system
that is used in several makes of mobiles, notably the Nokia brand, and
propagates through the new bluetooth wireless technology that is in
several new mobile phones.
If the virus succeeds in penetrating the phone, it replaces the phone's
address book and stored files with the entire densely symbolic novel. It
is able to scan for phones that are also using the Bluetooth technology
and is able to send a copy of itself to the first handset that it finds.
"I was really freaked out when I turned on my phone and found this
convoluted narrative mess crawling across my screen," said Jack Clemson,
a University of Washington student who owns one of the first known
infected phones. ""Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead,
bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed..." I
was pretty sure that wasn't my girlfriend texting me about lunch."
The textual complexities and multiple editions of Joyce's novel have
fueled a great deal of scholarship in the past hundred years, and this
is likely to get even more complicated since an early examination of the
Bloomsday virus version has revealed it does not correspond exactly to
any other extant version of the text.
"Ulysses may be the zenith of modernist writing in the novel form, but
it's barely recognizable as a novel or as any other kind of writing,"
said Francis Harrod, of the anti-virus software developer F-Secure. "Of
course the same can be said of text messaging; but nonetheless I
sincerely doubt America's youth is equal to the task of sudden,
unanticipated confrontation with this book. It could be extremely
damaging to their minds."
Anti-virus experts are warning that this mobile phone virus is almost
surely just the first of many, and that there exists a plethora of
densely symbolic literature that could be inflicted on an unwary mobile
phone-using public.
"James Joyce is just the first salvo," warned Harrod. "Melville, Camus,
Dostoevsky, Woolf... It's only going to get uglier from here on out."
------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------
Robert G. Kelly
Electronic Selection Librarian
Kresge Business Administration Library
([log in to unmask])
Phone: 734-764-9969
Fax: 734-764-3839
University of Michigan
701 Tappan K3330
Ann Arbor, MI. 48109-1234
-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask]
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of [log in to unmask]
Sent: Wednesday, June 16, 2004 3:27 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: and in honor of Bloomsday
. . . did everyone see Google today?
Marcy (off to get an ebook copy of Ulysses)
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Marcy Bauman, PhD
Media Consultant
College of Pharmacy
University of Michigan
734-647-2227
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
!DSPAM:40d0a2c12428982156520!
---------- End Forwarded Message ----------
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Marcy Bauman, PhD
Media Consultant
College of Pharmacy
University of Michigan
734-647-2227
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