As you may be aware, there are many amoral and sadistic programmers out there
and they have written programs for the PC's called Viruses. These programs hide
silently inside a legitimate application. Once you run the application on your
computer, they spring to life, and clone themselves into your computer and
continue to clone themselves into every computer they contact,. Once a part of
your machine, they do various things ranging from cute to destructive. And I
mean destructive. Many of the viruses intentionally destory data on your disk!!

The most popular way for viruses to spread is through "shareware" or other
"free" software particularly when downloaded from a BBS (Bulletin Board
Service). We now have more and more PC's in Engineering and they are NETWORKED
together which means a virus on one computer easily spreads to ALL the 
computers. This means a virus can corrupt and destroy all our work. You have
a responsibility to your yourself, your fellow workers and the Company to
avoid introducing viruses.

           AN OUNCE OF PREVENTION IS WORTH A POUND OF CURE

RULE #1: Only commercially purchased software may be loaded directly into 
         any PC on the Atari Games Network. 

RULE #2: Think twice before copying any piece of software from one machine
         to another. Is the source computer "clean"??? Is this piece of
	 software proven clean???

RULE #3: If you want to install downloaded or shareware/freeware software
         on Atari Games Computers: 1) Download it from a reputable BBS; AND 
         2) use it regularly for at least 2 months on your personal property 
         computer (not on network) and verify its cleaness.

Feedback on this approach to viruses is solicited.
If this "on-your-honor" approach fails, we will have to take a harder line.

 I lost several months of data on my own PC to "JERUSALEM strain B." that
was apparently picked-up from SJSU computer lab.  It took nearly 2 months
for it to completely cripple my PC, it eventually penetrated all my system,
.exe, and .com files until the computer came to a grinding halt.  

 Needless to say that the department deen denied the possibility of passing
out viruses from schools computers.  So later I checked every PC in the lab 
and discovered viruses on 2 PCs using my new virus checkerssss (I'm currently
running 3 virus checker softwares on my PC).

 With so many PCs here, we ought to install an antivirus software on them 
and sterilize our modem lines, and avoid close contact with any unknown 
BBS and SHAREWARE products.

Farrokh