Like I'd seen a ghost... [Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος]

I just got an email message in my spam-box. The alleged sender and subject lines caught my eye ... rather jarringly. It claims to be from a friend of mine who died a year ago (just a few days more than a year ago, in fact).

Ouch. And the irony: it appears to be a worm that appended malware (a file with a MIME type of "audio/x-midi" but an extension of ".scr", containing a string indicating that it "cannot execute in DOS mode" -- sounds like a Trojan to me) to an old, saved copy of an authentic message on the infected machine ... announcing that a performance is being cancelled "due to circumstances beyond her control" (what an understatement) and "will be rescheduled" (somehow I don't think so).

Worse, I had opened the message thinking perhaps it was some sort of tribute concert that I hadn't heard about, carrying on her punk-lute work. No, no, just a [expletive]ing virus, pretending to reanimate the dead.

Ouch. Just ... ouch.

From dcculb@bethsteel.com  Mon Dec  5 16:08:21 2005
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Date: Mon, 5 Dec 2005 16:06:50 -0500 (EST)
Message-Id: <200512052106.jB5L6oIS016586@mail.bcpl.net>
From: dcculb@bethsteel.com
Subject:  pie & punk lute POSTPONED
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="----------QIYB0PD7JL9TUA0"
Status: R

------------QIYB0PD7JL9TUA0
Content-Type: text/html;
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

<HTML><HEAD></HEAD><BODY>
<iframe src=3Dcid:IM1ffN4Gf5UIf height=3D0 width=3D0>
</iframe>
<FONT></FONT>
<br>
Due to circumstances beyond her control, the Evil Pappy Twin (aka 
Dawn Culbertson's) performance at Dangerously Delicious Pies today 
at 4 p.m. has been cancelled. It will be rescheduled, probably 
sometime in November, but the exact date isn't known yet. Watch 
this spot for further developments...<br>
<br>
___________________________________________
</BODY></HTML>

------------QIYB0PD7JL9TUA0
Content-Type: audio/x-midi;
	name=Yahoo!.url.scr
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-ID: <IM1ffN4Gf5UIf>

TVqQAAMAAAAEAAAA//8AALgAAAAAAAAAQAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAA2AAAAA4fug4AtAnNIbgBTM0hVGhpcyBwcm9ncmFtIGNhbm5vdCBiZSBydW4gaW4gRE9TIG1v
ZGUuDQ0KJAAAAAAAAACPY1NsywI9P8sCPT/LAj0/sB4xP88CPT9IHjM/yQI9PyMdNz/eAj0/Ix05
[...]

Not fair. Just not fair. (Yah, automated malware, random number generator, no intelligence or concept of fairness, etc. Still not fair. One more reason to be disgusted with viri/worms/et al.)

Only remedy, I suppose, it to reconceptualize this event as some sort of omen, and hope it's a good one -- that she's planning to bless tonight's gig from the beyond or something.

Reminds me of the one of the better semaphore bits from Pratchett's _Going Postal_ -- the linemen believe that as long as someone's callsign continues to travel along the line, they can never die. Some have been travelling for years.

[link] [reply]

There are services that will let you send out an email on a scheduled date or a certain period after you die, but that's not totally relevant.

Yeah, not fair. Damn. Like a ghost in the machine.

Setting up a cron job to email (or post) after my death sounds like something I'd do, actually. (And I remember a bandmate's sudden realization, on hearing the explanation of my QotD cron script, that, "You mean if you died, we wouldn't be able to tell by reading your journal for a couple of weeks?" Except that the queue at that time was more like a few months deep.)

But like you said, not totally relevant -- having a virus pretend to be her ... is different. Ugh.

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