Bulletin Board

A collection of short articles and data that covers topics such as computer-virus detection and the Internet.

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The Bot Zone
Alex Haddox waves a security key card in front of a scanner before he moves through a series of reinforced doors and walks into his computer lab in Santa Monica, Calif. He has no E-mail. His computer can't access the Internet. Nor can the other 120 systems surrounding him. Nothing is ever downloaded here. The measures are in place to prevent a lethal virus from entering the network, which Haddox's team uses to study the countless infections that spread throughout the computerized world.

This is the Symantec Antivirus Research Center, or SARC, and Haddox is the director. The lab, founded in 1989, is funded by Symantec, a maker of antivirus products. Here more than 30 virus experts spend their days examining the 9 to 12 bugs that spring up around the globe every day.

For years now Haddox has studied the devastating effects of boot-sector viruses. These viruses infect the files that allow the computer to operate and can only be transferred by human contact--meaning via a floppy disk. But they aren't what keeps Haddox up at night.

The latest threat is called a macro virus, which burrows into the code of applications such as word processors. Unlike its predecessors, it can easily migrate across most platforms. These devilish lines of code can sit dormant on a computer for years before they bring down an entire network. Worst of all, they are simple to write and spread at a terrifying pace across the Internet.

The first macro virus to be identified was called the "concept virus." It is the most prolific virus in history. A twisted taunt, it does nothing--save avoid detection. A trained eye only knows it exists because of the message hidden in its code: "And that is enough to prove my point."

Macro viruses get mainlined into computers around the world every day. Recently a bandit infected a computer at the University of Auckland, in New Zealand, with a form of virus that is similar to the macro. Before SARC was called in to identify the virus and come up with the cure, it had spread to six countries in two weeks. "We cured it, but not before it had reached as far as South Africa, England, and the United States," says Haddox. -- Joshua Macht

Things We Love
As a patent attorney for the Boston law firm of Banner & Witcoff, Charlie Call spent hours in meetings watching his clients scribble technical mumbo-jumbo on whiteboards. While the excited company heads furiously jotted down notes, Call and his colleagues would try to keep up on their legal pads. When that didn't work, Call would bring in his secretary to snap a Polaroid of the board before it was erased, or ask her to spend her lunch hour typing up the chicken scratch.

Then, three years ago, Call found a better solution: MicroTouch's Ibid, an electronic whiteboard ($499). Now Call simply hooks up the Ibid whiteboard to his computer via a parallel port, and everything that is written on it is saved automatically in a computer file. Afterward, he can either E-mail the information to the people who need it, print it out, or cut and paste it into, say, a Microsoft Word document. "I keep the system running all the time," says Call, who gets a kick out of capturing his visitors' doodlings.

Call, who works at home every other day, says the system is great for keeping him up to date on meetings that are held while he's out of the office. And he's not the only one who's thrilled by Ibid. No longer do the secretaries at Banner & Witcoff have to spend hours trying to decode the arcana of a room full of techies. "They really appreciate being able to go to lunch instead," says Call. -- Sarah Schafer

Biblio-Tech
Spend 10 seconds in the lobby of the New York Public Library's Science, Industry and Business Library (SIBL) and your preconceptions of libraries as repositories of out-of-date periodicals and yellowing cards in dusty cabinets will disappear. An expansive mix of oak and stainless steel, the room's most prominent features are a sense of light and openness--and a wall adorned with state-of-the-art interactive kiosks.

SIBL, pronounced "Sybil," opened in May 1996 in New York City. Its mission: to serve as the prototype for the 21st-century library by combining extensive electronic resources with a massive collection of paper (1.2 million volumes reside in the research section and an additional 50,000 circulate). Its target audience is small businesses, which "simply don't have the resources in-house to do the research they need," says Betty Jean Lacy, a SIBL librarian and small-business specialist.

Patrons must reserve one of the 82 workstations ahead of time. These systems can be used to search nearly 100 business and government databases, ranging from Nexis to import/export collections, or to browse the Internet. There are also 42 computers that provide access to the card catalog and are available on a first-come­first-served basis. Got a laptop? Bring it along: there are 500 jacks to accommodate it.

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