If you've ever been on the internet, you probably have or have had a computer virus at some point. That is unless you use a Mac (they can't access the internet). While the majority of viruses are damaging, extremely annoying and make you want to pound your head repeatedly into a brick wall, every once and a while a virus actually is useful and warranted. OK, this probably the first. Stan Downings, a student at USF, has written a self replicating virus that does some interesting things when users go surfing on the wonderful world wide web.

Blue Damage was able to catch up with Stan to ask him a little more about the new virus. Stan explained, "Basically, before you are about to submit a post to a blog, newsgroup or forum, it spell checks the message for you. However, the most important feature is if the comment being posted is idiotic and not well thought out, it will display a prompt that tells the user, 'This post is idiotic. Are you an idiot and completely sure you want to post this?'"

Stan told us that the second function was a lot harder to program than the first. "Yes, the spell checker was quite easy. I had to come up with several scenarios why a message would be flagged as idiotic though. One of them was if the comment had more emoticons than actual words. The second was trigger words like faggot, n00b, ur etc. Another scenario would be a bunch of exclamation points followed by 1's. And of course the obvious, an entire post written in mixed case," Stan explained. The virus is set to be releases tomorrow and should be propagating through out the internet in the next few weeks.