Good Times Virus Hoax

~ the eulogy ~

Good Times sits in the part of internet history i can read about but cannot personally remember. In november 1994 i was ten years old and did not have an email address. My first modem was four years away. By the time i got online in 1998 the hoax was already old enough to have grown variants, and it was somebody else's inbox it had been living in. So this is reconstructed rather than recalled.

The message itself was short. Somebody on america online, or a student somewhere, wrote a warning that a virus called Good Times was going around by email and that reading the message would destroy your hard drive. The earliest copy anyone has managed to date was posted to a mailing list called TECH-LAW on 15 november 1994. Headers on aol forwards point at the first days of december. There are claims of sightings the previous spring that nobody has ever pinned down.

On 6 december 1994 the Computer Incident Advisory Capability, a unit of the us department of energy, put out a bulletin stating plainly that no such virus existed and that reading a message could not infect a machine. This changed nothing. The bulletin was a document you had to go and find. The hoax was already in your inbox, sent by someone you trusted, asking you to pass it along.

~ the dossier ~

~ what the message said ~

The early version was vague, which is most of why it worked. Later versions got ambitious. One claimed the virus would put your processor into an nth complexity infinite binary loop and damage it permanently, a phrase that means nothing and sounds like it should mean something. Another had it mailing itself to every address in your address book, which in 1994 was science fiction and by 2000 was a tuesday.

Every version ended the same way. Forward this to everyone you know. That instruction is the only part of the text that was ever true about anything, because it described what the warning itself was doing.

~ why it worked ~

A chain letter needs a reason to be forwarded and this one had a good one. If you deleted the message unread, nothing happened to your computer, and you now had proof the advice worked. If you forwarded it, you were protecting people you liked. There was no way of following the instructions that produced evidence against them.

It also landed in the only window where it was plausible. In 1994 most people receiving email had been doing it for under a year and had no mental model of what a message could and could not do to a machine. Ten years later the same text would have been laughed off by lunchtime. Ten years earlier there would have been nobody to send it to.

~ the day it died ~

There is no shutdown notice for a hoax, so the date on this grave is a decision rather than a fact. In 1997 the Cult of the Dead Cow claimed authorship, saying the point had been to show how easily people calling themselves experts could be fooled. That is a confession, not a death. The forwards kept coming for years after it.

The death is 4 may 2000. A message with the subject line ILOVEYOU went out of manila that morning, and by the end of the day it had mailed itself to every address in millions of outlook address books and overwritten files on the machines it reached. Melissa had done a smaller version of the same trick in march 1999. After that, telling somebody an email could not hurt their computer was no longer true, and telling them one could was no longer a joke. Good Times had spent six years being wrong about a thing that then simply happened.

The shape outlived it. Every forwarded warning since, the ones about numbers you must never call back and the ones sourced to a friend of a friend who works at microsoft, is running the same program with the words swapped out.

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