Author’s note: I was quite pleased with this – but Tom declared it unoriginal and declined to publish it
Authorities arrested Bill Gates today for the creation and distribution of what they described as “the biggest and most destructive virus the IT world has ever seen.”
The authorities swooped on Mr Gates at his messy Seattle home after an extensive year long investigation into the source of the mysterious virus which started to appear on peoples PC’s in mid 2001. The virus purported to be an “easy to use” operating system that offered the unwary user greatly enhanced facilities over their existing system. Once the user attempted to install it, however, it immediately wiped all previous installations and took several hours before it returned control of the computer to the user, usually after requiring several reboots and the insertion of a “Boot CD” that cunningly did not exist.
From then on, XP showed all of the classic symptoms of a virus. It would allow a PC to operate normally for a period of time, sometimes as long as several hours, before identifying that a crucial task was being performed and crashing the computer. Vital data would be regularly wiped from the hard drive so that it could not be recovered and attempts to recover it would generate screenfuls of random characters. The virus also collected personal information about the user, including credit card and bank details, and forwarded these to the Mr. Gates’ secret headquarters in Seattle. XP also continually installed other related viruses, including ‘Office’, ‘Outlook’ and the infamous ‘Explorer’ regardless of whether these were requested or not. It also aggressively removed other ‘benign’ programs that resided on the PC and may have interfered with it’s own ability to propagate or manage the computer and its relationship to the outside world.
The authorities finally tracked down Mr. Gates after employing a profiling specialist who was able to pinpoint the creator of XP as a frustrated loner, probably with a victimisation phobia and an unreasoning hatred of people with whom he felt in competition, no matter how insignificant they were. “Mr Gates fitted the profile exactly,” explained Detective Hal Burler, the policeman who ultimately made the arrest. “When we collared him, he just kept muttering about the Supreme Court being out to get him and repeating the phrase ‘Kill Linux! Kill Linux’ over and over again.”
Estimates of the damage caused by the XP virus run into billions. “It’s the most widespread virus that has ever affected the computing industry,” confirmed Dr Hugo Z Hackenbush of the Hysterical Overreation Institute. “It has infected both business and home users alike and caused terabytes of lost data, millions of crashed systems and massive amounts of time wasted with fruitless disc scans, reboots and system re-installs.”
Now that the authorities have captured Mr. Gates they are turning their attention to other viruses infecting systems. These are thought to include the infamous Oracle 9i virus, which tempts users to install it with the promise of greater security, better performance and a photo of Anna Kournikova’s bottom but then fills up the entire disc with turgid, unintelligible nonsense described as user manuals. Detective Burler was also keen to find the creator of what he described as “the Mother of all timewasters” known only as “The Internet”
Sex and Drugs and Growing Old 