I've experienced something quite strange over the last few weeks, and
that is the changing attitudes of people when they discover that you're
"a virus dude".  People that I've known for quite some time over the modem
and personally have decided to ignore just because of this fact.  This
change if you ask me is people being afraid of what they don't know.
That's the cause of a lot of misdirected attitudes but it doesn't have
to be that way.

   In most cases education is the key to solving fear of the unknown but
I've found when I try to explain viruses to these people they tend to
dislike me even more.  Destructive or not, people see no difference, I'm
still a vandal to society and what I do is immoral and unethical.  What
I do is my business, and I don't see it as being a bad thing.  I'm not
out to purposely infect everyones computers.  We don't release our
viruses in the wild, it's people that get hold of our viruses and
decide to infect a mate.

   I had my upload access taken away on a bbs here in Goondiwindi just
because of the sysops narrow mindedness and bullshit ethics.  Trust me,
I'm a nice guy!  Well I try my best.. which doesn't satisfy everyone
obviously.  I lead a normal life apart from getting stuff done for the
magazine.  But then, doing that is part of my normal life so I think
I just contradicted myself (doh!).  Even if I was to upload a virus
to a bbs, I think I'd use another name other than my real one.

   A lot of people know who I am and what I do, I guess that's my fault
in having no shame in what I do.  It's only laws and these sort of people
that force me to skulk around like I'm some vigilante.  I've changed my
alias since we started the group and that wasn't really something I
enjoyed.  It's only people who're VX or occasionally AV that know the real
deal and what sort of motivation moves us.

   Despite all this there are plenty of other bbs's in my area and unless
the sysop of the bbs I mentioned has got me blacklisted from them all then
I guess I'll give them a call.  I'm sure for every crosslinked file or
bad sector that sysop gets he'll blame it on a VLAD virus.  Even though
that wouldn't happen and it definately couldn't be us.  That would help
promote this wrong attitude people seem to have and that is fucked.

   I can't really see any way people can change about this, either you
know how things go or you don't.  Telling people how wrong they are
results in them telling you how wrong you are and vice versa.  No fun
whatsover, and that's what life is all about!  So we'll have fun
releasing this and you have fun reading!  I hope you learn something, and
if you have kids :) then you can educate them as to the real way the
virus world works.

   Metabolis