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Robert has called my attention to the fact that we may have shipped a possible virus way back in issue five. Actually, the beast in question is a near relative of the virus called a trojan horse: a sub-program concealed inside an innocent looking outer program.
The culprit is the Pi Calculation program distributed as one of the issue five gifts. This was a simple program that merely generated the value of pi to an arbitrarily large number of decimal places.
The latest version of Virex, a commercial virus detection program, spotted the (possible) problem. Here is its report: "Pi Calculation: This application SEEMS to be a variant of the Virus Info type of Trojan Horse program. Running it MAY destroy your data. The file should be deleted. It is possible that this is a false alarm."
I rather suspect this is a false alarm. I remember running this program on my machine a year or so ago, and I have not noticed any problems (not that that proves anything!). There's no use taking any unnecessary chances, though, so if any of you still have this thing floating around on your hard disk, drag it into the trash! DO NOT try to run it!
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