Bloomsday virus
Thursday, June 17th, 2004 12:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robinturnerI found this on an e-mail list - enjoy (and don't take seriously!).
Bloomsday Virus Inflicts James Joyce on Mobile Phone Users
The first ever computer virus that can infect mobile phones has been
discovered, anti-virus software developers said today, adding that it
has the potential to render many phones virtually useless.
The French unit of the Russian security software developer Kaspersky
Labs said that that virus - called Bloomsday - appears to have been
developed by an international group specialising in creating literary
viruses that try to "show illiterate technophiles the power of the
written word."
Bloomsday takes its name from the James Joyce novel Ulysses. June 16,
1904 is the day Joyce's protagonist Leopold Bloom famously made his
travels through Dublin, and is celebrated annually by bibliophiles
worldwide. Ulysses parallels a story about a day in the life of an
ordinary Dubliner with Homer's Odyssey.
The virus was apparently released in time for the 100th anniversary of
the eponymous literary holiday. It infects the Symbian operating system
that is used in several makes of mobiles, notably the Nokia brand, and
propagates through the new bluetooth wireless technology that is in
several new mobile phones.
If the virus succeeds in penetrating the phone, it replaces the phone's
address book and stored files with the entire densely symbolic novel. It
is able to scan for phones that are also using the Bluetooth technology
and is able to send a copy of itself to the first handset that it finds
"I was really freaked out when I turned on my phone and found this
convoluted narrative mess crawling across my screen," said Jack Clemson,
a University of Washington student who owns one of the first known
infected phones. ""Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead,
bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed..." I
was pretty sure that wasn't my girlfriend texting me about lunch."
The textual complexities and multiple editions of Joyce's novel have
fueled a great deal of scholarship in the past hundred years, and this
is likely to get even more complicated since an early examination of the
Bloomsday virus version has revealed it does not correspond exactly to
any other extant version of the text.
"Ulysses may be the zenith of modernist writing in the novel form, but
it's barely recognizable as a novel or as any other kind of writing,"
said Francis Harrod, of the anti-virus software developer F-Secure. "Of
course the same can be said of text messaging; but nonetheless I
sincerely doubt America's youth is equal to the task of sudden,
unanticipated confrontation with this book. It could be extremely
damaging to their minds."
Anti-virus experts are warning that this mobile phone virus is almost
surely just the first of many, and that there exists a plethora of
densely symbolic literature that could be inflicted on an unwary mobile
phone-using public.
"James Joyce is just the first salvo," warned Harrod. "Melville, Camus,
Dostoevsky, Woolf... It's only going to get uglier from here on out."
Bloomsday Virus Inflicts James Joyce on Mobile Phone Users
The first ever computer virus that can infect mobile phones has been
discovered, anti-virus software developers said today, adding that it
has the potential to render many phones virtually useless.
The French unit of the Russian security software developer Kaspersky
Labs said that that virus - called Bloomsday - appears to have been
developed by an international group specialising in creating literary
viruses that try to "show illiterate technophiles the power of the
written word."
Bloomsday takes its name from the James Joyce novel Ulysses. June 16,
1904 is the day Joyce's protagonist Leopold Bloom famously made his
travels through Dublin, and is celebrated annually by bibliophiles
worldwide. Ulysses parallels a story about a day in the life of an
ordinary Dubliner with Homer's Odyssey.
The virus was apparently released in time for the 100th anniversary of
the eponymous literary holiday. It infects the Symbian operating system
that is used in several makes of mobiles, notably the Nokia brand, and
propagates through the new bluetooth wireless technology that is in
several new mobile phones.
If the virus succeeds in penetrating the phone, it replaces the phone's
address book and stored files with the entire densely symbolic novel. It
is able to scan for phones that are also using the Bluetooth technology
and is able to send a copy of itself to the first handset that it finds
"I was really freaked out when I turned on my phone and found this
convoluted narrative mess crawling across my screen," said Jack Clemson,
a University of Washington student who owns one of the first known
infected phones. ""Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead,
bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed..." I
was pretty sure that wasn't my girlfriend texting me about lunch."
The textual complexities and multiple editions of Joyce's novel have
fueled a great deal of scholarship in the past hundred years, and this
is likely to get even more complicated since an early examination of the
Bloomsday virus version has revealed it does not correspond exactly to
any other extant version of the text.
"Ulysses may be the zenith of modernist writing in the novel form, but
it's barely recognizable as a novel or as any other kind of writing,"
said Francis Harrod, of the anti-virus software developer F-Secure. "Of
course the same can be said of text messaging; but nonetheless I
sincerely doubt America's youth is equal to the task of sudden,
unanticipated confrontation with this book. It could be extremely
damaging to their minds."
Anti-virus experts are warning that this mobile phone virus is almost
surely just the first of many, and that there exists a plethora of
densely symbolic literature that could be inflicted on an unwary mobile
phone-using public.
"James Joyce is just the first salvo," warned Harrod. "Melville, Camus,
Dostoevsky, Woolf... It's only going to get uglier from here on out."
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-06-16 03:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-06-16 04:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-06-16 06:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-06-17 05:21 am (UTC)http://www.guardian.co.uk/mobile/article/0,2763,1240382,00.html?=rss
I'm guessing they'd rather have the Bloomsday virus ;-)
Ooooooooh
Date: 2004-06-17 12:24 pm (UTC)Oooooh Robin, I am destined to add you as LJ friend once again. Why not Finnegans Wake, or the whole Oulipo?
This could have done better as a feature in The Onion, which people around the world searching Google think is Number One in News.
Re: Ooooooooh
Date: 2004-06-17 02:33 pm (UTC)