| The Evilest File
Just when you think you know something about computers, things like the following turns up.
From theregister.co.uk:
US preacher finds demon-possessed PCs
Forget about viruses and malicious hackers; the real threat these days is far more insidious. Your home computer may be host to a demon, and you and your family may well come under its malevolent control, the Weekly World News reports.
"While the Computer Age has ushered in many advances, it has also opened yet another door through which Lucifer and his minions can enter and corrupt men's souls," the paper quotes the Reverend Jim Peasboro, author of an upcoming book, The Devil in the Machine, as saying.
Demons are able to possess anything with a brain, from a chicken to a human being. And today's thinking machines have enough space on their hard drives to accommodate Satan or his pals, the paper reports.
Disk capacity is an issue, however. Only a PC built after 1985 has the storage capacity to house an evil spirit, the minister explained.
The Georgia clergyman says he became aware of the problem from counseling churchgoers. "I learned that many members of my congregation became in touch with a dark force whenever they used their computers," he said. "Decent, happily married family men were drawn irresistibly to pornographic Web sites and forced to witness unspeakable abominations.
"Housewives who had never expressed an impure thought were entering Internet chat rooms and found themselves spewing foul, debasing language they would never use normally," he declared.
"One woman wept as she confessed to me, 'I feel when I'm on the computer as if someone else or something else just takes over.'"
The minister said he probed one such case, actually logging onto the parishioner's computer himself. To his horror, an artificial-intelligence program started spontaneously.
"The program began talking directly to me, openly mocked me," he recalls. "It typed out, 'Preacher, you are a weakling and your God is a damn liar.'"
Then the device went haywire and started printing out what looked like gobbledygook.
"I later had an expert in dead languages examine the text," the minister said. "It turned out to be a stream of obscenities written in a 2,800-year-old Mesopotamian dialect!"
The minister estimates that one in ten computers in America now hosts some type of evil spirit.
The Reverend advises anyone suspecting that their computer is possessed to consult a clergyman, or, if the computer is still under warranty, to take it in for servicing.
"Technicians can replace the hard drive and reinstall the software, getting rid of the wicked spirit permanently," he says.
There is just so much revolutionary new knowledge here that it is hard to know where to start.
1: "An artificial-intelligence program started spontaneously"? I know some guys at MIT who would love to get their hands on this PC, since AI has been one of the holy grails of computer science now for decades, and it does not seem closer than it did 30 years ago.
2: I am not even going to touch on the supposed "evil" of porn sites, or the supposed responsibility an individual carries in chosing whether he visits one or not.
3: "a 2,800-year-old Mesopotamian dialect"? And what alphabet was the PC using for this, pray tell? Which font?
3: "The minister estimates that one in ten computers in America now hosts some type of evil spirit". Hot dog. This guy must have carried out a spectacular amount of research all on his little lonely to be able to make that kind of an estimate.
4: "or, if the computer is still under warranty, to take it in for servicing". ...I can just see it: "Hi, I need my computer fixed under warrenty; it is possesed by a demon."
5: My favorites are the parts that say that replacing the hard disk will get rid of the demon, and that only a hard disk of a certain size is useful to a demon. While unfortunately no specific hard disk size is mentioned (and by the way I think they mean "after 1995". Hardly any PCs had a hard disk at all in 1985) this of course tells us that the demon must exist as an actual file on the disk. I think this should tell us also that if your disk is filled to capacity with porn and Duke Nukem, you are not in danger of having your machine possessed, because the necessary disk space is not there. I also wonder what the domon file looks like, how big it is, and what program can open it. I am sure it will be a Microsoft program, though.
Ending off here, I have to tell you that I actually believe that spirits exist (and that we are such, ourselves), but I don't think this preacher really does, or he would not try to profit from such appaling nonsense as this. "...author of an upcoming book". Really? Big surprise.
- Stobblehouse |
