75 I was told that the Stoned virus displays the text "Your PC is now Stoned" at boot time. I have been infected by this virus several times, but have never seen the message. Why?
Description
This article is from the Computer Viruses FAQ, by Nick FitzGerald n.fitzgerald@csc.canterbury.ac.nz with numerous contributions by others.
75 I was told that the Stoned virus displays the text "Your PC is now Stoned" at boot time. I have been infected by this virus several times, but have never seen the message. Why?
The "original" Stoned message was ".Your PC is now Stoned!", where the
"." represents the "bell" character (ASCII 7 or "PC speaker beep"). The
message is displayed with a probability of 1 in 8 *only* when a PC is
booted from an infected *diskette*. When booting from an infected hard
disk, Stoned never displays this message.
Further, versions of Stoned with no message whatsoever or only the
leading bell character have become very common. These versions of
Stoned are likely to go unnoticed by all but the most observant, even
when regularly booting from infected diskettes.
Contrary to some reports, the Stoned virus does *not* display the
message "LEGALISE MARIJUANA", although such a string is quite clearly
visible in the boot sectors of diskettes and MBR's of hard disks
infected with the "original" version of Stoned.
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