Univel Inc received its electronic edition of our sister paper Unigram.X a few days late last week because Unigram, like some other UUNET users in the UK, fell victim of a plague of files full of ASCII character number 152 – Y with an umlaut which infested our delivery system – which happens to be a Sun Microsystems Inc workstation. Apparently, an ex-Univel employee in California initiated – and the firm won’t say whether it was done maliciously or not – a process that took over Univel’s electronic mail system for a number of days the week before last, sending out huge files of Ys. Whether the files were sent to all Univel mail system subscribers or just to those that were logged in at the time, we don’t know. But, it meant that the previous week’s issue of Unigram was bounced back to us with these files – two days on the trot. The files swallowed all the memory on our Sun, which had to be restored from back-up tapes. Consequently, until we were assured that the problem was fixed, Univel didn’t get its Unigram. Univel has been here, there and everywhere this week, reassuring users that its electronic mail system is clean living and decent again.
