Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2003/02/14/make_love_to_your/

Make Love To Your IT Manager on Valentine's Day

Love is in the air, and in IT press releases

By John Leyden

Posted in Security, 14th February 2003 09:56 GMT

Microsoft is appealing to computer users to save their IT Managers' heartache this Valentine's Day by...being vigilant and guarding against computer viruses.

It does this through a press notice titled: Microsoft Launches Nationwide Appeal to UK Businesses: "Make Love To Your IT Manager this Valentine's Day".

Unfortunately the attached notice fails to live up to this headline (how could it?). And no it isn't an injunction to initiate bacchanalian orgies in the server room. Instead we get the annual advice to be wary of unsolicited - possibly viral - messages posing as lovers' greetings.

How disappointing.

The threat that MS highlights is real enough, as the Love Bug virus, and the greeting cards scam show. Disguising viral code is messages of lurve has become a very common trick.

So let's be careful out there.

Some more St. Valentine PR stunts

Virgin Mobile offers us a survey saying the person British males would most like to have "text sex" with is Kylie Minogue. Cameron Diaz and Britney Spears also have plenty of text appeal to men, the survey found.

Women quizzed during the survey rated Robbie Williams as Britain's sexiest text prospect, with Brad and George Clooney also popular choices among women for a spot of flirty text messaging.

This enjoyable nonsense about text sex fantasies allows Virgin plug a charity Valentine's Day Ball, and mention Britons send more than 50 million text messages a day!

Oh matron!

Meanwhile the "anticipated surge in network traffic caused by Valentine's Day gift purchases" calls for more robust networking infrastructures, we're told.

Yes, you've guessed it, this comes as a plug for Israeli application switching vendor Radware.

Sounds like just the right present for Kay Hammond, the dot com founder who gained notoriety by running an auction for her hand in marriage last year. Last we heard, Kay was still single... ®

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