Lots of law firms were hit with this yesterday, judging from the lawnet listserve traffic.  It's a nasty little marketing ploy--get an e-card, get prompted for a download, and if you haven't read the EULA, you don't realize that you're agreeing to this worm download.  Very tricky, but you've got to hand it to them for creative business use of a disruptive technology... 

First Worm with a EULA? [Slashdot]

It affects Outlook the same way any worm does--mines through your contacts and sends itself out.  To prevent your users from accessing the download, block www*friendgreetings*com as well as these two other sites belonging to the same company that owns the current irritant:

www*permissionedmedia*com and www*cool-downloads*com

More information can be found on the Sophos website at

http://www.sophos.com/virusinfo/articles/greetings.html

Another reference to the online communities article I referenced yesterday, this one from Serious Instructional Technology: 

Quote: "Cultivate a community, and you'll attract eyeballs and ears willing to read and to listen to your message. Encourage discussion, and you'll attract people willing to share their own messages."

Comment: Some fairly obvious lessons in this piece, but a good reference nevertheless.

[Addendum: in my experience, very few institutional web sites support the student community and have a discussion space, whether at the program level or at the institutional level.]

It's too bad that schools don't encourage this more. 

From Reason's online daily brickbats...

Bob Taft, the Republican governor of Ohio, wants to spend $1.6 billion on the Third Frontier Project, a plan to attract high-tech projects to the state. Gov. Taft himself doesn't have a computer or use e-mail.

Huh.  I wonder if he considers e-mail high-tech.