Remember that scene with John Cusack from “Say Anything”? Where he held the boombox outside his girlfriend’s window? It’s the absolute pinnacle of the lost art of the crazy romantic gesture. Until now.

And we really do mean crazy, by the way. Criminally so, laughed “Step Up 2″ actress Briana Evigan, whose new romantic comedy “Subject: I Love You” follows the real life story of a man who went just a wee bit too far for the one he loved.

“You ever hear of the ‘I Love You Virus’? It’s based on that. It’s the American girl and the Filipino boy and I leave the Philippines and there’s not much Internet or cell phone stuff going on at that time over there and he tries to track me down and his friends come up with an idea of him sending out a virus,” Evigan said of the film’s set-up, which uses the true story of the Love Bug for inspiration.

Posted by Justin Payton in Adware, Spyware and Trojans at 14:38

A stressed e-mail from a friend once read: "A worm has just eaten my kid!"

Thankfully, the message was not referring to infanticidal earthworms, but rather to a type of computer virus, a "worm", that had just infected some files (known as KID files) on his computer.

And he may have had Fred Cohen to thank for the ensuing implosion of his computer hard-drive.

Mr Cohen released the very first computer virus in a controlled experiment in a class at the University of Southern California, 25 years ago today.

In 1983, in a class at the School of Engineering taught by the computer-programming guru Leonard Adleman, Mr Cohen wrote a program for a parasitic application that seized control of computer operations.

Posted by Justin Payton in Adware, Spyware and Trojans at 09:18