It has 25 million registered users, 11 million active users and on any given day at any given time some 800,000 thousand people are chatting with friends and relatives on ICQ.
It has also become the newest way to spread rumors, hoaxes and bandwidth-eating messages that often are started to generate visitors for people who get paid for click-throughs to their web sites. Worse, innocents find themselves accused of all sorts of nasty behavior and people with too much time on their hands and no sense of ethics tie up an already-busy service with
"I am sick of this," said 22-year-old Australian Daniel Duke. "If it keeps up I might delete ICQ."
Duke discovered some months ago that there was a message making the rounds on ICQ warning people not to add his number to their contact list. The reason, according to the message, was that he was using his ICQ to inject viruses into the computers on his list. One version was even translated into Spanish.
"[Daniel] is a very ill young man and he lives in a wheelchair," said his friend Jarryd Manson, who lets Daniel keep a chat room on his Geocities web site. "As far as I know that ICQ message is just plain slander."
Duke, who registered for a new account number when the first messages started making the rounds, said he knows who started the message, but even now he hesitates to delete that person from his contact list. He received an apology and a promise from the individual that it wouldn't happen again.
It did, and this time it was personal. The message, which was sent to Jarryd by two friends who weren't aware he knew Daniel, listed Duke's old number and called him "Daniel Power," combining his first name with his ICQ nickname instead of his surname.
"It is all lies," he said. "I found out (about the message) a few months ago. Just yesterday I got [another] message about this virus message with my old number and name on it. I want to keep ICQ, but if this keeps up I have no choice but to delete it."
Duke's experience is the latest twist on a problem that has afflicted the Internet since the invention of email
ICQ ("I Seek You") is an Internet phenomenon, founded in 1996 by a quartet of young Israeli computer users who wanted to create a new way to communicate. They founded a small company, called it "Mirabilis," and launched their idea for free. Within six months, it had one of the largest download rates for a new company in the history of the ŚNet. The growth of the service astounded even its creators, and the demand became so great that in June of 1998 they had to look for a larger backer to help pay the costs of development. Enter America On Line, which purchased Mirabilis and relaunched it as ICQ, Inc.
For those wired into the ŚNet, ICQ has replaced the telephone as the way to "reach out and touch," offering not only message service, but realtime chat, file transfers and email connections. Businesses and organizations hold virtual meetings on it, and far-flung relatives maintain family ties without having to decide which 10-10 number to use this week. One million new subscribers sign on every 22 days, according to a message on their home page, and anyone who has tried to log on during peak activity hours would likely attest that every one of them must be online at the same time.
Taking all that into consideration, it was probably inevitable that the same rumors and hoaxes that had become ubiquitous on the email circuit would start to crop up on ICQ. The earliest ones generally warned that Mirabilis (and later AOL) would start to charge for the program unless the "alert" was passed along a given number of times. These false alarms continue to circulate, despite clear messages on the ICQ site assuring clients that no changes in the way the medium is handled will be instituted without plenty of advance warning.
And, as web designer Thomas R. Pasawicz states on his web site "Lies, Damn Lies & ICQ," "It's the millions of people who use ICQ that make it such a useful product. Lose a significant number of them or make it difficult for new people to join and ICQ loses much of its value." Which, he adds, makes it unlikely anyone would be foolish enough to enact a fee structure that would cause large numbers of those millions of people to go elsewhere.
The next stage of the message bombardment came when Mirabilis added on the ability to send a web site URL with a click of the mouse button. Unlike email, which usually sends not just the address but the entire page, ICQ allows the user to send a window with the URL and a brief description, which the recipient can then visit immediately or bookmark for later. Initially, the sites sent were usually harmless or amusing: a page of smiley faces or a bouquet of roses. Over the Christmas holidays, someone initiated a virtual "snowball fight" where the idea was to "toss" the snowball at all the people on your contact list so they could toss it back and pass it on. Another URL that made the rounds, http://members.tripod.com/~Cherishyour/friendchain.html, was just an effort to see how many people would actually visit the page.
Ambitious members of click-thru associates and banner programs then came up with the bright idea of sending out their home page address with a request to "pass it on," increasing their number of site visits with a new version of spam.
A woman who asked to be known only as "Cathy, a Christian housewife from Wilkes-Barre, Pa.," used her newly-developed page-design skills to put up a neat little site that had the familiar 7-Up dots dancing to Henry Mancini's "Baby Elephant Walk" and the request that the visitor "Have a great day." Imagine her shock, then, when she started receiving email messages telling her that the URL for her happy little site was being forwarded on ICQ along with a message reading "if you are NOT gay forward this to everyone on your list or u[sic] will be known".
"People wrote to me...because they thought I would want to know, since I am a Christian, that my page was being used this way," she said. "I received about four letters in two days before I amended my page to apologize and ask that it not be forwarded that way."
Her new message reads: "I want to apologize to all who received my page via ICQ. I did not forward this page with any reference to any group or individual preference or orientation. I am not responsible for any of the ICQ forwards. I am aware of the problem but do not know how to stop it other than to ask that you not forward it with a derogatory heading. Thank you."
Cathy said she thinks the note has helped. "I get many letters telling me they have received [the URL] without derogatory messages," she reported. "I have not asked that the page not be forwarded. I asked that it not be forwarded with the derogatory heading."
Like Daniel Duke, Cathy said she felt victimized. She added that she relied on her belief that God would lead people to go to the page, despite the heading, and would then see her apology and explanation.
The latest development in ICQ forwards is the one that so troubles Duke
"The biggest Śvirus' problem I've seen are the chain-letter-types, which don't involve insidious files at all, but rather are just a variation on the tons of email chain-letters: sign this protest to prevent AOL from charging for ICQ...Little Timmy, dying of cancer, will get a nickel every time you send this...snowball fight...that ilk," said David Berhoff of http://Freedback.com, a web site that offers free customized forms for webpage builders.
The fact is, said Rob Rosenberger, a nationally-known computer security consultant, nearly all of the rumors about viruses simply aren't true. "Users often claim a virus attack if anything out of the ordinary happens to their computer
The best way to deal with hysterical forwards about viruses and hackers, the experts agree is to delete them and then reply to the sender with a link to one of the many sites that provide information on virus hoaxes, including theirs. Chain letters about dying children often list organizations like the American Cancer Society or a hospital or other institution that can be contacted online for verification. Rumors about ICQ can be addressed by simply clicking the System button on the ICQ window and going to their home page.
As for viruses, a few good virus scanning programs on your computer and a little common sense will help a lot more than joining the forwarding frenzy. To date, the only text files known to occasionally carry viruses a species known as "macro-viruses" that are carried on Microsoft Word files are easily cleaned using the existing scanners. "As far as accepting programs from unknown sources, well, that's even more obvious," said Berhoff "Don't do it."
Nor should you worry a lot over someone hacking into your system, they added. "While Śevil hacker web pages' are more myth than fact, almost anything is possible where browser or e-mail client bugs are concerned," said Tom. "I strongly advise you to use up-to-date versions of your browser, e-mail reader and ICQ."
The question you might want to ask yourself, however, said Rosenberger, is whether you really have anything to fear even if "evil hackers" do exist. "Let's suppose someone actually could break into your computer via ICQ," he said. "First, explain why a hacker would choose ICQ exploits above all the other vulnerabilities your computer exhibits. Second, explain what makes you so special that someone specifically would pick you out of all the ICQ users on the planet."
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FMI on Viruses real or otherwise:
Lies, Damned Lies, and ICQ (temporary home)
The US Dept. of Energy Computer Incident Advisory Capability
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