It’s become commonplace to ridicule the so-called New Economy, that wave of schemes that sought fortune by turning ideas that were relatively mundane in the real world into sexy ideas with "edge" online: pets.com (an online store for pet products), eve.com (an online cosmetics store), furniture.com (you guessed it: an online furniture store). But with all the frenzy of the past couple of years, nobody ever thought of taking an online-only idea and making it real. You simply couldn’t, for example, create a real-life version of a chat room, where strangers from across the world are brought together to converse in the same place.

Since September 11, however, terrorists have figured out a way to take something known only in the virtual world — the e-mail virus — and turn it into real reality. Remember when the "ILOVEYOU" menace wreaked havoc on the world’s computers, back in May 2000? Now, criminal minds are applying the logic of the computer virus to good old-fashioned snail mail. This time, instead of receiving suspicious e-mails that contain a "worm" capable of killing a computer’s files, innocent people receive envelopes that, when opened, give off a dose of anthrax capable of killing them.

I liked it better when technology worked the other way around.

Issue Date: October 25 - November 1, 2001