The Experts Prove It Is Just a Hoax! Norton Antivirus Releases a Hoax Report

Please click this link to read for yourself http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/y2kgame.hoax.html.

Newspaper Article Falsely Implies Elf Bowling Sends Information Over the Internet, Raises Privacy Concerns

Our NStorm games do NOT collect and send your information over the Internet. Click here for more info.

False Elf Bowling and Frogapult Virus Rumor

As you know, Frogapult and Elf Bowling are extremely popular games. Unfortunately, riding on the coattails of this success, someone has circulated a defamatory e-mail that these games contain viruses or Trojan horses. This has lead to many inquiries from our customers and fans.

This e-mail is slanderous and false. No games we release contain any virus or Trojan horse. NVision Design, the maker of NStorm games, is a successful, profitable web design company with a very good reputation in the industry. Our good name and reputation is associated with these games, and we have nothing to gain whatsoever in any malicious act, other than some possible jail time.

Virus Hoaxes are as prevalent as viruses themselves. Go straight to the experts to read some interesting information about these hoaxes:

http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/hoax.html

Further, we have submitted the Elf Bowling and Frogapult games contained on our site to the Symantec AntiVirus Research Center (SARC) for evaluation. Please see below for the confirmation we received. If you are still concerned that you might have picked up a virus from some unknown source, please download the games directly from this site.

Thank you for your interest in our NStorm games. We will continue to provide many more entertaining games in the months to come, and we are sorry for any inconvenience that this virus hoax may have caused you.

Sincerely, Michael Bielinski CEO / NVision Design, Inc.

This message is an automatically generated reply. This system is designed to analyze and process virus submissions into the Symantec AntiVirus Research Center (SARC) and cannot accept correspondence or inquiries. Please contact your Technical Support representative if more detailed information about your submission is required. Do not reply to this message.

Below is a status update on your virus submission:

Date: Tue Dec 7 08:54:08 PST 1999 Dan Ferguson 1400 Turtle Creek Blvd., Suite 209 Dallas, TX 75207

Dear Dan Ferguson

We have analyzed your submission. The following is a report of our findings for each file you have submitted:

filename: E:\ElfBowl.exe machine: result: This file is clean

We have determined that no virus exists on the samples provided.

Developer notes: E:\ElfBowl.exe does not appear to be infected.

Should you have any questions about your submission, please contact technical support at the appropriate number listed below and give them the tracking number in the subject of this message.

Our NStorm games do NOT collect and send your information over the Internet.

Playing off the country's hysteria about the Elf Bowling virus hoax, an irresponsible and inaccurate news story was published suggesting that Elf Bowling, Frogpult, and other "innocent looking" NStorm Games "set up a secret Internet connection" to collect and send private information from your computer to our NStorm server. Unfortunately, this story was picked up by Knight Ridder news service, and has appeared in many reputable newspapers across the country. .

This has raised numerous privacy concerns which we would like to address here.

Absolutely no information is collected from your computer and transmitted over the Internet by Elf Bowling or other games. At the beginning of each game, Elf Bowling tests to see if the computer has a live Internet connection since registering scores online is one of the functions of the games. To determine if there is a live Internet connection, it sends an HTTP request command to nstorm.com, requesting nstorm.com to send it a blank HTML page. If it receives the blank HTML page, it sets a variable for Internet connectivity to TRUE.

In the future, we had hoped to develop technology to also include "live update" information in the HTML page sent to the game, such as the current top 5 scores, to enhance the users experience. At this time, with information sent FROM our server TO the game, we would not just disclose it, but advertise the feature and encourage people to play on-line.

We understand your concerns for privacy. Once again, we assure you that at no time does any NStorm game collect and send ANY information from your computer. We hope this clearly lets you know what is going on, and, with this information, hope you do not feel that we have violated your trust. In the future, we will include a privacy statement in our games that disclose this Internet activity.

If you have concerns, or would like to comment on this, we would appreciate an e-mail sent to studio@nvisiondesign.com.

-- Sheri (wncy2k@nccn.net), December 25, 1999

Answers

Well, I wasn't trying to step on anyones' toes.

I was just trying to give a head's up to folks. If I was interested in checking out the game myself I might have done the research myself to find out if this game really did contain a virus, but since I didn't have any interest in checking it out I was just passing along the info I had on hand as a head's-up just in case there was a virus in it.

No harm intended.

-- pizzaman (pizza@your.door), December 25, 1999.

If there is no virus, there is no heads up to be given.

-- Lane Core Jr. (elcore@sgi.net), December 25, 1999.

Its called rumor mongoring! This is what will happen on New Years Eve and in days to come. Check out your story before passing it along.

-- Rumor (control@com.com), December 25, 1999.