I’m a geek, but I don’t play games on my computer. Well, I haven’t for at least 15 years.

My first PC was an IBM PC “5150” model (I think) with an 8088 processor, 16K of memory (yep, KB, not MB), no disk drives (hard or floppy) and a CGA monitor (think of the resolution of a really cheap cell phone). The operating system was loaded from a cassette player. It took a couple of minutes to boot to a command prompt. And all it would do was the Basic language.

I soon upgraded it with an additional 384K of memory, a 5 1/2″ floppy drive, and later a 10MB hard drive. Along with some simple Basic programs, I got a copy of the game called “Zork”.

It was a text-based adventure game, and fun to play (although I never did get very far). Infocom was the publisher of Zork — I don’t think the company is still around. Although you can find an HTML-based Zork game here http://thcnet.net/zork/index.php , along with various Wikipedia entries for the game (for a sample, try this one about a “Grue” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grue_(monster). (You young kids might find Zork interesting, and I can see you old-timers nodding your heads as you remember your late nights with Zork.)

All of this is to bring up the threat to Second Life users. Malware in a Apple Quicktime video file in a Second Life game object could result in the evil hacker draining your Linden Dollar bank account.

How? Well, in a thinly-disguised attempt to drive my three regular readers to my “Security Dawg” site, wander over here: http://www.securitydawg.com/2007/12/second-life-attack-on-linden-dollars.html .

As for me, perhaps a bit of nostalgic time over on the Zork site.

And be careful out there. The evil hackers are lurking. Or …

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue..