March 3, 2004

The new version is currently being beta-tested by a few selected people. No problems have been found so far, and if I have enough time this week, I'll make sure to release v20.00 in a few days. I don't have as much time as I'd like to work on KMJ, partly due to my e-mail issues, which I'm going to discuss now. Important! Starting from now, the e-mail address "naoki at kyodai.com" is no longer available. Any e-mail sent there will not be delivered. I'm sorry that I do not have, for the present time, any other e-mail address to give you to contact me (the author), but I've received 5,500 viruses today (yes, that's nearly six thousand e-mails !). I was already receiving an average of 2,500 e-mails a day these last weeks. It became a huge concern for me when the Sobig worm got released on the Internet last year. Since then, I've never stopped receiving at least 200 worms a day. The problem with these worms, is that most people are not aware of what they are, and don't think of installing an antivirus. This would help a lot to reduce the worm problems. Indeed, once you have opened an infected e-mail (most likely with Outlook Express), your computer is infected as well, and the worm (it can be Sobig, Netsky, MyDoom... There are lots of similar "programs") will start finding all the e-mail address available in your address book, Internet cache or any text files on your computer. It will then forge fake e-mails using the addresses found, and will send itself to tons of recipients, effectively slowing down your Internet connection, and flooding the mailboxes of exposed users, such as my old e-mail address, that was carelessly written down in the Kyodai Mahjongg help files. The bottom line is : don't e-mail the author. If you want to contact me, use the e-mail address mentioned at the bottom of every page, which will take you to my assistant (Valentine). She will then forward all your questions to me. Oh, and yes, we may decide to change her e-mail address as well. She's got an incredible amount of worms in her mail, too. And please, everyone : if you don't have an antivirus, please try to install one, it won't hurt, and contribute to make the Internet a better (and safer) place !