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Some True Stories > The Father - Pg. 315

Education in Education · Chapter 8 315 The Sister Gordon is a Scot who has a sister, Janet, who is severely agoraphobic, that is, afraid of open spaces. As a result, she is very introverted and rarely goes out. She lives alone on a housing estate. She dislikes using the telephone, and is an awkward conversationalist on it. So Gordon had the idea of buying her a computer and showing her how to use e-mail. She took to it immediately, and for the first time in years Gordon and Janet were able to communicate easily with one another. Among other things, Gordon used to send her family photographs as e-mail attachments.Then one day Janet received an e-mail, apparently from Gordon, with an attachment. She clicked on the attachment and her computer was infected with a virus; one of the variety that ransacks victims' address books and dispatches virus-infected e-mail to addresses it finds in them. In the end, Gordon realized what had happened, had his computer disinfected and arranged for Janet's to be cleaned up also. But Janet was traumatized by this experience, and now refuses to read even the text of an e-mail message. Gordon has found that the only way he can communicate with her is to put his entire message in the "Subject" line of his messages. The Father Tom is an academic with teenage children.The family has a broadband connection to the Internet. One of Tom's sons is very interested in music, and used the file-sharing program Kazaa to download and share music files across the Internet.Tom knew nothing of this, but