On Fri, May 05, 2000 at 04:19:33PM +0100, Tibor Mocsar wrote:
>
> I'm really sick and tired of these virus warnings every other month.
> A new virus? So what?! I don't care! I use a SurvPC WITHOUT Windows.
> It serves all the a*sholes right if they get f*cked in the a*s with a virus.
> Why do they use Windows?! Who punishes a private user to buy this or that
> software? The own stupidity! According to the hungarian proverb "the stupid
> should die". So I don't feel sorry for the idiots that cry and whine now.
> It's time to obtain a brain! (And don't forget to switch it on.)
>
<<SNIPPAGE>>
Y'know, there was an article in today's paper mentioning something about
this. One of the reasons for the amazing spread of the virus is
Outlook. Outlook, by default, will automatically forward messages
so when folks did their mail thing they unknowingly sent out this virus
to all the users in their addressbook.
Other mailers such as Netscape Mail, Eudora, etc. don't do that
since mail forwarding usually requires manual intervention.
The virus wouldn't have spread so quickly if it weren't for Outlook.
It only took hours to spread around the world.
"Microsoft's Windows operating system appears on more than 85 percent
of personal computers. More diversity, experts say, would likely have
slowed the virus by at least a few hours, maybe a day or two, giving
network administrators a longer head start."
Of course another analyst says you can't blame Microsoft or Windows.
Whatever the dominant OS is and most people write for would have been
the target audience.
Microsoft says "Internet users must ultimately understand technology's
limitations. Customers have the option to turn off some of the features
in question and take other security precautions."
My take on this is, far as I'm concerned, a big chunk of Windows
users are clueless regarding the software that runs on that
point-click-n-grunt environment they love so much.
Look at all the html that gets sent to newsgroups and mailing lists,
vcard attachments, and message lines that never seem to end (not really
an on/off feature, but still...).
I think various features/options should be _off_ by default,
leaving the user to have to turn on a feature they may want, such as
that automatic forwarding jive.
(Speaking of html, I rarely see any html posts in my mail reader
under Linux. One day I used a text viewer to grep through some mailboxes
and discovered a !%#$load of html in my mailboxes. Apparently metamail
or the reader is doing its job of filtering the stuff but I know I would've
been mighty annoyed if that weren't the case.)
Marc
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