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This one's a cheap shot, but I don't care. Once upon a time, viruses were something other people had to deal with. Some Windows' user's hard drive gets reformatted, "oh, hard luck pal" as you snicker quietly and turn back to your Mac and/or Unix machine. Now, through the wonder of executable email attachments, Visual Basic and the incredible gullibility of the bottom 10% of the Internet, any keyboard pounder can slop together an email virus with just enough social engineering to make someone drool in the vicinity of the left mouse button. "*GASP*! The FBI's Department of Illegal Internet Downloads has caught me!" After a few years of this sort of thing, you'd think people would learn. [1] Then it breeds like a rabbit hutch on trial size Viagra sending itself indiscriminately to any address it finds while ransacking the poor fool's computer. Now its MY problem because this infinite queue of email clicking monkeys managed to find activestate.com and installed Perl documentation with my email address in it. With this last outbreak I'm getting hundreds a day. And even if I filter them out, I still need to download and scan the bloody things at 30K a piece. And then, because some anti-virus companies are so astoundingly gullible that they trust the From line on an email, the bounce messages add to the fun. Must. Purge. Internet. [1] They don't. While home over Christmas I helped my neighbor set up their new WAP. They had so much crap installed on their machine that it would simply accumulate random popup ads if they left it on doing nothing to the point where rebooting it was faster than trying to get rid of them all. IE was encrusted with ads and scam search tabs. This was all sort of accepted as the price of using a computer. -- Michael G Schwern schwern@xxxxx.xxx http://www.pobox.com/~schwern/ We're talkin' to you, weaselnuts. http://www.goats.com/archive/000831.html
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