Email viruses

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From: Michael G Schwern
Subject: Email viruses
Date: 01:49 on 27 Jan 2004
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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