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HOME TOPICS ABOUT ME Most of us are nimwits when it comes to e-mail. |
technofile Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983 Should computer users have to get an operator's license?May 1, 2002 By Al Fasoldt Copyright © 2002, Al Fasoldt Copyright © 2002, The Post-Standard My radio partner and fellow columnist Gene Wolf told our radio audience last Sunday that computer users should be treated just like automobile operators. He got a lot of laughter when he said everyone who uses a computer should be required to get an operator's license. A computer operator's license? Surely that's ridiculous. But I think my old neighbor might have a point. (Gene and I grew up in the same little town -- "we drank the same water," as we like to say to people who wonder why we both act a little crazy at times.) I think most people who use computers have no idea how to use them safely. Maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea if they had to pass a test before being allowed to sit down at a keyboard. The Klez Worm proves this if anything possibly could. People who should have known better passed infected e-mail to their friends. People who know what an English sentence looks like took a look at the worm's strange phrases and gave them no extra thought. People who should know what the prefix "anti" means when it's paired with the word "virus" paid no attention to the health and safety of their computers. They endangered the PCs run by everyone else by being careless with their own. This has to stop. You might think the best way is the criminal way -- by arresting all the people who create viruses and worms. Apart from the obvious flaw in that method -- we'd never catch all of them, and we'd probably never know the identities of the people who create them anyway -- there's a big problem with hoping that prosecutorial law can substitute for common sense. That never works. It's common sense, not the threat of being arrested by the thought police, that keeps us going day after day. Common sense tells us that it's a good idea to carry an umbrella if we think it might rain. Common sense tells us to slow down on that long drive home in the rain. Common sense should tell you that your sister-in-law is the last person on the planet who would send you an e-mail with this as the text: "This is a special funny website. I expect you would like it." Yet thousands -- surely, tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands -- of what are otherwise normal, common-sense Windows users fell for such a stupid ploy. The Klez Worm sent itself out to all these users by fooling them into opening such a message. These messages looked like they were from people we knew -- from relatives and friends, from our local Internet provider in some cases, and even, according to many reports, from our own bosses at work -- but in every case the messages containing the worm came from some other source. The addresses were faked to make us more willing to open the messages. The author of the Klez Worm makes two assumptions. First, the worm's creator assumes that most people who get e-mail will automatically read something that is sent (or seems to have been sent) by someone they know. Second, this rogue hacker assumes that most people will read mail, from any source, that has intriguing subject lines. I think the worm's author is right. Most of us are nimwits when it comes to e-mail. Sometimes I get discouraged and think that nobody has paid attention to all the articles I've written about Internet safety and about computer worms and viruses. I realize this sounds conceited. But I'm being honest. I got hundreds upon hundreds of worm-infected e-mail letters after the Klez Worm hit. They were all passed on by Windows users who had no common sense. If Gene's idea means that everyone who uses computers -- or maybe just everyone who uses Windows, since there's no sense making life hard for the folks who chose the safe route and use Linux computers or bought Apple Macintoshes -- would get training in e-mail common sense, I might go along with it. In the meantime, if you get a letter that has an attachment you didn't ask for, trash the letter. If you get a letter that seems to be from someone you know but makes no sense -- no common sense, in other words -- trash the letter. If you have any doubts about anything that comes in the mail, trash it. It's THAT simple. Please give it a try. Maybe we can prove Gene wrong. Maybe we can show some common sense after all. |