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HOME TOPICS ABOUT ME Heaven help us if someone writes a virus in a letter that says Walt Disney will pay you $15,000 if you pass the letter on to 12 of your friends. |
technofile Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983 Got a Windows virus? When will you ever learn?August 15, 2001 By Al Fasoldt Copyright © 2001, Al Fasoldt Copyright © 2001, The Post-Standard If we weren't slow to learn, preachers would be out of business and Traffic Court would be an empty place. And the boneheads who create Windows viruses would get bored and have to get real jobs. Virus writers prey on two weaknesses, not just one. The first weak area is clear to everyone, from Microsoft founder Bill Gates on down. Windows is full of holes. It has no protection at all against viruses. You have to add that protection yourself. (The fact that Microsoft has refused to change the design of Windows to make it resist viruses shows us what happens when a monopoly controls an entire market. Monopolies do what they want to do -- whatever that happens to be -- not what is best for consumers.) The second weakness is far worse. It's us. We never seem to learn our lessons. We always seem to make the same mistakes. The miscreants who make viruses know that better than the rest of us do. If we got smarter every time we made a mistake, we'd quickly get too smart to do anything dumb. But instead we just keep doing all those dumb things. Such as opening e-mail attachments. How many times are you supposed to explain something as simple as "Don't open e-mail attachments unless you've asked for them and you know what they contain"? I've said this for years. I've written about it for years. Is anybody paying attention? When I speak to civic groups, I always remind the crowd about Windows viruses. I always tell them my simple rule: If you didn't ask for it and if you don't know what it is, don't open it. (I usually add a third part, so the full rule goes like this: If you don't know the person who sent it, didn't ask for it and don't know what it is, don't open it.) People who should know better have been sending me the Sircam virus for weeks. I'm not sending it out to anyone else. I simply delete the messages and empty the trash. The Sircam virus just dies in my trash can. What's so hard about that? What is it about a message written in broken English that draws so many otherwise intelligent people to open an attachment? I shouldn't complain so much. We're actually lucky. The Sircam virus, carried in a message that seems all too obviously bogus, spread around the world in just a couple of days. Heaven help us if someone writes a virus in a letter that says Walt Disney will pay you $15,000 if you pass the letter on to 12 of your friends. Or in an e-mail that breathlessly "warns" everyone about needles hidden in the handles of gas pumps. Letters like that spread from PC to PC in minutes. Walt Disney is dead, of course, and dead people don't give away cash, nor would he give you money even if he were alive. And the hoax about needles in gas pumps just refuses to go away. Those are the letters that scare me. Not the ones written in lousy English that invite you to open an attachment for no good reason at all. When viruses start arriving in hoaxes your brother-in-law falls for, the kind your nephew thinks are real, the kind you wonder about yourself, we are all in big trouble. |