quote:
Originally posted by GnatB:
Call me callous...But anyone nowadays who's foolish enough to open unsolicited attachments sorta deserves to have their hardrive formatted by a virus. They're messing up things for the rest of us... How many times has the net been brought crawling to a halt because of virus's like that?
Here's a hint:
Unless you are expecting it, never *EVER* open an attachment. If you aren't expecting it, but it's from a friend, just send an e-mail to confirm he sent it.
You're callous. You expect too much of the general population.
Certainly, anyone who knows better (or ought to know better) and opens the attachment anyway is foolish. That's not to say everyone ought to know better. People who don't know anything about computers might not even know what "executable" means, or why its bad, or what kinds of files are executable. People may not even know what an extension is, since there's an option on Windows machines to hide it (an utterly stupid move on MS' part, one of many).
Don't confuse ignorance with stupidity. One is easily correctable. Yes, people who practice poor 'net security harm the community as a whole. If you're going to assign blame, though, most of it can go to Microsoft for having such poor security in the first place.