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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Is there anything that actually gets users to fix theircomputers?
At 2:11 AM +0000 10/5/03, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote: It's the anti-virus ones that drive me nuts. "Someone in your domain sent us a virus which always forges the from line, but we're going to tell you anyway because we'd like you to buy our software..."For more fun, consider that you are [email protected], and get those When I moved somewhere.com to a new ISP, the very first thing I did was contact the abuse desk there and warn them what to expect. That was helpful when Universal Studios tried to come after me because someone at somewhere.com (literally :-) had posted a stolen movie on usenet. (Only one?)Reply to that and you will, as likely as not, get your reply sent back to you and your upstreams as a spam complaint. on that cc list for the same reason that you are - Outlook Express being set up to add all people that you reply to, to your address book. Those of us who post widely get that. But your average "just use email to talk to friends and family" is more likely to get it from friends--unless of course they forwarded a joke to everyone in their address book, who forwarded it....> been told right and left not to open mail from strangers (acompletely bogus concept, given that viruses tend to come from friends). What I found was that they take that quite literally.Say what? I have received virii from people I don't know from Adam, from countries where I don't know anyone at all. Bringing this back to the more relevant topic. Is there something that ISPs could do to notify users and get in their face more without shutting off their connection? Perhaps a custom piece of notification software that only took signed messages, and made some attempt to keep its bits secure? Unfortunately I don't see much way to keep it from being subverted without OS support. If it became common enough, then the virus writers would just simulate messages from it and disable the real one.> They either need to be contacted out of band, or their email softwareneeds to support a secure channel of communications that they can really trust.Hotmail, for example, clearly marks mail from hotmail staff (service announcements etc) with a different colored text in the inbox ... I guess if you control the client your user uses (using a custom built web interface is one way, a customized browser / mail client is another way) ... But other than that, you could well ask for the moon. -- Kee Hinckley http://www.messagefire.com/ Next Generation Spam Defense http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/ Writings on Technology and Society I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate everyone else's.
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