North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Dumb users spread viruses

  • From: Mike Jezierski - BOFH
  • Date: Mon Feb 09 13:15:27 2004 


At 02:46 PM 2/8/2004, Paul Vixie wrote:

In this past year's tour of my friends and family, I've taken to removing
their antivirus software at the same time I remove their spyware, and I've
taken to installing Mozilla (with its IMAP client) as a way to keep the
machine from having any dependency on anti-virus software.  IT managers are
encouraged to consider a similar move next time they're asked to approve
the renewal costs of a campus-wide anti-virus license.
Do you honestly think that any IT manager is going to be successful getting an entire company to dump Outlook/Exchange and stop using anti-virus software? Do you have an example (within the North American area of interest to NANOG members) where this has actually happened?

IMHO, if you can convince an Outlook/Exchange using company to dump MS for email, you can convince them to dump MS/Windoze OSs entirely, which is a much more complete way to solve this problem.

jc
As much as I respect Paul's opinions, are you sure Mozilla is viable as a solution to the virus problem? I still fell it's an OS problem. And yes even with Mozilla I still leave the AV software on a client's PC. Lusers still like to click on things and having the mail client /dev/null attachments is not viable as they want their family to send attached pictures of the grandkids.

And JC, yes I am working on getting this company to move from Windows to Mac. Windows users know better than to come to me with their latest Windows Woes. I gently pat my iMac and say "Gee, I don't have that problem" with a Smug BOFH grin :-)


--
Mike Jezierski
[email protected]