2004 February 2, 2004 Viruses,worms and spam As there has been a lot of publicity recently of viruses and worms, Gary thought it would be beneficial to briefly expand on the subject including spam. WORMS There has been quite a bit of news coverage regarding one of the latest worms "Mydoom" which has spread very quickly. It reaches an unprotected PC mostly by email but in order to release the worm, the recipient must open the attachment. Just receiving the email and then deleting will not cause any harm if you leave that little attachment icon alone. Viruses can also get into an unprotected computer by downloading infected music files from places like KazaA. Simply stated, when it gets into the computer it will get to work if you have Outlook Express installed as your email program. It will propagate by sending itself to everyone in your address book and to confuse things will select at random one of your friends as being the sender. It will also send out files and leave an opening for someone to access your personal files etc should they desire to do so. For a more in depth description visit the Symantec web site at http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/vinfodb.html As I have mentioned in the past, this is a good resource to put in your favourites. VIRUSES I personally have Norton Anti Virus running continually and manually check for updates daily. Although most virus programs have an auto update feature, it does not always keep its word and a few days can go by without an update. Also, my internet service provider has a state of the art program installed that virtually blocks all known viruses before they reach me. It also blocks out 99% of spam. I believe Shaw might have this feature and perhaps a few other ISPs as well. Over the past week my ISP has blocked about two dozen viruses directed to my email address. A few are shown as having been sent by fellow classmates which, as already explained, may or may not be the case. What it does mean is that my email address is in a few of the infected computers. You may also be getting bogus notices of delivery failure of messages you never sent. SPAM Now onto spam. There are expensive programs available that harvest email addresses from the internet. Because our email addresses are in theory open to the world on this website, they can be gleaned by one of these programs and used with ten thousand others by spammers. If you are concerned, you can foil the program by substituting the word "at" in place of "@" in your email address. I am sure Gary would accommodate your request. Before my ISP installed the spam filters, I was getting about 15 a day which was a major annoyance. Check into it, and if your provider does not offer this service, shop around. One last note. There is almost zero chance that having your email address listed on the Oak Bay site would attract viruses. The culprit is your friend who has become rather lax in keeping his or her virus program updated on a daily basis. And finally it goes without saying, if you own a Mac you are quite safe from viruses since the programs are written for PCs. Richard Richard Goodall / goodallr@sunwave.net