Sasser and Viruses
/My brother in law has the Sasser virus. His shiny new portable is now seething with the darned thing. I've send him a CD-ROM with a killer program, an anti-virus suite and Zone Alarm, but it is very irritating when these things happen. I keep wondering whether other fields of human endeavour have suffered as much from human stupidity. Did we really have people who, two years after the first railway was invented, decided to have some fun by dropping rocks on the tracks in front of trains just to see what happens? I suppose we did have Luddites, but they smashed the machinery becuase they thought it might take their jobs.
Perhaps in the "Good Old Days" (tm) folks were too busy with the more urgent aspects of staying alive, having a roof over their heads and not dropping dead from whatever plague was doing the rounds. Nowadays most of this is a given, and so there is enough slack in the system for going to Britney concerts and writing viruses (not that people who go to Britney concerts are the virus writers - but you know what I mean).
I've no idea how we solve it. I guess we need to make sure that we have the latest software (if my brother in law's machine had been better prepared before he got it there would not have been a problem). Perhaps we should insist that, just before a machine is shipped or sold over the counter, it is connected to windows update and prepared for the horrible world out there. This would not stop new viruses but it should help things a bit. I for one would think that such a move would give a vendor a nice sales advantage - I'd prefer to buy a machine fully prepped rather than spend a couple of hours of my time bringing it up to scratch.
Perhaps in the "Good Old Days" (tm) folks were too busy with the more urgent aspects of staying alive, having a roof over their heads and not dropping dead from whatever plague was doing the rounds. Nowadays most of this is a given, and so there is enough slack in the system for going to Britney concerts and writing viruses (not that people who go to Britney concerts are the virus writers - but you know what I mean).
I've no idea how we solve it. I guess we need to make sure that we have the latest software (if my brother in law's machine had been better prepared before he got it there would not have been a problem). Perhaps we should insist that, just before a machine is shipped or sold over the counter, it is connected to windows update and prepared for the horrible world out there. This would not stop new viruses but it should help things a bit. I for one would think that such a move would give a vendor a nice sales advantage - I'd prefer to buy a machine fully prepped rather than spend a couple of hours of my time bringing it up to scratch.
