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Just check yesterday's posts on Scripting.com:
250 emails this morning. Only four contained content. The rest were spam and viruses.
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A particularly tricky virus. Who wouldn't want to know about an email to The World Bank that bounced. But wait a minute. I didn't send an email to them. Cute.
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Outage update. Our Linux server appears to be infected with a worm. Until we completely back it up to a new server (installed yesterday) the outages will continue...
It really looks like the whole web is increasingly becoming a dangerous environment.
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Klez Worm Rises to Top of Threat Lists. Climbing the charts like a catchy tune, the Klez.H computer virus is using multiple
vectors to spread and now sits atop the threat lists of many security companies. The
virus accounts for the highest rate of infection reports ever at anti virus giant Symantec. [osOpinion]
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In the last few days I have received a lot of messages sent by people I've exchanged email with sometime in the past, all sent by the new strain of the Klez worm.
Also if I have not been infected (running Eudora on MacOS X is a pretty safe solution), I did had damages from this last infection.
What this little nasty smart worm do is sending infected messages to addresses found in the infected user's address book, using other addresses it founds as "sender". This simply means that a lot of people I don't know are receiving infected messages from my email address, and are of course not happy with me (as they think) infecting their computer.
Now, why is all this happening?
At first I was mad to the people I know who got infected first. If you are a Windows/Outlook user you should know by now that you should not open attachments, that you should keep all your software and especially your anti virus application always updated.
Unfortunately there's a lot of people today who use computers without actually knowing what they are doing. Of course, this is positive and is making the world a better place, but there should be at least some degree of control. Cars have been a great advance in human history too, but you can't drive a car unless you have a license, because you could harm other users.
But I'm not asking for computer driving licenses, because continuing with the cars analogy we get to yet another POV.
If one individual causes an accident while driving his car, he's responsible for it. But what happens when thousands of people have the same accident about at the same time? We usually check with the car manufacturer, uh?
Microsoft is the car manufacturer.
It's not a rant about Microsoft vs. Apple, if Apple would have the same market share that Microsoft has, we would probably have as many worms and viruses.
But Microsoft managed, illegally, to gain a monopolistic position on the market.
Whatever they did to get where they are, the should at least be held responsible for the software they make. It's just absurd that they keep creating damages to millions of people around the world without anybody even trying to make them pay. Whatever they wrote in their EULA (have you ever read them? We are not running nuclear plants!) but we are trusting them with our data.
Maybe we should start looking around to find some alternatives, this is not another browser war, it's about our data and our business, and maybe a little competition would benefit the market and our own email messages.
Paolo | 
