Virus check...

[Klunk]

Nice one. I have a very good friend who works for a very well known anti- virus company. The support staff have a document to follow if a virus is sent in that has not been identified. Would you believe it reads;

"First of all confirm the file is a virus."

How do you think they have been doing this? Why, by opening them and running them on their windows desktops and looking to see if the AV (which never caught it in the first place, hence why the customer has submitted it) detects it.

You could not make this up if you tried.

[Cork Soaker]

So what are you doing here?

[Man at B&Q]

A lot more than you.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Here being one of cam.misc. uk.d-i-y and uk.telecoms.broadband, nothing in the posting implies either a PC, or a Linux setup.

And 'live CD' implies Linux, and I have yet to actually see a Mac infected by a virus. I am sure its possible, but they are as rare as hen's teeth. Viruses are largely a windows PC phenomenon.

And your advice was patntly wrong.

So?

[Paul Leyland]

I've seen them, but over 10 years ago and back in days of floppy-borne beasties. One of the joys of working for a university computer service.

Paul

[Roland Perry]

In message , at 13:32:56 on Wed,

8 Oct 2008, Paul Leyland remarked:

Viruses today are mainly "drive by" attacks on browsers, having attracted the user to an infected website. The major anti-virus vendors no doubt have statistics for which platforms are most vulnerable.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Are you sure about that?

I thought they were mainly in email attachments..

Anyway I don't use IE at all, so that's mainly that.

[Tim Ward]

Haven't seen one of those for years. Are there really still people who use ISPs who don't throw them away on the server?

[August West]

Are there really still people who use their ISP for email?

[Roland Perry]

In message , at 20:18:39 on Wed, 8 Oct 2008, The Natural Philosopher remarked:

Yes, it's been like that for a year or more.

Not any more; the networks got too good at filtering them out, so the effort has gone into other avenues.

[Tim Ward]

Eh?? Don't get you. Do you mean "are there people who don't contribute more than their fair share to the carbon footprint by running their own server at home 24/7 just to pick up the occasional email"? In which case, as you know perfectly well, the answer is "yes, there are lots of such people".

[August West]

Eh?? I was thinking more of hotmail, gmail, and the like.

[Tim Ward]

Oh, I think you and I disagree about what "ISP" means. I think it means "internet service provider". I use several different internet services, and I use several ISPs for different purposes, quite often at the same time - just right now I'm using one for connectivity, one for usenet access, and one for both hosting my website and managing my email (which, like hotmail, gmail and the like, does have a webmail interface, but I don't use it very often). If I also used hotmail I would regard hotmail as a "provider" of one of my "internet services", ie one of my ISPs, and I would expect them to filter out email viruses for me.

If you think "ISP" means *just* the service of providing connectivity, and not all the other things that many of us unbundle these days, that would explain the confusion.

[Tim S]

Tim Ward coughed up some electrons that declared:

We run our entire lives of our two servers: one RAID5 filestore (and soon to be migrated Postgresql server) with secure remote access, the other (soon to be upgraded on recycled equipment) general purpose server (web, calendar (Horde), email (Exim + Dovecot), misc).

Without it, neither me nor the missus would have a clue what we're doing.

:)

Cheers

Tim

[Roland Perry]

In message , at 22:15:06 on Wed, 8 Oct 2008, Tim Ward remarked:

Agreed. I'm currently using seven ISPs, only two of them for connectivity. And that's not counting niche services like Googlemail, Skype, MS-Messenger and another half dozen other providers of similar stuff. My Freeserve account finally expired recently, after many years of not using them for dial-up.

[Bob Eager]

I'll confess to being one of those irresponsible people who increases their mythical 'carbon footprint'. I receive a LOT of email, and several thousand spams each day, which I doubt an ISP would be as efficient at filtering.

My email server performs several other tasks, and consumes between 30 and 35 watts.

[Tim Ward]

I used to receive thousands of spams but my ISP has fixed their systems and the spam no longer consume entropy and thus carbon by being sent down the wire to my house.

[August West]

I do. The ISP shifts the packets,a mail provider provides, mail, News provider, news, and so on. I really don't see any utulity in overloading ISP.

[Tim Ward]

Oh, right. I use lots of different packet shifters, depending on where I am and what device I'm using, and quite often I don't even know what packet shifter I'm using[#], but only one of each of most of the others.

[#] After all you never need to. Apart from having to know their SMTP server. Which isn't *quite* enough of a pain for me to organise one of the many alternatives for myself.

[Fevric J Glandules]

That is what most people - both internet pros and the great unwashed - mean by "ISP", in the absence of any further qualification.