Re: Getting rid of a spyware program called "Once Dead"

From: Walter Roberson (roberson_at_ibd.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca)
Date: 05/10/04 

Date: 10 May 2004 15:54:31 GMT

In article <sh3v905ge0bpd01bavt0mfedarm9q07lou@4ax.com>,
Chuck <none@example.net> wrote:
:And Ray, please don't contribute to the spread of email address mining viruses.
:Learn to munge your email address properly, to keep yourself a bit safer when
:posting to open forums. Protect yourself and the rest of the internet - never
:post your address unmunged.

I've been posting with unmunged addresses for decades (I dug up one of
my 1986 posts yesterday.) I don't see how you could say that I am
contributing to the spread of email address mining viruses, though:
not *one* of my posted email addresses has ever been on a system which has
ever had a virus developed for it.

Sure, viruses on other computers find my email address and send me
email to -attempt- to infect me. Most of those get filtered out by
my anti-spam filters, and I just delete the rest. Cross-scripting
and so on are not an issue as I use text-only email clients that do
not process attachments in any way. Text-only newsreaders too.
The viruses are perhaps -copied- to me, but they do not -spread- to me
[there is a difference!]. And if I were to munge my email address,
the systems that tried to send to the munged addresses would -still-
already have been infected.

The only rationalization I can see for your admonition is this:
that if NO-ONE ever used their right email address (nor a mechanically
deducible one) on Usenet, and were to change their existing addresses,
then harvesting Usenet as a technique would die off as being unproductive.
But I'm -expecting- people to send me email in response to my postings,
and I'm not about to go out and hire a web hosting company and put up
some kind of challenge-response "proof of humanness and good intent"
system to make people hop through just to email me. Read comp.risks --
there are known attacks on several of the visual pattern recognition
systems... and such systems violate the US ADA (Americans With Disabilities
Act) in discriminating against blind people. I expect some of my
correspondants to be visually impaired. 

-- 
'ignorandus (Latin): "deserving not to be known"'
   -- Journal of Self-Referentialism

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Getting rid of a spyware program called "Once Dead"
    ... please don't contribute to the spread of email address mining viruses. ... :posting to open forums. ... And if I were to munge my email address, ...
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  • Re: Getting rid of a spyware program called "Once Dead"
    ... please don't contribute to the spread of email address mining viruses. ... It's good that you have security precautions in place on your computers. ... I provide this advice to those with less secured systems, ...
    (comp.security.firewalls)
  • Re: Getting rid of a spyware program called "Once Dead"
    ... please don't contribute to the spread of email address mining viruses. ... It's good that you have security precautions in place on your computers. ... I provide this advice to those with less secured systems, ...
    (comp.security.misc)
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