Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2002/07/09

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Subject: Re: [Leica] JPEG virus discovered
From: "Rei Shinozuka" <shino@panix.com>
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 2002 07:58:00 -0400 (EDT)

while windoze's dominant market share is certainly a major contributing
factor to the proliferation of viruses which find a happy medium therein,
windoze culture has historically done much to promulgate unsafe computing.

encouraging users to email movies and other content encapsulated inside 
tiny binary executables for automatic execution on the receiver's 
(presumably windoze) machine was a bad thing.  

conjuring up the eleemosynary self-administering OS by having the browser 
and email client in conjunction with incoming content automatically 
reconfigure registries and such on the fly was a bad thing.

mind you, much of this gimcrackery was effective marketing, and
undoubtedly sold many computers and OS upgrades.  but it was not safe 
computing.

- -rei

> From: Douglas Herr <telyt@earthlink.net>
> On Mon, 8 Jul 2002 16:00:49 -0500 George Lottermoser <imagist@concentric.net>
> wrote:
> 
> > Intersting that this virus, like so many 
> > others, infects only windoze systems.
> 
> It's "marketing".  Windoze computers are an overwhelming majority of the
> installed base so it's much easier to create havoc by targeting these systems.

- -- 
Rei Shinozuka shino@panix.com
Ridgewood, New Jersey

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