"Joe" wrote in message
...


It's largely a matter of attitude and policy. Microsoft has tried for
years to move software out of computers and into its own servers, so you
would download Word when you needed it and be charged by the hour. This
gets them away from the enormous problem of maintaining a revenue stream
by constantly producing new versions of everything. Secondly, Microsoft is
trying to make money from third-party content, i.e. entertainment, again
as a continuous source of revenue. Both ambitions cause Microsoft to look
favourably on downloading and running just about anything from anybody on
the Internet, and to downplay the risks, even to themselves.

Hence an email program which routinely runs attachments received in
emails. For a long time, it was not possible to stop Outlook/Outlook
Express running attachments automatically. The preview pane meant that it
was not even necessary to explicitly look at an email. This behaviour went
on long after it became glaringly obvious that it was a stupid idea. The
question is, why was it *ever* considered anything other than a stupid
idea? Even after it had been 'stopped', it was possible to include an
executable in an email and tell Outlook that it was a harmless audio file.
Outlook would swallow this and pass it to Windows. Windows would assume
Outlook knew what it was doing, and run the file. I kid you not.

You're making these statements as though they are fact, not opinion. If you
claim that they re factual you need to support them with evidence.


Remember with viruses, it's not just the number of infections that matter,
it's the rate of spread. If the common cold was likely to infect less than
one other person during the course of the disease, it would not simply be
extinct, it would never have evolved. Linux viruses exist, bugs in Linux
program exist, but if an infected installation is unlikely to manage to
infect another, the infection doesn't spread.

But if the MS critics have their way and many more people have Linus the
vuruses WILL be able to spread, thus Linux will be as bvulnerable as OE.


It's not *just* the variation in Linux installations, not *just* that few
people run as root, not *just* that nobody has yet been stupid enough to
write a mail client like Outlook.

Using words like 'stupid' is offensive and diminishes your credibility.

Mary