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RE: Painful USA Today article (was RE: ANN: RESTTuto

• To: 'Joe English' <jenglish@f...>, xml-dev@l...
• Subject: RE: Painful USA Today article (was RE: ANN: RESTTutorial)
• From: "Anderson, John" <John@B...>
• Date: Fri, 24 May 2002 15:50:14 +0200

Hear, hear.

Maybe it was relevant 10 years ago when "Is it plugged in?" was a reasonable question to ask.

But now that we are breeding a generation of computer literates, isn't it about time to deliver software with all the idiot features turned off rather than on?

John

-----Original Message-----
From: Joe English [mailto:jenglish@f...]
Sent: 23 May 2002 20:56
To: xml-dev@l...
Subject: Re: Painful USA Today article (was RE: ANN:
RESTTutorial)

Sorry for being completely off-topic, but this is one
of my major pet peeves:

Bullard, Claude L wrote:
>
> At the rate of attacks, at some point, Outlook
> will be the most secure and virus resistant client
> available.

It will never be as secure and virus resistant as
traditional Unix MUAs which HAVE THE GOOD SENSE NOT
TO AUTOMATICALLY RUN EXECUTABLE PROGRAMS THAT ARRIVE
IN THE MAIL.

Sheesh!

Remember the "Good Times" memetic virus that used to
make the rounds every September?  How we had to carefully
explain to the naive freshmen that no, it's not possible
to catch a computer virus simply by reading an e-mail
message because no programmer would be stupid enough to
write a mail reader that would make this possible?

Guess we were wrong.

(Outlook isn't really the main culprit either; it's
Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and other programs
that interpret documents as programs and give them
the equivalent of root privileges.)

--Joe English

  jenglish@f...

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