re:RE: attatched photos

Tom is spot on, for more than one reason. A lot
of new viral loads are traveling inside of jpg
files now, and it's not long until every link will
be suspect because there's a way to embed
executables in a link that bypass a few of the
virus packages. Right now, several of the ISPs
are tagging any mail with an embedded jpg file as
suspicious, and a few are routinely quarrantining
them and forcing users to to fetch them if they
want them.

I'm pretty technically sophisticated, and have
huge amounts of bandwidth, but I've removed myself
from any mailing list that routinely includes
images or links that are different in each email.
 Reducing the amount of time I spend fighting the
bad guys in the online world is one of the ways I
maintain enough time in my life for pinholing.

One only has to look at the snakepit of bots,
viruses, keyloggers, and other nasty stuff on my
son's two computers - one Mac, one PC - to
understand what kinds of risks are lurking out
there waiting to eat up your weekend.

On the one poster who noted that when they
switched operating systems or computers, now
downloads take forever - that's a symptom of one
of the newest zombie botnet applications out
there, they put packets in attachment message
packets and files to minimize the possibility of
detection. It's also one of the bots that
functions in the Mac world. (I only know that
because I offered my son's Mac laptop to the
computer security product team where I work for my
day job, figuring my son is doing research for
them...) Just for the heck of it, you might want
to do a few different, very aggressive scans to
see if you're just suffering from a connectivity
problem or if you've become part of what looks
like an experiment by some of the Eastern European
bot herders.

Given all the stuff that's going on, where one
nasty attachment can eat up an entire weekend
trying to make it go away, I massively prefer
going to sites to see lovely images, instead of
receiving them in my email. Browsers and virus
software do a great job of stopping site-based
risks. (As long as you don't click on everything,
like my son does...)

Ed

---- Original Message ----

From: "Tom Miller" <tomwmiller@comcast.net>
To: <pinhole-discussion@spitbite.org>
Cc:
Subject: RE: [pinhole-discussion] attatched photos
Date: Mon, September 03, 2007, 19:33:00

Ellis wrote:
No-one has yet answered my basic
question, if attachments can be sent on other
sites and all the 'problems'
raised here are not problems on those sites, why
not have attachments here ?
~~~~~~~
So, I'll try to answer. People accessing the
other sites are making a
choice about whether and for how long they want
their bit of bandwidth tied
up with downloads. This choice is a "pull" from
the user's perspective.

The discussion list automatically "pushes" content
to members' email boxes.
The choice is gone, and members are stuck waiting
for who knows how long
before their bandwidth is freed up again.

Count me on the side opposing attachments on this
list (even though I have a
pretty good cable connection). A link to a photo
on another site is
sufficient; then I can choose.

Tom Miller
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Received on Tue Sep 4 07:01:04 2007