--George Bernard Shaw

In the July issue of Atlantic Monthly, which I just took out from the library, Christopher D. Cuttone's letter to the editor complains about an article in the April issue which apparently suggests that viruses can be spread via e-mail. "Don't blame the messenger!" says Cuttone. "The E-mail itself is incapable of executing any programs, virus or otherwise. Of course, if one downloads an attachment to an E-mail, that's another story (which should make folks think twice about fowarding and reforwarding those smutty Viagra cartoons)."

The writer of the article in question, Robert Budert, responds, ending with: "...since the latest E-mail systems make it extremely easy to open attachments, there is often little distinction between reading E-mail and potentially unleashing a virus. IBM reports that in a few cases attachments can be opened as the user simply 'opens the mail.'"

Well, duh. Talk about spectacularly missing the point.

Rather than note that this feature of automatically opening attachments is a singularly dumb idea, and the cause of much of the problem, and advocating that people turn off the feature in question, Budert seems content to take for granted that the attachments will be opened, and there's nothing to be done about that, other than going after the viruses directly. But the viruses wouldn't get anywhere if people weren't acting cluelessly in the first place...

For my part, I tend to feel that anybody who executes an unexpected attachment has no right to complain about anything that happens as a result... but maybe I'm just feeling smug because I don't run Windoze 95, which is what most of the new viruses go after, anyway.

I'm talking here of e-mail viruses of the macro or executable sort, of course. The real, most dreaded E-mail viruses are the endless e-mail forwards from well-meaning people about the latest supposed viruses going around. They propogate endlessly, they consume countless hours of system resources, and they clutter up ones Inbox to the point where one has trouble picking out the real messages. (This is not my original observation; the Good Times Hoax Virus FAQ covered this pretty well.)

Sorry; I'm just being cranky, I think.

Besides, somebody has to do it. I was recently struck by the fact that the journals I've read have invariably steered clear of religion, with the possible exception of journals with an atheistic viewpoint. I know that a couple of the journallers I read are religious, but they never seem to write about it. Which is a pity, because I'd love to hear more perspectives on the matter. Besides, there seems to be a misconception among some that we religious fundamentalists "aren't very smart," to quote a recent Diary-L post. One can only assume that those holding that position are doing so out of ignorance. Maybe we need to be heard.