From: Carey Lening (carey@tstonramp.com)
Date: Thu May 11 2000 - 19:50:06 PDT
I've been stewing over this one.
Frankly, I've been listening to all the armchair theorists blaming everyone
and everything when it comes to Love Letter, and its brothers. I'm growing
annoyed with the sheer newsplay that the blaming alone has gotten. Blame
Microsoft, blame Norton, Blame your mother, blame the dog, etc. No one
really stops to think, "hey, stupid users here" or if you'd rather be less
cynical, those-without-clue.
Being one of a criminology/psychology background, I often wonder why these
attacks occur on a social level. And to fulfill my own selfish cynical
interests, I thought of a splendid study that could be performed on the
minions. Hear me out, then nit pick away.
Here's what I want to do: create a worm, with the same function and
replicability of love letter, but sans the malicious quality. In turn, I
want the worm/Trojan (as I was debating with a friend about what it would
actually classify under) to send me a tally mark of every ditz who opens
the thing, nothing more, nothing less.
And here's the kicker: The header, instead of saying something even
reomtely obscure, will simply be called: This is a virus, don't open.
I figure if I make it evident, I'm not commiting any fraud. Those who
choose to open the message will have advanced warning of its intent. I use
virus, simply because abo e any other title given to distinguish these
attacks, virus seems to be the most common and well known to the majority
of people.
Now I've talked to a few friends about this one, mostly because I want to
see the downfall. It usually comes down to Unlawful entry into a machine
and stealing information, but relatively, thats a small price to pay for
the better social understanding of how many sheep we actually have in this
world;)
Mostly, this is just musings from a girl who's been thinking too hard about
this. Any ideas? Suggestions? The likelyhood of enactment is minimal, so
you can call off the FBI....:)
-BB
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 11 2000 - 19:50:30 PDT