Virus Laden E-mail

[Teutonic Knight]

Hey guys,

Recently I've been receiving very poorly engineered virus laden e-mails from this address: ms-mta-03.tampabay.rr.com

I did a google search (http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLD,GGLD:2005-01,GGLD:en&q=ms%2Dmta%2D03%2Etampabay%2Err%2Ecom+virus) on the address out of curiosity, and to my surprise this address seems to be somewhat infamous for being a host in banking scams. I have to wonder how they got my email address, but what do you guys think about this stuff?

[MacBeth]

I am 42 - when I left school we didn't have any 'geeks' - comptuer science was a subject that went hand in hand with A level maths and the internet wasn't even a dream.

Now that society has allowed the 'geek' to inherit the earth you get what you deserve. The internet can be very useful for forums like these but they are not essential.

In my opinion the internet is of more benefit to gun runners, drug dealers and pornographers than to the average family. It can be a very anti-social medium and virus' spam etc are all part of it.

If you shut it down I wouldn't miss it.

Just my opinion and probably wide of the mark as usual.

[BDC]

I am 42 - when I left school we didn't have any 'geeks' - comptuer science was a subject that went hand in hand with A level maths and the internet wasn't even a dream.

Now that society has allowed the 'geek' to inherit the earth you get what you deserve. The internet can be very useful for forums like these but they are not essential.

In my opinion the internet is of more benefit to gun runners, drug dealers and pornographers than to the average family. It can be a very anti-social medium and virus' spam etc are all part of it.

If you shut it down I wouldn't miss it.

Just my opinion and probably wide of the mark as usual.
It's useful. It's changing the world. How else would I speak to you or some random teenager from Singapore?

But the whole spam thing has to be sorted out soon.

[MacBeth]

Good point BDC, although we did have pen pals in the 'good old days' ~:)

Indeed how can you tell anything other than that which you are told. Hiding behind the facelessness of a forum probably leads to more bullshit and mis-information than ever before.

[Blodrast]

TK: they usually pickup addresses off of web pages, i.e. if you have a web page, you usually put your email address in there; they parse the pages for things like "xxxxx@yyyy.zzzz.wwww...". This is the reason why a lot of people spell their address differently on their web pages (e.g. "blah at xx dot yyy dot ...).
Another possibility is, of course, viruses that are reading other people's addressbooks, and your address happened to be in one of them.

as for the usefulness of the Internet, well, it's exactly like anything else: it can be used for good things, and it can be used for bad things. It's not a good thing or a bad thing itself, it's only how you use it. Is TV bad/good ? Are computers bad/good ? Is nuclear fusion and/or fission bad/good ? It's all in how you use it; if you make bombs to kill people, it's bad; if you use it to generate energy, it's good... etc, etc.
I'm sure you get the picture.
(sorry if this sounded patronizing, it was not intentional at all).

[Kaiser of Arabia]

Whoevers responsable for that should be shot.
Not killed, but like in the gut.
There is no need for this.
~D
On a lighter note, I got some weird virus a week or so ago. Virusscan got rid of it but it got sent to most of the peeps on my MSN contakts.

[Ronin]

spam isn´t much of a problem if you´re carefull....dealing with this problem is as simple as having a separate email acount for use with all "sensitive" uses....webpages....signing up to stuff...etc....
then i just go to this "junk" email account once a week an basically delete every thing.
as a result of this my real email adresses receive a minimum to non-existance amount of spam