How many people really send mail from public places using someone else's
computer? Not many that I've seen.
In my travels to Europe and Russia I've discovered the internet cafes are
HUGELY popular and everyone is sending email from public places using public
computers. I would say the amount of people in the world doing that is
quite large.
Wrong metric. There are a lot of very popular behaviors that should
be discouraged whenever possible, NOT accommodated and lubricated.
Ok, so now you want to CHANGE the way the WORLD uses the Internet, just to suit
YOUR thinking on the matter? GOOD LUCK!!!!
A sizable fraction of mail users will open any attachment they get, so
the approach of making the popular act slick brought us mailers that
auto-open attachments.
Good point. The better solution is to simply prevent such attachments from
being delivered, if they pose a substantial risk. That way, by the time they
get to the user machine, they are protected against their own carelessness.
Using the Internet from a public access Windows machine that is
administered with an eye to keeping costs down is unsound, unsafe
behavior.
The *FACT* of the matter is that *most* Internet-connected machines, NOT ONLY
JUST those at public access places, are operated and administered by people who
are less savvy and I (and presumably you) are. But you know what? WE CAN'T
CHANGE THAT!
It might be acceptable if all of those machines were
managed by a skilled team of professionals and/or were running
systems designed to shield themselves and their overall user
population from the recklessness of one user, but that's generally
not so.
To be fair, it's getting better. XP SP2 is much improved, and it's just about
the first major release since Microsoft's major effort at security has started
getting taken (very) seriously. If you were to look at how most cruise ship
Internet cafes are set up, they are generally in fact pretty tightly battened
down. I'm not sure that a Linux box set up and administered by someone equally
clueless would be any safer (and maybe less so).
Breaking that sort of behavior in a consistent standard way would be
a very good thing.
Fine, but that's also vanishingly unlikely to happen. What we need, instead,
is
some kind of SIMPLE, UNDERSTANDABLE approach that ordinary people can put in
and
administer and use every day, without great difficulty... and which protects
them against most of these E-mail annoyances and hazards.
Gordon Peterson http://personal.terabites.com/
1977-2002 Twenty-fifth anniversary year of Local Area Networking!
Support free and fair US elections! http://stickers.defend-democracy.org
12/19/98: Partisan Republicans scornfully ignore the voters they "represent".
12/09/00: the date the Republican Party took down democracy in America.
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