[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Netiquette and virus
Hi,
A warning: I just got an email claiming to be from the over-the-rhine
list (interestingly, they tacked the word "Subject" on to the end of
the address, so it read "over-the-rhine at actwin_comSubject", which I
guess they were hoping I wouldn't notice). The headers seem to indicate
an aol origin for the email, but there are two different source
addresses, and I'm not sure which is fake. Anyway, the email is
just a binary attachment, which I believe is some kind of Micro$oft
virus masquerading as a music file (it has .bat as an extention,
which I believe is the Windows equivalent of a shell script, isn't
it? I'm a Linux/Unix kinda guy, so I've only got a vague notion
of these windows things.), at least I think "midi" is music related,
isn't it? The subject line of the email was just a date, and they
sent it to my old address at MIT.
Anyway, in case anyone else gets this virus (if it is a virus), I thought I
would warn you that someone seems to be using over the rhine as a cover.
Oh, and just another netiquette note: PLEASE, *PLEASE* remember to only include
the text to which you are responding! Someone just quoted Peter's humongous
citation of Crossan, it its entirety, and didn't respond to *any* of it! Think
about it: if you include text, you are sending the implicit message "this is
something you will need to read to understand what I'm saying; I will have
something to say in response to it". So I scrolled down and down and down
through Peter's message, waiting to see what this person wanted to say, and
then got to the end and found ... nothing. There was no need to include it at
all! When it's just a few lines, it's mildly annoying, but when it's page
after page, it's a waste of bandwidth, time, money, and effort. Remember all
these posts get archived, anyway, so when in doubt, it's probably best not to
include text at all, since anyone who can't follow your point can always go
read the archived posts to see what you're responding to. Also remember that
some people read email on their cell phones, and hundreds of lines of
unecessary text is really rude. It wouldn't surprise me if it were really
expensive, too, the way phone companies always try to gouge you.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled program.
Oh, and by the way, I'm not much of a baseball person, but the new
Comisky park is a pale shadow of the old one. ;-) Have fun, anyway.
--
Don Smith Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment
donaldas at umich_edu http://xte.mit.edu/~dasmith/
"Life is ... moments flabbergasted to be in each others' presence."
- "Speed" Levitch in _Waking Life_
---------------
Unsubscribe by going to http://www.actwin.com/OtR/