...And THAT is exactly what I'm talking about! Does she really think that her friends own all these credit card companies, and penis enlargers, and cable descrambler sellers and whatnot?! You don't have to understand anything about computers to recognize an ad. You don't have to know anything about computers to recognize that the email saying "free credit card" is every bit as much of an ad as the one that said "credit card for free".

She doesn't realize it's advertising junk. She believes it's addressed directly to her by a person who knows her, as she only gived out her address to friends. That's the ultimate problem, and not only with her, but many others: they think that once you "install Internet" on their computer, they will need to allow others to have access to them, and not need to prevent others from contacting them.

ND- Her mistake is bothering to open something that is obviously advertising junk, instead of just deleting it without reading it. Her mistake is always thinking "well maybe it won't be advertising junk this time". She may not realize that she's helping to propigate a virus, but she has to realize that she's wasting her own time reading the crap.

NetDanzr: That's exactly my point: Computers don't do anything without the user telling them.

Mr Creosote: We told her several times, but she still doesn't get it. A worm doesn't do anything to her computer, and she simply cannot understand that the worm could resend itself without her direct intervention. It may come natural to you or me, but she thinks of computers as typewriters - you press a key and a letter shows on the screen. You don't press the "send" button and nothing gets sent.

Cypherswipe: Yeah, but what own mistakes when you unleash a worm? 99% of current viruses and worms don't do anything to your PC, they simply spread elsewhere. As such, you often don't notice you've been infected, and a person like her who uses PCs for e-mails and Word documents only will never notice her computer has been infected. How do you learn from mistakes you never know you did?

Not understanding new technology is one thing, but not learning from your own mistakes is sheer idiocy. How many does will she have to click on "get a bigger penis" and "free cable descramblers" and "you have already won" etc before she realizes that they are all the same?! You don't have to know how something works to know that it works. She doesn't need to understand how these spammers keep getting her address to realize that they are getting it and that they are sending her garbage, and that they will continue to send her garbage. To not be able to realize and acknowledge that fact and act accordingly is sheer, unadulterated STUPIDITY! Next time you're building a wall, use her head for a brick, it's certainly dense enough.

Computers are too complicated for them. They cannot grasp the basic concept of it. It's like if you ask a great lot of people about how cars work, you will get enough responses like "I don't know at all, it might as well be magic" Like this girl I knew in highschool who always shifted her car from 3rd to 1st to "start over again". She trashed many transmissions this way and never learned. It's these things that need to be taught in school early, like how things work.

Until you've been tackled off of a chair because you just tried to click "Show Windows folder files" when working on someone elses computer trying to fix it... and they think you're going to "hurt" the computer in some way because of that stupid message it puts up.

So let's assume it was like this (which I still can't follow). I'm sure someone told her how it actually is. Same question as with fretz' newbies point: Why does she still not get it?

She sees a difference between e-mail and address. An address is a publicly listed information, while e-mail isn't, so she figures that only people she gives the address to should write her. A while ago, she's been on the receiving end of a dictionary attack (easy, with an aol address), and she started clicking on those "Click here to unsubscribe" links. She still keeps doing it, and she can't understand why she's now getting 100+ spams per day.

That's exactly the part I don't understand, and that's why I do blame these people. What is there to learn? If she finds some ads in her (real-life) mailbox, does she take it seriously? Does she think it's addressed to her personally? What if she finds some food lying on the street? Will she pick it up and eat it?

Let's see. Somebody gets an e-mail without any text, only with a strange attachment and he clicks on it. That's how Sobig.F spread. I can quite understand the thing about the Microsoft e-mail, especially for those whose mail client works with HTML.

But seriously: there's lots of people who simply don't know. Your grandfather is a very rare case, but in most cases people are simply too old to learn new tricks. Consider that 10 years ago, Internet was only a geek toy, and I'm still sending letters to people who don't have an e-mail address.

I'll give you an opposite example. The wife of my boss is 65. She knows how to write text documents and save them. However, that's about it. Whenever she wants to manipulate files, she goes to MS Word, clicks on "open file" and does all the copy/paste or delete operations in that window. No matter how often I printed out a simple procedure for using Windows Explorer for her, it's too complicated for her. She takes great offense at spam, not realizing that it's not addressed to her personally, but only to her among many others.She pretty much clicks on everything she gets, and I don't blame her. These people will never learn how to use e-mail.

That was the explanation I were after, thanks

What's fun is plugging into the school network and instantly getting a virus. Or somebody in your building gets it and they shut down the whole building's internet, and thus you don't have internet for a couple of days.

Yeah, I'm starting to get like 5 of those Microsoft emails a day... really annoying.
I remember when I wouldn't get a single email for a week, and then when I did, it would be legitamite, not for some bank fraud.

I've had a computer online for over 4yrs now, and haven't gotten a single virus, I really don't see how anyone can be stupid enough to get nailed by more than one virus. Then again, I can't see how anyone can be dumb enough to leave their keys in their car while they go shopping, but they often do. *shrug*

Sometimes spam generators trip themselves up with their "clever" tricks. Whenever I set an email acct on a new site, I always send myself a test email to make sure it works, see how lag there is, etc. A couple of times I've recieved emails supposedly from my emails that I used for the test messages. Obviously the email tried to be clever and use an address from my inbox, but it backfired. I laughed my ass off when I saw it.

Yes, I get those bounced ones a lot, too. Without using evil Hotmail of course. It's pretty simple: Since basically all these virii fake the sender field, they're of course 'bounced back' to someone who didn't actually send them. That's not the worst thing, though. The most stupid mails are those from enraged people who think I actually sent them a virus. They can't understand that the sender field in e-mails doesn't mean anything...

I'm not using outlook but web hotmail. I rarely send mails but my address is widespread on the net for I'm using it as the main contact address on my website.

Whenever I log on to hotmail, my trash mail folder is filled with rejected mails that were supposed to be sent by me but bounced because they contained the sobig worm. I can't understand how this can happen, hotmail SERVERS themselves are spreading this it seems.

:D Now thats funny!




Its very stupid, some people are like that. Not all people live their lives according to the learnings of Pavlov's Dog.


Its funny you should fire up this thread, about a month ago when Sobig was in the news I was going to post a poll here...

Q: Are you stupid enough to click an attachment that is obviously a virus?

option: YES
option: NO
option: Whats a virus?

Perhaps you should post it in the other forum you mentioned

It's not limited to new Internet users, though. In another forum I'm visiting regularly, people have always been talking about how they 'always get infected', 'just removed two virii from their systems again' and so on. These are people who are at the same age as we are. They've used computers for at least a few years (many for more than 10 years). They know about virii and how worms work. Still, they're obviously installing these 'things' all the time! And they get extremely pissed when I'm telling them the problem lies between keyboard and chair. Instead of just admitting it, they're trying to make up excuses how it's 'impossible to avoid' being infected with virii. How stupid is that?

Your Grandfather is an isolated example of someone applying real-life common sense to a new envoironment they dont really understand. The majority of people arent like that.

Consider these two points...

-Before the internet, virii(sp?) spread from LAN to LAN on storage devices that were used on both of the sperate LAN's.

-Now the internet is there they can spread from any computer to any other computer on the internet without the need of a 'host' to carry it between two PC's or networks.

Now consider the number of new internet connection worldwide every month. In UK we are getting 20,000 new DSL connections a month, that doesnt include cable connection or, of course, dial ups. Worldwide the number of new internet users each month will be huge, easily over 1,000,000 i bet.

Just because your Grandad has some common sense doesnt mean the other 999,999 new users every month has. I think your underestimating the number of new internet connections being switched on monthly that are used by poorly educated, stupid people.

Nope.... still not enough. Counterexample: My grandfather doesn't even know the difference between a program and a text document. He often tells me that he receives e-mails offering 'live sex shows' and all that stuff (most likely dialers). Even he doesn't click on those! He's as computer illetarate (?) as it gets. He's using Windows and Outlook (even though he doesn't know that - he calls it "computer" and "e-mail"). Ok, so he's older than the people in your example. Still, he seems to be really proud to receive those 'personal offers'...

Now let's assume someone follows your example and actually wants to check those tits out. So he gets infected with this worm and 300 more people are the lucky receipients of this important message. However, the testee didn't get to see any tits. He absolutely has to remember this! Next time when he receives such an e-mail, why does he click on the attachment again? It didn't work last time, why should it work now?

Edited by Mr Creosote at 00:07 on September, 20th 2003