Posts by Phil 6 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Mar 2009
When I was a teenager in the eighties, rather than all this cool, sexy targetted advertising, we had the AIDS campaign: HAVE SEX AND YOU WILL DIE!!!
There's probably some figures somewhere, but I wonder which is the more effective? All I know about the latest campaign is that I'd quite like one of those Gonorrhea necklaces :)
I haven't got any kids, and I certainly wouldn't let them use the Internet unsupervised if I did.
And yes, I remember finding porn as one of the more pleasant nostalgic memories of childhood. Did I grow up all twisted? I'm probably not the best person to ask, but probably not.
I'm not phycologist, but exposing young children to porn, (who, wrongly, do use the Internet unsupvised) whilst probably not generally doing any permanent harm may well be a bit confusing and distressing for them.
Will they get over it? Of course, but it's still targetting porn at kids, which just aint on. Some things are illegal for a reason.
What I hate is the implication that if we somehow need protecting from his views - let him come over the Atlantic and we'll all turn into bigoted, autist-bashers. A moron's a moron, where-ever he's standing and I'm still going to ignore his right-wing nonsense, wherever he says it.
Being allowed to say and think what you like, so long as you don't cause actual harm to others? Clearly a British ideal Jaqui doesn't share, so perhpas she'd like to add herself to the list?
I've always found it interesting to note that users of a particular OS (no names, there are a variety) often claim along the lines of "Well, a user had to install it, that doesn't count." User interaction doesn't have anything to do with it. A virus is code that self replicates. A Trojan does something other than what it says on the tin. That's all folks. They don't have to exploit vulnrabilities, they don't have to run without user intervention. By the description I've seen of this botnet, these are Trojans by definition.
Yes, users were fooled into running them, but then Love Letter, Anna Kornikova and a host of other Windows viruses relied on social engineering too, and they are *never* dismissed in such a way.
While computers still need users, there will be malware, regardless of the OS. As the average skill level of Mac (or Linux, for that matter) falls, so viruses and other malware will rise
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