Are We Getting Paranoid?

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Are we getting paranoid?

Published 20 November 07 01:01 AM | RjBass  Edit

So the other day I was at a customers house trying to help her set up her new DSL service.  She had just gotten the basic tier DSL service from AT&T for only $10 a month, which was $15 cheaper then the dial up service from Compuserve that she was using before. 

Not long after helping her get it started up I received an email from her saying she was thinking about going back to dial up and Compuserve because Yahoo (the main mail provider being used by AT&T) was not doing what she wanted it to do. 

When she was using Compuserve and she received an email with pictures in the body, she would copy those images and paste them into a new email that she would then send out to her friends and family.  Compuserve allowed her to do the copy and paste just fine.  However in Yahoo, you can't do a copy and paste with images.  The images just won't send like that. 

So I said, "well why don't you just forward the email?".  And she replied with "I don't forward any emails because most of my friends and family won't open forwarded emails because of viruses". 

I then said, "well then download the pictures and send them as an email attachment" with which she gave me another reply that was very similar to her last reply.  She then went on to tell me that she won't even open emails that have attachments in them in fear of viruses.   

I then said, "well ok, how about you download the pictures to your computer and then just insert them into your email using an email client like Outlook Express?".  She had a couple reasons for not wanting to do this like not wanting to fill up her 150gb hard drive that was only 15% full, and also not wanting to use any types of email clients.  She only wanted to use Yahoo web mail. 

So at this point I was pretty stumped.  While I eventually found a way for her to do what she wanted (all be it a rather weird way around the issues), it left me wondering if our fear of viruses has taken us to the point that we can't even enjoy the internet anymore. 

Now before the Linux and Mac *** start to scream their war cries, let's just understand that a 55 year old woman who has been using nothing but Windows for the last several years is not about to learn a whole new OS.  If she can't deal with the fact that she lost one little feature but gained many new features and wants to switch her service back to slow dial up because of it, well then the chances of getting her to appreciate OS X or Ubuntu are zero to none. 

So now where were we?  Ohh yes, have we become so fearful of viruses and spyware that we are not even able to enjoy the internet like it should be enjoyed? 

The customer explained to me how so many of her friends and family have had horrible experiences opening the wrong files and emails, getting viruses and basically having to start over with their computers.  Now I know nearly everybody has made those types of mistakes once in the past.  The smart ones learn from their mistakes and move on, hopefully to never repeat the same mistake.  The not so smart ones tend to repeat the same mistakes over and over again, never learning from the past. 

The answer to these peoples problems is all in some decent anti virus protection.  But to some people, who have had the virus via email problem, and have gotten decent virus protection, it still isn't enough.  They have closed them selves off to some of the many cool features of the internet. 

These same people obviously have never had to work in an environment where email attachments are common practice and a necessity for business. 

Email attachments and forwards are not something to fear.  Just be smart about it.  If you don't know who sent you the email, then don't open it.  And seriously, if somebody, even somebody you know sends you an unsolicited .exe file, DON"T OPEN IT. 

But otherwise, it's pretty normal to accept these incoming emails and to enjoy the internet.  If your anti virus protection is doing it's job then you shouldn't have anything to fear.  Just back up your data every once in awhile and in the event that a computer catastrophe does happen, then don't worry about it.  Your still alive aren't ya?